✭✭✭✩✩

by Kristen Thomson, directed by Chris Abraham

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto

February 25-March 29, 2009

Kristen Thomson’s first play I, Claudia (2003) was such a massive success, expectations were high for her second play, The Patient Hour, now receiving its world premiere at the Tarragon Theatre.  Thomson wisely eschewed the accoutrements of the earlier piece.  The Patient Hour is not a one-person play with masks but a four-person play in a highly detailed naturalistic setting.  What remains the same is Thomson’s enormous sympathy for her flawed characters, an almost palpable sense of their pain and presentation of life as both precious and mysterious.

Julie Fox’s hospital room set is so realistic you expect to smell excretory odours beneath a mask of disinfectant.  Here Charles Walker (Todd Thomson, Kristen’s real-life brother), holds a vigil over his mother, conscious but unresponsive, hovering between life and death.  He is unexpectedly joined by his sister Laura (Waneta Storms), just released from prison, whom neither Charles nor his mother has seen for years.  Thomson’s brilliant conceit is that the mother’s bed is situated somewhere in the auditorium so that when characters speak to her they seem to address the audience directly.  Thus, in fairly uncomfortably fashion, we take the place of the dying mother.  The 90-minute play has no plot.  Rather, as the mother’s condition worsens the feelings of the siblings and of the nurse June (Liisa Repo-Martell) come closer to the surface as they try to cope with this insistent reminder of their own mortality.  Meanwhile, a mysterious Young Female Patient (Patricia Fagan) with her own tragic history strangely finds comfort in visiting Mrs. Walker.

All four actors are superb.  We see how Charles’s jocularity masks his fear and insecurity.  June’s professionalism also masks an involvement with her patient and with Charles that she must suppress.  Laura’s seriousness itself masks bottomless levels of despair.  The Young Patient, however, has had her mask torn away and is freest to speak of her pain in an almost poetic language.  Toward the end the story takes two sudden twists.  The first is easy to accept and in a rather beautiful way makes sense.  The second may be one twist too many.  Only a second viewing of the play could determine whether it enhances or detracts from what precedes it.  My initial feeling is that it is probably unnecessary.  Despite this, what is never in doubt is the truthfulness of Thomson’s depiction of the complex emotions people feel at a time we all dread to confront.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-02-27.

Photo: Patricia Fagan (behind glass), Liisa Repo-Martell, Todd Thomson and Waneta Storms. ©Michael Cooper.