Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✩✩
written by Judith Thompson, directed by Brian Quirt
Theatre Passe Muraille, TPM Backspace, Toronto
January 20-February 7, 2010
Life as a teenager is hell and school is the worst part of it, but is it really as bad as life as a Jew in a Nazi concentration camp? Judith Thompson seems to think so on the evidence of her latest play Such Creatures now having its world premiere at Theatre Passe Muraille. There she interleaves the monologues of a modern-day teenaged girl in Toronto with those of an older woman recalling the time when she was imprisoned as a teenager at Auschwitz. Both girls' lives are in danger but is today's urban violence really comparable to coldly planned genocide?
What Thompson means to do is to show how fiction can help a person confront reality. In Toronto, Blandy (Michaela Washburn) waits for a gang of girls she has offended who are coming to kill her. At Auschwitz, Sorele (Maria Vacratsis) remembers when she and other girls carried out a plan to blow up a crematorium, an act for which her sister was hanged. Blandy, once assigned to play Hamlet in a special ed class, sees how relevant Hamlet’s plight is to her own. His phrases, “The readiness is all” and “We defy augury” help her pluck up her courage. Sorele, who once played Miranda in a school production of The Tempest, views herself as stranded on Prospero’s island, but instead of Miranda she finds she has become Caliban. We can’t look too closely at either situation or they fall apart. Blandy’s verbal skills suggest she’d have a hard time reading much less memorizing Hamlet. As for Sorele, the Shakespeare metaphor works only if the Nazi guards represent Prospero. Thompson has both heroines view their Shakespeare plays as pro-revenge, when, in fact, they are just the opposite.
Despite Thompson’s fuzzy thinking, Such Creatures receives a fine production under Brian Quirt’s direction. Beth Kates has created an ingenious mirror-like space that Quirt uses to great effect. Washburn throws herself into her role with furious energy to make Blandy a truly vivid character. Despite Vacratsis’ great talent, Sorele’s oddly formal language prevents us from becoming fully engaged with her story. Thompson wants us to see these two 15-year-olds as sisters across time, but we can only do that if we ignore their situations and check our intellect at the door.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly, 2010-02-206.
Photo: Maria Vacratsis and Michaela Washburn. ©Alex Felipe.
2010-01-25
Such Creatures