Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✩✩✩
written and directed by Ken Gass
Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
November 19-December 12, 2010
Ken Gass’s latest play, Bethune Imagined, is unengaging and unenlightening. Anyone seeking to learn how Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune (1890-1936) became a medical pioneer and political revolutionary revered as a hero in communist China will have to look elsewhere. The admittedly “small window” on Bethune’s life Gass has chosen, namely his relations with three women in 1936, gives us so little insight as to be irrelevant to understanding its central character.
Bethune Imagined is written in three incompatible styles. Sometimes it is a Noel Coward-like drawing-room comedy but without the wit. Sometimes it is undiluted political debate but without the parry and thrust to make it interesting. Sometimes its is a women’s drama written from a male point of view. It would be good if playwrights realized that the private lives of the great often provides no clue as to what makes them great. Just as knowing the precise number of prescription drugs Glenn Gould took in his later years does not help us understand the pianist’s genius in David Young’s play Glenn (1993), so knowing that Bethune was an alcoholic and womanizer does not help us understand his achievements. Gass implies that Bethune the great man does everything on a large scale and that that is reflected in his sexual appetite and drinking. We see Bethune (Ron White) torment an intellectual woman Marian Dale Scott (Irene Poole), who needs comfort and encouragement. During this affair, we see him deflower a young follower Margaret Day (Sascha Cole) and later personally give her an abortion. The women stay with him because he is so “compelling,” but both realize they have to escape his influence to have their own lives. We see that Bethune has a dark side and his stance against bourgeois standards takes its toll. Yet, there is no connection with this soap opera and Bethune’s concluding out-of-the-blue decision to fight fascism in Spain.
Gass gives White nothing to work with to make Bethune seem a charismatic thinker rather than an angry drunk who uses talk of art and politics to lure women to his lair. Poole makes the most sense of her character, but Cole has to fight the many contradictions Gass has given hers. Fiona Byrne’s talent is wasted in a cameo as the wife Bethune twice married and divorced, whose presence gives no key to either his or her personality. The set by Marian Wihak and costumes by Victoria Wallace are more attractive and well thought out than the characters or plot of the play. Why is Norman Bethune so famous? You won’t find out in how Gass has imagined him.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-11-22.
Photo: Sascha Cole and Ron White. ©Ed Gass-Donnelly.
2010-11-22
Bethune Imagined