Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✩✩
written by Rosa Laborde, directed by Richard Rose
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
February 17-March 21, 2010
Hush, Rosa Laborde’s first play since her 2006 hit Léo, is as ambitious in its scope as it is confusing in its execution. “Is there a God?” “Is there a soul?” “Is there a life after death?” These are the questions Hush ponders, but the play seems much more like an artificial construct to ask these questions than a drama from which these questions naturally arise.
It is impossible to discuss the play without revealing that one of the five characters is dead. Harlem (Graeme Somerville), a dentist who seems rather more like a Richard Dawkinsesque biologist, is still grieving for the death of his unstable wife Talia (Tara Rosling), who continually visits him in dreams, memories and often tries to phone him. His 12-year-old daughter Lily (Vivien Endicott-Douglas) is having nightmares in which a voodoo witch-doctor, who looks like Harlem’s fellow dentist Andre (Conrad Coates), sacrifices animals with an view to sacrificing her. Laborde has so intercut the dreams of Harlem and Lily with each other and with scenes of “reality” that eventually it is difficult to know which is which. Since the play begins with Harlem’s reverie about Talia, the entire play could be his imagining. If so, the fantasy element undermines the point that Laborde tries to make that Harlem’s atheism is a barrier to his letting go of Talia’s memory and that his anxiety over Lily’s maturing is the cause of Lily’s fear. Laborde gives the play a happy ending but how precisely she arrives at it given the muddling of illusion and reality in between is totally unclear.
The cast is uniformly excellent with Rosling in particular giving what amounts to a master class in the gamut of intense emotion. Endicott-Douglas is a remarkable find and manages to make the clichéd character of the precocious pre-teen seem new. The faith-inspired black character is also a cliché, but Coates makes Andre a much-needed anchor of realism, while Somerville’s dentist is so perturbed I wouldn’t want his drill anywhere near me. The black-on-black costumes and set could be a source of magical effects, only some of which director Richard Rose uses. Fluidity of direction is usually a virtue, but here it only adds to the confusion over what happens when and to whom. Some may be intrigued by the puzzle that Laborde has created. Others may find she has not engaged us enough in the story to make us want to put its pieces together.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-02-19.
Photo: Tara Rosling, Graeme Somerville, Conrad Coates, Vivien Endicott-Douglas.
©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2010-02-19
Hush