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written by Gary Owen, directed by Adam Bailey

Royal Porcupine Productions, Lower Ossington Theatre, Toronto

September 16-26, 2010

Royal Porcupine Productions continues its season of staging the second plays of a variety of authors with the Canadian premiere of The Shadow of a Boy  (2002) by Welsh playwright Gary Owen.  The first play RPP ever mounted was Crazy Gary’s Mobile Disco, Owen’s first play and the one that launched him into the national spotlight.  Shadow is not so exciting.  It’s a well observed coming-of-age story that struggles against the forced whimsicality of its premise.

Luke (Jeremy LaPalme) is an introverted ten-year-old boy who has lived with his devout Christian Nanna (Janice Hawke) ever since his parents died in a car accident four year earlier.  He is constantly taunted by Katie (Tanya Lynne), the precocious 12-year-old girl next door, who tries to scare Luke by how kids in comprehensive school will bully a guy as weird as he is.  The Luke’s main solace is Shadow (Peter Jensen), his favourite comic book character, sent to Earth to determine whether its inhabitants deserve to live.  You don’t need Jung to tell you that Shadow is Luke’s alter ego who appraises everything as if it were unfamiliar and sees through the lies people tell.  He first appears when Nanna tells Luke her sugar-coated version of his parents’ fatal crash and disappears when Luke comes to terms with what really happened.  Not only is the alien-finds-Earthlings-strange routine too well worn from numerous sitcoms, but, except for the incidental humour he provides, the character is not really necessary.  Luke comes to his realization more from experiencing Katie’s fear of dying than from anything Shadow says.  

The great virtue of the production is LaPalme’s outstanding performance.  Too often adult actors try to cutsify roles as children.  LaPalme’s, however, is utterly honest and completely natural, somehow tapping directly into the body sense of how this particular boy would react in each particular situation.  He’s so convincing you often forget he’s the tallest actor on stage.  It really is the best performance of an adult actor playing a child since Kristen Thomson’s Claudia.  Lynne’s performance comes close, but she tends to err on the side of over-emphasis.  Hawke deftly manages to avoid making Nanna a caricature, while Jensen guides his alien more towards Mork than Spock.  Owen has moved on to bigger and better things with a steady stream of commissions from important theatres in Britain.  RPP has given us a useful background by staging Owen’s first two plays.  Let’s hope they now move on to some of his major works.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-09-17.