Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✩✩
by David Grieg, directed by Jennifer Tarver
Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
April 21-May 14, 2011
From 1991 to 1992 Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev spent 311 days stranded on the Mir Space Station, quite possibly forgotten by the collapsing Soviet Union below. This odd fact inspired an even odder play by Scottish writer David Greig about human isolation and the inability to communicate. The full title of Cosmonaut is not only unnecessarily long, but so is the play itself in which the playwright seems unable to communicate little if anything to interest us in his characters or his topic.
A play that shifts among settings in Scotland, England, France and outer space, might seem to have epic scope. In fact, it consists entirely of short scenes of dialogue between only two people at a time. We have Casimir and Oleg (Tom Barnett and Tony Nappo), two cosmonauts abandoned in space; Vivienne and Keith (Fiona Byrne and David Jansen), a Scottish couple whose marriage has soured; Casimir’s daughter Natasja (Sarah Wilson), who has become a pole-dancer in London and is having an affair with Keith; and Eric (Raoul Bhaneja), a Norwegian peace negotiator who later becomes Natasja’s sugar daddy. Adding richness to the play, all the actors except Bhaneja play one other character each who parallels in some way their primary character. Bhaneja, for instance, plays several bartenders of various nationalities.
Setting aside the issue of accents which director Jennifer Tarver has unsystematically assigned, all six actors give excellent performances within the narrow parameters of their roles. The problem is that Greig is only interested in his characters in the abstract--specifically in the ways they provide points of comparison and contrast with each other in the series of dyads he’s set up. He leaves the motivation for their actions obscure or non-existent. Add to this Tarver chilly direction and the result is that we could care less what happens to any of them, except perhaps Vivienne, who may really be Natasja’s friend Sylvia. Yet, even there, as in the whole play, this ploy seems more like artifice than any real grappling with the mysteries of identity or human interaction.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-04-26.
Photo: Tom Barnett and Tony Nappo. ©Bruce Zinger.
2011-04-26
The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union