Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✭✩
by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by Julie Mehta,
directed by John Van Burek
Pleiades Theatre, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
May 10-June 4, 2011
Pleiades Theatre is currently presenting the Canadian professional premiere of Rabindranath Tagore’s best-known play The Post Office. Tagore (1861-1941), who in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature, is generally considered the poet laureate of modern India and was a major influence during his lifetime. Pleiades Theatre has often gone where Ontario’s other classic theatre companies have feared to tread. It has brought us works by Marivaux and Goldoni in the past and just two years ago made its first foray into Indian drama with the Sanskrit masterpiece Shakuntala by Kālidāsa (fl. 4th cent. ad). Once again we in Toronto must count ourselves lucky to have such a theatre company as Pleiades to bring such a beautifully poetic work as The Post Office to life in such a sensitive production.
Written in Bengali in 1911, The Post Office is deceptively simple. The young illiterate boy Amal, adopted by his uncle Madhab Dutta, has become seriously ill and the local Healer believes, according ancient scriptures, that the boy’s only hope is to remain indoors. The majority of the play consists of the various conversations Amal has with the people who appear outside his window. Being built directly in his view is a new royal post office, and Amal’s greatest hope is to receive a letter from the king. Unfortunately, Amal’s sickness only worsens and he confined to bed without even the window to give him contact with the world outside.
Pleiades Theatre states that its mandate is to “introduce writers and styles not widely known to Toronto audiences” and The Post Office does exactly that. It is written in a style closely related to the symbolist drama that flourished in Europe at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. This form of drama that uses limited action to suggest the larger inexpressible forces to which its characters are subject. The most familiar example is Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), now best known in its setting as an opera by Claude Debussy, where an unnamed, oppressive fate seems to prevent the characters from fully expressing themselves. A play as early as Gerhart Hauptmann’s Hanneles Himmelfahrt (1893), begins in a naturalist fashion but leaves that mode behind to explore the experiences of a dying child. It’s no wonder Tagore’s play should have been so popular at this time since the Hinduism and Buddhism as interpreted by Schopenhauer underlie the symbolist movement in the first place.
In The Post Office, characters come and go, but conflict that drives traditional western drama is unimportant. Instead, what holds our attention is the transformation of Amal. As he grows physically weaker he grows spiritually stronger, and, in the exquisite passage at the end, as he falls into an eternal sleep, we experience the world as his dream.
Central to the success of Pleiades’ production is the moving performance of Mina James (a woman) as Amal. She captures all the enthusiasm natural to a young boy along with the naïveté that makes so many of his statements charmingly humorous. Amal is quite willing to believe that the fantastic tales of the Fakir about an isle of parrot or a land without gravity are real. Unfamiliar with the ways of the outside world, Amal always believes the best of everyone and this belief transforms everyone he encounters. The Curdseller and Watchman no longer looks down on their jobs but see them in a new light because of Amal’s enthusiasm. Mina James carefully depicts Amal’s physical decline and Amal’s ungrudging accommodation to it.
Sugith Varughese tends to bluster as Amal’s uncle but sets that aside for more authentic feeling in the final third of the play. The other five member of the cast all play two or three roles and excel at keeping these roles distinct. Patricia Marceau’s best role is as the Curdseller. It is lovely to watch how Amal’s view of her job as exciting gradually erases the care from her face. Dylan Scott Smith effects his great physical transformation perfectly between the lame Watchman and the elegant Royal Healer whose poise bespeaks his authority. The concern Smith shows as the Watchman when Amal says he would like to travel to where time comes from provides our first clear suggestion of the larger issue that Tagore is presenting. In other roles, Errol Sitahal is comically pedantic as the Healer, Sam Moses combines whimsy and earnestness as the Fakir and Jennifer Villaverde is a treat as the sprightly flower-seller Suda. Marceau, Sitahal, Smith and Villaverde also have a lot of fun a quartet of boys playing outside Amal’s window, a sign, both joyous and sad, of the life he will never have.
Teresa Przybylski has created a beautiful set for the piece with a large wooden door and textured drapery for the wall that, depending on Robert Thomson’s skillful lighting, can change from solid to transparent. To Debashis Sinha’s fine score combining traditional Indian instruments with electronic sounds, Hari Krishnan had created a series of expressive dances that alternate with the drama and enhance the performance as a kind of ritual.
To appreciate The Post Office put yourself in a relaxed, meditative state of mind and realize that like Amal we are all innocents when it comes to facing life’s greatest mystery.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Cast of The Post Office. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.
2011-05-11
The Post Office