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by Ferdinand Bruckner, adapted by Martin Crimp, directed by Richie Wilcox

WORKhouse Theatre, Unit 102 Theatre, Toronto

September 7-17, 2011

Ferdinand Bruckner’s Pains of Youth still has the power to shock 85 years after it was written.  With its discussions of suicide, depression, sadomasochism, homosexual incest, drug abuse, prostitution and euthanizing the terminally ill along with its depictions of overt lesbianism and psychosexual control of other people, this play from 1926, like those of Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), impels us to re-evaluate our self-satisfied notion that we are more knowledgeable about the darker side of human behaviour than people of the past.  There are many places in the world today this play could not be staged because of its content.  Luckily, Toronto is not one of those places.  Luckily, too, there are young companies like WORKhouse Theatre brave enough to take up the challenge even if the results are variable.

The play concerns the interactions of a group of medical students who inhabit the same boarding house in Vienna.  Marie simply wants to prepare for a party to celebrate taking her final exam, but there are many distractions.  Petrell, the poet she thought loved her, has switched his attention to the grasping Irene.  Meanwhile, the neurotic aristocrat Désirée is intent on seducing Marie primarily to dispel her boredom.  Disturbing to everyone but Désirée is the project of the handsome sociopath Freder, her former lover, to bend the innocent maid Lucy to his will.  Marie begins the play as a hopeful, moral person.  The tragedy is that she is not strong enough to fend off the decadence of the world around her. 

Bruckner’s medical students are intelligent and rational enough to diagnose physical illness in others but are blind to the spiritual illness that infects them.  The fact that Freder is the most powerful of the group shows that Bruckner had chilling foresight into the disaster that could rise in the midst of a spiritual vacuum.

The WORKhouse Theatre’s production is an equal balance of plusses and minuses.  On the plus side director Richie Wilcox and his cast clearly know what the play is about and are aware of its implications.  On the minus side the cast is not always able to bring this vision effectively to the stage.  The acting area as it is configured at the Unit 102 Theatre is tiny--only about 11’ by 11’--with space for only 37 seats.  This kind of intimacy requires a level of highly detailed acting beyond what is needed in a much larger space.  Yet, that is just what most of the cast is unable to provide on a consistent basis. 

The most thoroughly successful performance comes from Sarah Illiatovich-Goldman as Lucy.  She is the only one who is able to portray the multiple layers of her character simultaneously.  She shows that Lucy is constrained by a social position lower than that of the students.  Yet, she also shows underneath this the thrill of the possibility of breaking out from this servility that Freder’s supposed love offers her, even though she is innocent enough not to see that his “love” is just another form of servility.  Illiatovich-Goldman makes clear both the tragedy of Lucy’s degradation and the inevitability of it given her relationship with Freder.

Mark Paci is truly creepy as Freder rather as if he were channelling the young Jack Nicholson.  His habit of moving his tongue towards his teeth between phrases reinforces the Bruckner’s explicit characterization of him as a social vampire.  Though Paci is excellent at projecting subconversational levels of speech and negotiating Freder’s sudden switches from passivity to violence, his performance stays the same throughout the action even though Freder’s health is supposed to be declining to the point where we think his death is immanent.

Carrie Hage is assigned the extraordinarily difficult character of Désirée, a character as mentally deranged as Freder.  Where his mania expresses itself in a sick desire to control other people, Désirée’s manifests itself in a longing for death, or, what she thinks is closest to it--sex.  Early on she states that everyone should commit suicide at age seventeen because there is nothing worth living for after that age.  In her boredom, she longs for a return to childhood and innocence, but experience has barred her from that.  What is next best for her is total oblivion.  Hage only occasionally captures the weird mixture of Désirée’s desires and instead tends to present them sequentially rather than simultaneously.  When she does hit on the right balance, the effect is chilling, but all her moments on stage should do that.   

As the central character, Danielle Bossin-Hardy is excellent in Act 1 in showing how Marie rigidly repels the advances of Désirée and Freder and rightly denounces Petrell for deceiving her.  Yet, she shows no change of tone or demeanour when Marie eventually gives in to the temptations around her and becomes as morbidly thanatophilic as Désirée.      

John-Riley O’Handley is suitably weak and pathetic as Petrell, Lauren Commeford harpyish as Irene and Jonah Hundert oddly passive as Alt, the group’s hanger-on.  Yet, their characterizations all tend to strike only one note.

Set designer Kaitlyn Hickey has surrounded the two sides of the stage with a semitransparent curtain.  Through this Wilcox allows us to see the other housemates when they are not on stage and has them repeat significant words of the onstage dialogue.  Bruckner makes clear that the students’ boarding house is like a fishbowl and characters frequently worry whether they are being overheard.  Wilcox’s direction heightens this atmosphere but then he contradicts it by often having the actors shout out their anger when the situation would really demand a more repressed response.  Wilcox has the clever notion of having us see the balloons that Marie has strung up for her party but them having them pop one by one as the disappointments of her life wear her down. 

Theatre Voce’s production of Pains of Youth in 2001 was generally superior to the present production because the acting was so much more consistent.  Yet, productions of this play or those of Bruckner’s German-language contemporaries, hardly come around often so if you’re curious to see how topics we think of as modern were treated in the past, this play will be quite an eye-opener.  WORKhouse Theatre shows a lot of potential and I look forward to seeing how it will develop in the future.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Danielle Bossin-Hardy, Carrie Hage, Mark Paci, Sarah Illiatovich and John-Riley O’Handley. ©2011 Fahad Khan.

For tickets, visit www.workhousetheatre.com.