Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
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by Ruth Madoc-Jones, Marjorie Chan & Alex Williams
Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto
November 20-December 8, 2012
“‘You talkin’ to me?’ – or is Your Film Doing the Talking?”
The seventh initiative in Theatre Passe Muraille’s Theatre Beyond Walls Season focussing on Toronto itself is Fare Game: Life in Toronto’s Taxis. The show created and performed by Ruth Madoc-Jones, Marjorie Chan and Alex Williams is billed as a “multi-media play” and a “docudrama”, but basically it is an illustrated lecture about the taxi industry in Toronto mitigated by with mild attempts at theatricality. Instead of painting a portrait of “Life in Toronto’s Taxis” as the subtitle suggests, the show focusses almost exclusively in employment issues within the industry.
For the set designer Trevor Schwellnus has created as series of boxes that in shape suggests a waist-high version of downtown Toronto. Behind that is a floor-to-ceiling paper screen where Alex Williams’ illustrations and videos are projected. The team of Fare Game spent two years conducting hundreds of interviews, attending meetings and rallies, and filming taxi rides. One of the main difficulties of the the show is that for more than half of its hour-long length, we and the cast are looking at videos on the screen. The labour issues that the show focusses on are important, but you can’t help thinking that they would be better served if the team had made a fully-fledged film documentary, which it virtually is, than pretend the show is a “theatre piece”. To have the team share the narration among themselves and add occasional synchronized movements is not enough to turn what is primarily a film with live commentary into theatre.
The trio do apprise of of a number of interesting facts. The first cab in Toronto was run by Thornton Blackburn (1812-90), an escaped slave from the U.S. who arrived in Canada via the Underground Railroad. His single four-person cab, called “the City”, became the basis for Toronto’s first taxicab company. Blackburn and his wife were also instrumental in building Little Trinity Church. The three tell us that taxi drivers are twice as likely to be killed on the job as policemen. The repeated claim that “driving taxi”, as the phrase is, is the most dangerous occupation in North America. This claim is simply not true. “Driving taxi” is definitely dangerous, but not “the most dangerous” according to any statistics I found. Business Insiders survey confirms what I thought most people knew which is that commercial fishing is the most dangerous occupation with 116 deaths per 100,000 workers, followed by loggers at 91.6 and pilots at 70.6 whereas driving taxi is twelfth with 16.1 deaths per 100,000.
The majority of the show is taken up with explaining the unfair labour conditions that taxi drivers endure. The trio explain that there are two types of licenses or “plates” – the standard and the ambassador. Drivers with standard plates own their vehicle, can lend it out and and can sell it on the open market. For those with ambassador plates, a system begun in Toronto in 1998, none of these is possible. Taxi drivers have no pension and while their passengers are insured, they and their vehicles cannot be insured. Apparently, City Hall will render a decision next spring in an effort to make taxi driving more equitable. Meanwhile, the trio note, without statistics, that the majority of standard plate holders are of European descent and the majority of ambassador plate holders are not, thus implying, though it was thrown out of an Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, that the two-plate system is deliberately racially discriminatory.
Given all the unfairness and hardship that driving taxi involves, what the trio never explain is why so many recent immigrants choose that occupation among other possible low-level occupations. They say that taxi drivers are particularly devoted to their families, but how is a job with 12 to 16 hour days conducive to that? Only once to we hear from a taxi driver that he enjoys his job, but the film cuts off and we never hear what he enjoys. At one point the trio muse aloud about what stories these men and women could tell us about all the people they meet. Well then, why do the three give us absolutely no examples of these experiences except for how a taxi driver managed to survive a knife attack? If the group really want to give us a picture of “Life in Toronto’s Taxis”, they should give us some positive personal views to balance all the negative views of the drivers’ working conditions.
You do leave Fare Game with a greater understanding of what it means to be a taxi driver in Toronto. Yet, since the trio is so keen on painting taxi drivers as victims of exploitation – even including a quotation from Karl Marx – they don’t ever broach the subject of why taxi drivers in Toronto seem to drive more recklessly and know less about the layout of their city than do their counterparts in far larger cities like London (UK), Berlin or Tokyo, where I have also been a frequent taxi user. “Cops and cabs”, one driver told me, as he weaved through traffic, have different rules from ordinary drivers. Even on the way to the show, my cab driver declared the driving of another of his own company who sped across our path as “suicidal”. I had hoped that the show might give some background, such as flaws in training or pressure of work, that might explain the incautious behaviour well known to any ordinary city driver or taxi user.
As someone who takes up to ten taxi rides per week, I felt that the three speakers before me had barely scratched the surface of what “Life in Toronto’s Taxis”, both good and bad, actually is. Labour relations are one aspect, but the trio gave no overall view of the experience. What they could salvage from their “theatre piece” is a documentary film about the injustice of the the two-plate system. That is an aspect of the taxi business few lay people know about and it could help rally people to the cause of the ambassador plate holders.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Marjorie Chan, Alex Williams and Ruth Madoc-Jones. ©2012 Aviva Armour Ostroff.
For tickets, visit http://www.passemuraille.on.ca.
2012-11-21
Fare Game: Life in Toronto’s Taxis