<b>✭✭✭✭</b>✩
<b>by Eugène Ionesco, translated by Donald M. Allen, directed by Soheil Parsa
Modern Times Stage Company, Lower Ossington Theatre, Toronto
November 14-December 1, 2012
</b>
Professor: “Il faut aussi désintégrer.... C’est ça le progrès, la civilisation”.
Modern Times Stage Company is currently presenting the most detailed production of Ionesco’s absurdist masterpiece <i>The Lesson</i> (<i>La Leçon</i>) I have ever seen – and that includes the original production that has been running at the Théâtre de la Huchette in Paris since February 16, 1957. At La Huchette, <i>The Lesson</i> is paired on a double-bill with Ionesco’s <i>The Bald Soprano</i> (<i>La Cantatrice chauve</i>) played first, <a href="perma://BLPageReference/B2CACCBC-25E7-4B86-92DA-3800CA4FDA7E">a double-bill Soulpepper imitated</a> when it mounted the two works in 2001. Modern Times thus gives us a rare chance to appreciate <i>The Lesson</i> on its own without the giddy silliness of <i>Soprano</i> to warm us up. The effect is to make <i>The Lesson</i> even darker and more disturbing than usual as it examines questions of obsession and the abuse of power.
The plot of the hour-long play is quite simple. A young Pupil (Michelle Monteith) seeks the help of a Professor (David Ferry) to prepare for her “total doctorate”. Designer Angela Thomas has amusingly costumed him in his completely doctoral regalia including academic gown and mortarboard. With his short-chopped hair and his small round glasses Ferry looks like a Georg Grosz caricature of Weimar Berlin come to life.
The Professor begins with almost sycophantic politeness as he quizzes the Pupil about her present knowledge. Given that she already has her <i>baccalauréat</i>,much of the humour derives from the idiotically simple questions he puts to her, such as how to count or what is 1+1. Unfortunately, the Professor’s excessive politeness is put under visible strain when it transpires that the Pupil can perform addition but not subtraction (“integration” not “disintegration” as the Professor puts it). In Ionesco’s original text the Professor continues with a statement that has a dire meaning for the entire play: “Il faut aussi désintégrer. C’est ça la vie. C’est ça la philosophie. C’est ça la science. C’est ça le progrès, la civilisation”. (“It’s also necessary to disintegrate. That is what life is. That is what philosophy is. That is what progress is and civilization” [<i>my translation</i>].)
Noting his mounting emotion, the Professor’s maid Marie intervenes. Director Soheil Parsa makes her presence all the more comic and bizarre by having her played by a man, Costa Tovarnisky – an idea that did not occur at La Huchette or Soulpepper. This move emphasizes the peculiarity of the Professor’s household and makes the Maid a more forceful character than I have seen elsewhere.
The Maid warns the Professor not to continue with reference to “what always happens”, but he does causing her to warn him especially not to continue from arithmetic to philology because, in the felicitous translation of Donald M. Allen, “Philology leads to calamity”. But, alas, that is precisely the subject the Professor takes up next.
Trying though his failed attempt at teaching arithmetic was, the Professor still managed to subdue his rage. Now that he launches into a fantastical tirade claiming that all languages are derived from “Neo-Spanish”, including Latin, and are in fact exactly the same as “Neo-Spanish” it is clear that he is a monomaniac. His claim that imperceptible differences between the various “Neo-Spanish” languages are discernible only after years of study, means they can also not be taught. Thus, not only is the Professor’s speech nonsense, but even if it made sense, the professor implies that what he has stated has to be accepted not through reason but blind faith.
The once-obsequious Professor is so wrapped up in expounding his private theory that he does not tolerate any interruption even when it is clear that the Pupil is in excruciating pain from a toothache and can no long pay attention. The Professor works himself up to such a state that the Maid’s prophesy of “calamity” comes to pass. To comfort him the Maid girds him with an armband without insignia (Soulpepper used a Nazi armband) and the allegory about the rise of fascism (or any form of totalitarianism) is complete. The Pupil-Professor relationship is one of submission and power, and power can all too easily be abused.
Designer Anahita Dehbonehie has created a set unlike any I’ve previously seen used for this play. Normally, the director and designer give us the impression that the Professor is teaching the Pupil in the clutter of his own home. Here the walls of the bare stage are stark white with a red stripe midway up as if the Professor lived in a medical institution. Small sliding doors pepper the walls allowing the Maid to spy on the proceedings as if she were monitoring the behaviour of a problem inmate at an asylum. The only furniture are two adjustable chairs on casters. The starkness may indeed go too far. When blackboards are needed for the Professor to illustrate subtraction. Michelle Ramsay provides two glowing rectangles on the walls, but to make clear the ridiculousness of what the Pupil fails to understand, two blackboards with chalk and visible figures would be more effective. Also, all the books the Pupil brought are taken away, so that when the Professor asks if she is taking notes, she has had nothing to take notes with.
If Ionesco well done were not enough reason to see the show, the reason that trumps all else is the magnificent performance of David Ferry. In just an hour we see him transform the Professor from the fawning fool we first see ever so gradually into the raging maniac he is by the end. He delivers his long, diatribe on “Neo-Spanish” as an extended mentally orgiastic construct that increasingly isolates him from everything outside him. As what he says becomes ever more nonsensical, his professor becomes ever more intolerant of the cringing Pupil before him. Since, as we discover, his disquisition is about something that cannot be taught, his speech is a demonstration not of education but, frighteningly, of egotism, power and domination.
Michelle Monteith also gives an extraordinary performance as the Pupil. She begins all innocence and enthusiasm but beginning with her frustration in understanding subtraction she shows us doubt with flashes of terror that finally materialize in her toothache. Parsa does not have Monteith play this toothache for comedy, although the Monteith’s first few mentions of it elicit laughter. Rather, as with a real unattended toothache, Monteith shows how the increasing pain impairs her ability to concentrate and to speak. We sense that she consents to the Professor continuing with his lecture because she hopes he will finally stop and any objection she might make would only draw out her pain. She finally is just a mass on the floor quivering with physical torture from within and mental torture from without.
Having a man, Costa Tovarnisky, play the Maid only heightens the unsettling atmosphere of the play and makes us wonder what other perversities the bright white walls are shielding us from. By the end Tovarnisky has become a bizarre male mother figure to the whimpering Professor. His/her comfort of such a maniac, only makes him/her complicit in the Professor’s deeds.
Parsa’s attention to detail allows him carefully to modulate the play’s effect from comedy to tragedy. The large empty playing space allows him to give the verbal struggle between the Professor and Pupil a physical dimension. If the Professor is right about disintegration – “C’est ça la vie.” – Parsa shows us the disintegration of both main characters. This physicality is emphasized by Michelle Ramsay’s precise lighting effects – sometimes isolating Pupil and Professor in distinct squares of light, sometimes linking the two with a single beam with the Professor towering over the Pupil. At times, Parsa goes too far. There is no need for a sound cue to signal the onset of the Pupil’s toothache, and while Parsa rightly eschews a Nazi armband for the Professor, he does have him mouth words to a recording of Hitler addressing the masses – an unnecessary beating us over the head with symbolism. Besides, Ionesco, born in Romania, was against totalitarianism in general whether from the left or the right.
These objections are minor compared to the important achievement of the production. The fantastic performances of the cast under Parsa’s riveting direction left me thinking that <i>The Lesson</i> may be the greatest of Ionesco’s plays especially in a political sense. This is a production for anyone interested in 20th-century theatre, superb acting or both.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: David Ferry and Michelle Monteith. ©2012 John Lauener.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.moderntimesstage.com">www.moderntimesstage.com</a>.
<b>2012-11-23</b>
<b>The Lesson</b>