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by Andrew Bovell, directed by Philip Riccio

The Company Theatre with Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

November 2-24, 2012

Sonja & Jane: “I want to know something about the woman I’m hurting”.

Speaking in Tongues is the perfect play for people who like intellectual puzzles.  I have seen three plays by Australian playwright Andrew Bovell – Holy Day (2001) by the Sydney Theatre Company in 2003, When the Rain Stops Falling (2008) by the Shaw Festival in 2011 and now Speaking in Tongues (1996) by the Company Theatre – and all three show a fascination with interlocking stories and the question of whether human activity is governed more by chance or by fate.  In all three plays actions that people assume are private affect others in unforeseeable ways.  What makes Bovell unusual is that he is one of the few playwrights after Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard who experiments with form as well as content.  Rain presented interleaved stories from three time periods, including the future, in an associative, non-chronological order.  Tongues is by far the most formalized of the three, but its structure breaks new ground in how a play can be put together at the same as it reinforces Bovell’s central themes.

In the first act of the play we meet four characters – two male, two female, making two straight couples – who have just decided to have a one-night stand.  Using the same amusingly anonymous bedroom set designed by John Thompson, the two couples – neither present to the other – discuss whether or not to go through with the deed.  In this scene, acted with amazing precision by the cast, the two men speak their lines together as do the two women – each couple hilariously covering the same objections and trying to rekindle lust after so much discussion.  Gradually, a difference emerges from the simultaneous scenes.  One couple is able to go on with sex, while the other is not. 

If you listen carefully you will discover that all four people are married and thus either couple having sex will betray two spouses at once.  Pete (Richard Clarkin) is married to Jane but does not cheat on her with Sonja.  Jane (Helene Joy) does cheat on Pete with Leon (Jonathan Goad).  Leon is married to Sonja (Yanna McIntosh).  Following the hotel bedroom scene come parallel scenes of accusations against each other in the married couples’ amusingly anonymous living rooms.  Though the two couples again echo each other’s dialogue, a second difference emerges.  Pete leaves his wife Jane, while Sonja leaves her husband Leon.

Following these two scenes of synchronous dialogue, Bovell examines the repercussions of the events in two sets of sequential but parallel scenes – one in which the two men accidentally meet each other, followed by one where the two women accidentally meet each other.  Then comes Pete’s return to his wife Jane and Sonja’s return to her husband Leon – each with differing outcomes.

In the first scene the two men are said by the two women to be exactly the same.  The two men, however, distinguish between the two women.  Jane is said to be fragile while Sonja is said to be strong.  Bovell explores the increasingly divergent course that the marriage of Pete and Jane takes versus the marriage of Leon and Sonja in an almost mathematical way.  As in chaos theory is it the difference in character between the two women that sets the increasingly divergent courses of the two marriages in motion.  Bovell first asks whether it is fate or chance that two nearly similar premises end in such different ways.  Bovell then shows that whatever the cause, human beings have an ability to overcome the effects of fate or chance through trust and forgiveness.

If Act 1 were the whole of the play it alone would be a tour de force of playwriting.    But in Tongues, Act 1 only provides the foundation for a larger exploration of the same themes.  In the parallel reconciliation scenes of Act 1, we learn that three of the four characters have had a mysterious encounter with another person – an external encounter that in some way reflects the character’s own internal state of mind.  Leon literally runs into a man abandoned by the love of his life who is destroyed by his loss.  Pete passes a well-dressed woman on the street who immediately begins shouting abuse at him and accusing him of harassing her although he has done nothing.  Jane has seen her neighbour Neil come home late with scratches on his face and blood on his shirt and watches him throw a woman’s shoe into a vacant lot.  Fearing the worst, Jane phones the police about the incident.  Jane is astounded to find out later that despite so much evidence against him, Neil’s wife completely trusts him in a way she could never trust Pete.

In Act 2, we meet four new characters, all alluded to in Act 1.  Clarkin plays Neil the man abandoned by his fiancée.  Joy plays Sarah, the woman who left Neil.  McIntosh plays Valerie, Sarah’s psychologist, and the woman who screamed abuse at Pete.  And Goad plays Nick, the man Jane saw throw away the woman’s shoe.  Valerie is the owner of the shoe.

In Act 3 Bovell links old and new.  Joy and McIntosh return in their characters from Act 2, Goad returns in his character Leon from Act 1.  And Clarkin, alone among the cast, plays a third character, John.  Goad has come to visit John to question him about the disappearance of John’s wife Valerie.  While in Act 1, the characters came to fear losing their partners, in Acts 2 and 3, we meet characters who have permanently lost or abandoned theirs.  Having made the comic betrayals and abandonments tragic, Bovell asks whether trust and forgiveness still have the power to heal. 

Philip Riccio direct this complex work with admirable clarity.  The initial choral scenes are beautifully executed.  He paces the narratives later too cautiously likely because they contain so much important information for the remainder of the play.  Thankfully, Riccio does not ask the cast to do Australian accents (though Joy is originally Australian) since like most accents they must either be well done or not done at all.  If there is a signal flaw in his direction, it is in merging Acts 2 and 3 by having the continuing characters of Act 2 remain on stage.  This is a flaw because it obscures our perception of the play’s structure, especially in this play where structure reflects intent.  Even though there is no intermission between Act 2 and 3, he should have the cast exit and return to make the break.  Then we would better perceive how Act 1 presents us with four characters, Act 2 with four new characters and Act 3 with one from Act 1, two from Act 2 and one new character who appears only in Act 3.  Then it would be clearer that Act 3 is a further progression of what has gone before.  Without giving away the conclusion, I can say that it presents the image of a ruined relationship that combines aspects from the previous two acts.

The Company Theatre has become known for its the intensity of its performances and Tongues is no exception.  All four actors are excellent.  Helene Joy is, perhaps, the best at distinguishing her two characters – the fearful, fragile Jane from the aggressively carefree Sarah.  Yanna McIntosh is especially good as Valerie, in capturing her mounting anxiety when lost in the woods and her icy demeanour when in her office with Sarah.  Jonathan Goad brings passion both to Leon in his narrative about meeting the abandoned lover and as Nick when explaining to the police what really happened.  But the characters are too similar.  In his three roles Richard Clarkin shines most as John whose enigmatic reaction to the disappearance of his wife intrigues us as much as it does his interrogator Leon.              

It is a fascinating play.  Bovell’s screenplay for Ray Lawrence’s 2001 film Lantana is based on Tongues, but to write the screenplay, Bovell had to dismantle the structure of his play.  Great though the film is, in many ways the formal structure of the play makes the play easier to understand than the film.  The more closely you think about the comparisons and contrasts among the several couples, the more you will find.  The same is true the more you think about how Bovell uses doubling of roles to link aspects of various characters together.  The formalism of its presentation is a deliberate alienation device to make us look at the pattern Bovell has created more than identifying with any one character.  Within that pattern, however, Riccio and his cast have created rounded emotional human beings struggling to understand their situation.  Bovell’s pattern becomes a metaphor for the web of fate or chance in which they are caught and from which some do and some do not have the power or will to free themselves.  This is a play you will find yourself thinking about for days afterward as you discover further ramifications to all the parallels and contrasts Bovell has laid out before you.              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Yanna McIntosh, Richard Clarkin, Helene Joy and Jonathan Goad. ©2012 Shaun Benson.

For tickets, visit www.companytheatre.ca.