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by Conor McPherson, directed by Sarah Dodd

Cart/Horse Theatre, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

December 7-22, 2012

“... nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure”. Coleridge

The first part of December is offering theatre-lovers a fascinating pair of plays to compare and contrast.  Terminus by Mark O’Rowe presented by Outside the March opened November 23 and closes December 16.  This Lime Tree Bower by Conor McPherson opened December 7 and closes December 22.  Both plays are Irish and both are told using the same structure – not through dialogue, but through a series of monologues by three speakers.  Terminus is by far the more “in-yer-face” play with its lurid descriptions of sex and violence, supernatural beings and abundance of coarse language all told in rhyming verse.  This Lime Tree Bower, in contrast, does not set out to shock and dazzle and is instead firmly anchored in reality.  Though McPherson has used the supernatural before in plays like St. Nicholas (1997) and The Weir (1997), here the three intertwining stories remain on a completely human level where conflicts are resolved by natural means. At the end of Terminus there is actually little to discuss, since the fireworks of storytelling, more than the content, is what the show is about.  At the end of This Lime Tree Bower, however, you will find that more you compare and contrast the stories of the three speakers the richer the already fascinating play becomes.  It is delightful to see how two writers can use the same structure to such different ends.  Yet, without monologue plays like Brian Friel’s Faith Healer (1979) and Molly Sweeney (1994), or McPherson’s more closely related This Lime Tree Bower (1995) to develop it, O’Rowe would have had no form already to hand for his own play.             

The title of McPherson’s play comes from a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison”.  Coleridge wrote it in 1797 when an injured foot caused him to have to sit in a lime tree bower while four of his friends went on a walking excursion they had planned together.  The disappointed speaker first views the lime tree bower as a “prison” since he is confined there away from his friends.  But the more he imagines the sights his friends will see on their journey, the more he feels linked to them through nature and his imagination.  Reflecting on this, he concludes, “Henceforth I shall know That nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure”. 

In McPherson’s play, all three speakers at first feel confined by the prison circumstances have built for them.  Joe (Anthony MacMahon), a schoolboy aged 16, feels bound in my his own sense of morality and by his father’s and school’s strict rules.  The idol he loves is the scofflaw Damien, whose distain for societal rules makes his personality all the more charismatic.  Joe thinks the way out of his “prison” is to have an experience his father would disapprove of.  He is overjoyed when he has the chance to accompany his hero to a seedy disco on the edge of town known to be dangerous.

Joe’s older brother Frank (Matthew Gorman), works in his father chip-shop on the seaside near Dublin, now fairly unfrequented since it is out of season.  Frank and Joe have managed to cope with their mother’s death, but Frank is disturbed that his father’s drinking has increased not just because of the death but because he has fallen into debt to the local bookie and loan-shark known as Simple Simon, who flaunts his power over the poor man.  Frank thinks the way out of his “prison” is to rob the obnoxious bookie, repay his father’s debt and make a public laughing-stock of Simple Simon at the same time.     

Meanwhile, Ray (Gray Powell), a university professor of philosophy who is the occasional boyfriend of Joe and Frank’s sister Carmel, has his own problems.  He hates his students and hates his colleagues.  His cynicism towards his profession includes himself and to numb the pain of his mid-life crisis he overindulges in booze and mindless sex with his female students.  He thinks the way out of his “prison” will be to destroy publicly the reputation of a famous visiting professor and thus to elevate himself in the eyes of his colleagues and himself.  

Tension increases with each round of the speakers’ monologues but the overall mood is comic.  The results of the three stories are completely different.  Joe’s is a coming-of-age story where by the end he gains a greater sense of who he is once he rids himself of his idol-worship.  Frank and Ray also gain a a greater sense of self-knowledge but by means that are supremely comic – Frank through luck and ingenuity, Ray through grotesque public humiliation.

Much-lauded actor and first-time director Sarah Dodd has well cast the play.  Newcomer MacMahon gives a lovely, sensitive performance as Joe.  He shows us the mixture of doubt, yearning and innocence in the teenager and makes it so palpable we wish we could warn him against his infatuation with Damien and the life Damien leads.  But, at the same time, MacMahon makes us realize that this is a lesson only experience can teach. 

Gorman is fully believable as Joe’s older brother.  He, too, has a mixture of innocence and yearning, but with him anger at his father’s decline has overcome his doubt and fuelled his impetus to take action, even if he hasn’t fully thought it through.  His account of the robbery and its aftermath is made even more hilarious by his wonderfully deadpan delivery.

At the final preview I attended, Powell did not have the same command of text and Irish accent as did MacMahon and Gorman.  Knowing Powell’s fine work at the Shaw Festival, I’m certain this was a fluke and he will reach accustomed heights he unfailingly achieves at the Festival.  Even so, Powell clearly conveyed Ray’s thoughtless sleaziness and nihilistic world view.  In the context of the play, Dodd and Powell make clear that Ray may be like the two brothers in feeling imprisoned but he has, in fact, more in common with the negative force in the two brothers’ lives.  Like Damien, Ray disdains rules and, like Simon, he disdains other people.

Dodd has placed all three speakers on stage for the whole length of the 90-minute play as would have been the case at its premiere.  Each sits on a raised platform surmounted by a the kind of chair each would have in his environment.  Lindsay Anne Black has created a wavy backdrop of a metallic cloth against which the three stand out in Kevin Hutson’s precise lighting that picks out one speaker after the other, shows the transitions from one to the other and reveals all three when appropriate.  His lighting is essential in creating mood, turning Joe, for example, into a silhouette in the graveyard scene in his story. 

McPherson’s technique of serial monologues necessarily highlights the speakers as mentally isolated from each other even when their story describes them as together.  With reference to Coleridge’s poem, we come to see that the two brothers are much more successful in imagining another person’s life than Ray is in imagining anyone’s, even his own.  Meanwhile, we the audience, imprisoned in our own darkened bower, have the privilege of imagining the lives of all three characters that McPherson allows us through the poetic prose of their words.  We alone can see how all three lives unfold and can register with pleasure that in the world McPherson has conjured up there is some justice and the power to grow exists for those who are willing to learn.  I am always happy to see a McPherson play, especially when it is as satisfying as this one and so sensitively acted and insightfully directed. 

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Gray Powell, Matthew Gorman and Anthony MacMahon. ©2012 Scott Gorman.

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