Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✩✩
by Lee MacDougall, directed by Stuart Hughes
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
February 21-March 28, 2012
“Neil Simon on Drugs”
Soulpepper’s investigation of once-acclaimed Canadian plays has hit upon Lee MacDougall’s High Life from 1997 that, despite productions across this countries and others, has not been revived in Toronto until now. While academics are eager to establish a canon of Canadian drama, in reality canons can develop only over time when a work of art is seen to speak to audiences over many generations. Soulpepper is providing an invaluable service by reviving plays once-popular plays. In the case of High Life, the drug use and pervasive foul language that might have struck people as new and controversial in 1997, now seems unremarkable in light of what has come after and what is left does not have the resonance of other similar plays or films of the period.
High Life focusses on four morphine addicts, three of who have done extensive time in prison and one young guy who has engaged in criminal activity but so far has not been caught. Dick (Diego Matamoros), is the “brains” of the group, “brains” being used in very relative fashion given the drug-addled of all four. He has come up with a “foolproof” plan for robbing not just one bank but banks all across the country. To do this he needs the skills of two friends who, unfortunately, hate each other. One is Bug (made frighteningly real by Michael Hanrahan), a psychopathic thug willing to murder anyone who annoys him. In contrast is the pathetic Donnie (in an hilarious, finely detailed portrayal by Oliver Dennis), a man who spends most of his time in hospitals because virtually all of his internal organs are in some state of compromise because of his drug abuse. Dick needs Donnie because, despite his physical decrepitude, he has perfected an ingenious method of robbing people by using their bank cards and then conscientiously returning the cards to the owners.
Dick plan requires someone presentable enough to walk into a bank without drawing attention to himself persuasive enough to convince a (female) bank clerk of completely false story. Since Dick, Bug and Donnie all look like streetpeople, Dick recruits a new guy Billy (given a wonderfully swaggering performance by Mike Ross), who is good-looking and, even more important, healthy-looking and who obtains his drugs principally by seducing hospital nurses to get them for him. Since Billy has never done time, Bug and Donnie are instantly suspicious of him, and a dangerous rivalry develops between the cocky Billy and the brutal Bug.
Needless to say, the plot of man-assembles-group-to pull-off-perfect-crime is hardly new. The finest of all such heist movies is Jules Dassin’s Rififi from 1955. Plays about foul-mouthed criminals falling out over a theft is also not new. Soulpepper staged David Mamet’s American Buffalo (1975) in 2006. British playwright Jez Butterworth adds drugs to the mix in his play Mojo of 1995 and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs is from 1992 and Pulp Fiction from 1994. Thus, even in terms of its style of humour mixed with menace and abrupt apathetic violence, High Life was hardly ahead of the pack.
What keeps us watching is the fine ensemble work of the cast and MacDougall’s collection of funny though often gross stories. The show boils down to something more like a doubling of an innocuous play like Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple to The Odd Foursome with the addition of drugs, profanity and violence. Unlike the plays and films mentioned above, their is no attempt to uncover heroism even in criminals as in Dassin nor an implied commentary on the state of the nation as in Mamet or Butterworth nor on the nature of fate as in Tarantino.
The play is also curiously inconsistent regarding the character of Dick. Unlike the other three actors Diego Matamoros shows no difference in Dick’s behaviour before or after a shot of morphine. In Soulpepper’s other “morphine play”, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, playwright Eugene O’Neill details the gradual descent in Mary Tyrone from relatively normal interaction with others to a disturbing withdrawal into a fog of past memories. In High Life we have to assume that Bug, Donnie and Billy have been such heavy users that, as with Bug and Billy, they habitually exhibit sudden changes of mood or, as with Donnie, they live in a constant state of anxiety.
The state morphine-addicts seek is euphoria and we have to assume that is what motivates Dick’s enthusiasm for his great idea. Yet, Matamoros makes Dick so rational that it hides the pathological explanation for his behaviour. MacDougall does some provide evidence of Dick’s euphoria in the play. Dick’s once the plan is set in motion, we realize that it depends entirely on drug-impaired people trying to recognize the arrival of ATM repairmen on the scene. As Dick describes them, they do not wear uniforms but suits and carry briefcases. It is thus impossible that the four will ever know exactly when the repairmen arrive and thus when to begin the second phase of their heist. If MacDougall or director Stuart Hughes put more emphasis on this fact, the hopelessness of Dick’s plan would be obvious and would underscore that Dick, although more articulate than the others, is just as mentally impaired.
Lorenzo Savoini has devised a clever set that serves both at the dump Dick lives in and as the outside of the bank. Stuart Hughes tries to liven up the scenes changes loud rock music but it hardly suits the overall mood of the play. Music to underscore tension should be unnecessary and the hoofbeats to accompany mention of Bug’s dream of sometime owning a ranch would makes sense if there were sound effects for the dreams of the other three. Billy gets a samba to reflect his view of himself as irresistible but there’s nothing for Donnie and Dick.
High Life is amusing enough to watch while in the theatre, but it opens no new ground and poses no larger questions as the best plays do, including plays on this very topic. Given its illustrious predecessors at the time, we’re left to wonder why the play made such a splash in 1997.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Mike Ross, Michael Hanrahan, Oliver Dennis and Diego Matamoros. ©2012 Michael Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.
2012-02-29
High Life