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by Bryony Lavery, directed by Kelly Straughan

Seventh Stage with Nightwood Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto

May 15-June 3, 2012

“The Dark Side of the Perfect Couple”

Todd and Kali seem to be the perfect yuppie couple.  They both adore the old house they’ve completely gutted and renovated.  For Todd’s birthday, the couple has gone to see a classic Swedish art film and now Todd is planning to make dinner for just the two of them.  They both fantasize about their vacation in Stockholm that starts tomorrow.  If Stockholm is their destination, they are already there – in the midst of the syndrome named for the city, where hostages become emotionally attached to their captors. 

Bryony Lavery’s hour-long play at first seems to satirize Todd and Kali’s blissful relationship until it reveals that the relationship is not based on bliss at all.  There are signs from the very beginning that something is not quite right.  Both Todd (Jonathon Young) and Kali (Melissa-Jane Shaw) alternate between describing themselves in the first and third person as if trying to distance themselves mentally from themselves and each other.  The two have just seen Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) in which a knight is reunited with his wife for one last meal before they are taken by Death.  For a surprise Kali has bought Todd two bottles of Veuve Cliquot, which she oddly refers to as only “La Veuve” (“the widow”).  Inside their perfect home, Kali doesn’t want Todd to open the letter for hum from his mother or to listen to the messages on the phone.  When the phone rings neither wants to answer it to upset their “holy” time together. 

Yet, the gutting of the old house and the cleaning out of the attic, two innocent-seeming activities for any young couple, take on uncomfortable associations.  Kali doesn’t want anything from the past, including Todd’s parent whom she hates, to intrude on her exclusive hold over Todd in the present.  She is still jealous of the woman Todd was with when she first him and they go through a type of catechism to rid her of her “retro-jealousy”.  They describe their instant falling in love as if they eyes had been touched by the juice of Puck’s magic flower in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  This is an ominous allusion since Puck’s first use of the flower causes the couple who was in love, Lysander and Hermia, to break up when Lysander is charmed by Helena. 

While Todd is cooking, she uses a pretext to borrow his phone, scanning all his texts, and messages until she comes across what she dreaded to find.  An “urgent” message from a woman whose name she doesn’t recognize.  While Kali is searching Todd’s phone, Todd takes out the letter and reads it, suggesting that to do so in Kali’s presence would be dangerous.  It only takes Kali’s insistent question about what Todd’s favourite meal was before he met her to unleash the tensions that have built up into violence.  Perhaps it is no accident that Kali’s name is the same as that if the Hindu goddess of destruction. 

Lavery wrote her play in 2007 for the physical theatre troupe Frantic Assembly.  Here director Kelly Straughan has enlisted the help of choreographer Susie Burpee to stage the several danced interludes in the action.  The most amazing of these both for its comedy and precision timing is the when Todd and Kali unpack these groceries and put the food away in its proper place in their perfect kitchen.  The cleverness and ingenuity of Burpee’s imagination for staging this everyday event and the effortlessness and exactness with which Shaw and Young execute the choreography is simply thrilling. 

The same must be said for the brutal extended fight scene choreographed by Casey Hudecki, where after repeated battery from Kali, Todd finally loses his superior position and strikes her beginning an all-out physical struggle.  What we are meant to see is that the physicality of the lovely scenes of domestic harmony has a direct parallel in the scene of domestic strife.  The horrible revelation is that the descent from euphoria into savagery is not a one-time occurrence.  It is part of a cycle that both accept as part of their relationship.  Lavery forces us to accept this queasy traumatic bonding as one of the substitutes that people accept as love.  The question is, “If the two accept it as love is it any different from love?”  The second, more disquieting question is, “To what extent does Lavery feel all marriage is a version of Stockholm Syndrome?” 

Every detail of this production has been conceived with the utmost care.  Looking at Lindsay C. Walker’s kitchen set before the show begins, one is struck by its strange symmetry and by the non-naturalistic stairs that lead to Kali’s hideaway in the attic.  Little do we know at the start that the kitchen will function almost as a kind of gymnasium and that the peculiar stairs will reflect Kali’s odd state of mind.  Verne Good’s sound design is so realistic that we actually believe items are being smashed to bits during the fight when in fact they are not.  Straughan has tastefully Canadianized the British references in the Briton Lavery’s script. 

Straughan’s direction of the spoken sections blends seamlessly into Burpee’s choreographed section and Hudecki’s fight scene.  Tension builds throughout the piece through the superlative performances of Young and Shaw who use the switches from first to third person to suggest a strain each feels between being in the relationship and in looking at its idealized version from the outside.  Both Young and Shaw are rare performers who can communicate whole realms of contrary subtext both verbally and physically.  Shaw gives Kali’s abject submission to Todd an unnervingly ritualistic quality, and Young presents Todd’s joy at her humiliation with a stomach-turning exultation that makes us perceive, finally, the real basis for the couple’s “happiness”.             

Stockholm, receiving its Canadian premiere with this production, may be written by a renowned female playwright, but is not at all what one might expect from feminist theatre in depicting the female, not the male, as the aggressor.  The fact that Seventh Stage and Nightwood Theatre, two feminist companies, should create such a superb production of a play with such a seemingly contrary theme, shows that they, like feminist playwright Caryl Churchill in her groundbreaking play Top Girls (1982) are unafraid to explore the dark as well as the brilliant side of female power.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Melissa-Jane Shaw and Jonathon Young. ©2012 Karim Romero.

For tickets, visit /www.seventhstageproductions.com/theatre.