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by Michael Healey, directed by Miles Potter

Sue Edworthy, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

September 22-October 6, 2012

“The PM as Professor Higgins”

Michael Healey’s latest play Proud, in which Stephen Harper in all but name is the central character, was rejected by the Tarragon Theatre because a Tarragon board member feared the play was libellous.  Such an action from Tarragon Artistic Director Richard Rose, who had produced the two previous plays in Healey’s political trilogy – Generous in 2006 and Courageous in 2010 – is simple cowardice.  The show is no more libellous that what one can see in sketch comedy in Toronto or on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report any night.  If theatre is to be a forum for ideas in a free society, those ideas have to include political ideas.

As it is, Proud is barely a play at all, if you think plays involve conflict or action or well-rounded characters.  Instead, it’s a 90-minute-long satirical sketch.  I would be as happy as anyone in the arts to see Harper’s ideas demolished on stage, but many will be surprised at how fair Healey is when allowing Harper to defend himself and his policies.  What I found difficult is the central premise of the play that is too far-fetched.  It provides a clothesline on which Healey can hang out his ideas on Harper but when the line itself is weak it undermines the strength of his criticism.

The play is set in an alternative 2011 when the 59 votes that went to the NDP in Quebec have gone to the Conservatives, giving them the second biggest majority in Canadian history (based on the smallest percentage win in the popular vote).  Harper (played by Healey himself) is basking in his glory but cautions the newly elected MPs not to speak even to their closest relatives or loved ones about the party.  Instead, they should come directly to him.

Taking him at is word, rookie MP Jisbella Lyth (Maev Beaty) of the fictional Quebec riding of Cormier-Lac Poule, pops into the PM’s office to ask for a condom so she can have sex with a journalist in her office.  Jisbella – known as “Bella” to some or just “Jiz” back home (this is the kind of humour we’re dealing with) – is a single mother whose only work experience is managing a St. Hubert franchise.  We’re supposed to think of Lyth as naive.  But it’s impossible to believe that a new MP, especially from a small town, has no awareness of social or political status or that she’d have such easy access to the PM.     

We are meant to view the series of encounters between Lyth and the PM that makes up the bulk of the play as a meeting of opposites.  The PM is robotic, emotionless, calculating with a passion only for economics.  Lyth is natural, sensual, impulsive with a passion for frequent sex.  In a move reminiscent of Shaw’s Pygmalion (referred to in the background notes), the PM and his chief of staff, Cary Baines (Tom Barnett), decide that Lyth, as a kind of tabula rasa, would be an ideal candidate to train in the Conservative ideology and to use to cause distractions, like proposing a bill  to ban abortion, to distract media attention away from the PM’s plan to cut government.  Lyth likes the feeling power but since she seems incapable of seeing anything as non-sex-related, she assumes all the PM’s time spent training her is really an extended come-on. 

This pattern – PM expounds his views, Lyth misunderstands, interview ends abruptly when PM won’t put out – is repeated to the point of tedium for the rest of the play.  Unlike Pygmalion, there is no turnabout at the end where the pupil outshines the master, not merely in what she was taught but in moral judgment.  Instead, Healey ends the play with a long speech by Lyth’s son Jake (Jeff Lillico), only seven during the action of the play, now 25, who has become a Liberal and basically expounds Healey’s view of what is wrong with Harper’s philosophy and states what government should be about.  Thus, instead of having the play speak for itself, Healey appends a lecture that functions as the “in-case-you-didn’t-get-it” speech that mars so many North American plays.

As an actor, Healey’s portrait of the PM is equally amusing and chilling.  He appears to be a man completely cut off from common human feeling who has dedicated himself to a single goal, smaller government, to the exclusion of all other concerns.  He is not evil but simply obsessed with maintaining control to achieve his goal, completely unconcerned with what means he uses to achieve the end. 

If we set aside the improbability of a person like Lyth acting as she does in the presence of the PM and speaking in an increasing vulgar fashion to him, Maev Beaty does a superb job of creating the wildest, sex-addicted flake you’ve ever seen.  She makes Lyth so mentally addled it’s hard to see how she could ever have managed a St. Hubert.  But no matter – she makes Lyth a hilarious character.

In focussing so much on the PM and Lyth, Healey seems to have forgotten to give Cary a personality.  Barnett does what he can but Healey has given him nothing to work with.  Lillico, too, has the same difficulty.  Jake is boyish and earnest, but that’s it, and Lillico can act that kind of role in his sleep.

It would be nice to think that Richard Rose had rejected Proud simply because it’s not a very good play, but looking over some of the other choices he has made (e.g. The House of Many Tongues in 2009), that can’t be the whole reason.  As one might expect Proud is a play that preaches (literally at the end) to the converted and there are enough people in Toronto who enjoy having their views confirmed, even in the form of a play, that Proud should do well.  A step forward in Canadian drama would be the creation of plays that look at the nature of politics in general.  After all way back in 1937 Brecht showed in Señora Carrar’s Rifles that any action, or even non-action, has political consequences.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Tom Barnett and Michael Healey. ©2012 AmandaLynne Ballard.

For tickets, visit http://proudtheplay.com.