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by Chris Hanratty & Shira Leuchter, directed by Chris Hanratty

UnSpun Theatre, Daniels Spectrum, Toronto

December 5-14, 2013

Oskar: “I declared, resolved and determined that I would stop right there, remain as I was – and so I did”

UnSpun Theatre is currently presenting the first English-language theatrical adaptation of Günter Grass’s classic novel The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) from 1959.  It’s an ambitious task to adapt a 700-page novel into only two and a half hours, but Chris Hanratty and Shira Leuchter do quite a good job considering the difficulty of the source.  The picaresque novel is episodic and so is the adaptation.  Yet, while Hanratty as director has focussed on creating an inventive staging, he has not focussed enough attention on the acting.

Like the novel the play is narrated by its protagonist Oskar Matzerath (Jesse Aaron Dwyre) on the occasion of his 30th birthday in 1954.  He has been confined in a mental hospital since 1952 and sees his birthday as a time to reflect over an eventful life that covers World War II and the time preceding and following it.  He begins with his grandmother and the conception of his mother Agnes (Margaret Evans) and ends after the war after Germany has been divided into East and West. 

Oskar has three unusual characteristics – he is born with the mental capacity of an adult, at age three he decides to stop growing since does not want to fit into the adult world and he has a piercing scream that can shatter glass.  At age three he receives the gift he wished for, a tin drum, and from then on the drum becomes he primary means to expression.  As one might expect, Oskar’s personal life mirrors the events in German history.  He turns three, stops growing and receives his drum in 1927, the same year as the Nazi Party’s first Nuremberg Rally.  

Oskar is born in the Free City of Danzig (now called Gdánsk), a territory that existed from 1920 to 1939, that was ethically German but surrounded by Poland and under the protection of the League of Nations.  Reflecting this odd situation, Oskar has two possible fathers – Alfred (Gordon Bolan), Agnes’s husband and Nazi party member, and Jan (Cyrus Lane), Agnes’s cousin and lover who sides with Poles when the Nazis attack Danzig.  When the Communists invade Poland and reach Danzig, Alfred dies from choking on his Nazi party pin that he is trying to hide.  Significantly, it is then that Oskar decides to start growing again and stops playing his drum. 

Altering the novel, Hanratty and Leuchter have Oskar leave his stepmother Maria (Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster), who is also his mistress, in East Germany while Oskar flees to Düsseldorf in the West.  Although he had vowed not to play his drum again to honour Alfred’s memory, Oskar becomes part of a jazz trio and as a result of drumming, he stops growing again.          

Hanratty and Leuchter’s adaptation deals primarily with only the first two of the three sections of The Tin Drum.  They have Oskar’s stepbrother Kurt die along with is mother Agnes and they don’t even mention the Ring Finger Case in Book III which results in Oskar’s confinement in the mental hospital.  We therefore are allowed to think Oskar is in an asylum simply because he is strange rather than that he allowed himself to be convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. 

As director, Hanratty’s conceit is to have all the action staged in the mental hospital.  The crumpled papers under his bed become the fire where his grandmother roasts a potato while the rest of the cast rustles pieces of paper to create the sound of s burning fire.  Oskar’s bed becomes a city tram.  One of the most effective scenes is of a Nazi rally where the cast portray soldiers marching by means of shoes tied around broomsticks.  Another is the siege of the Danzig post office where the stamp of a foot simulates a gunshot and where a sudden lighting cue combined with a stamp from the whole cast simulates a bomb blast. 

The general impression is that Hanratty’s style is on the way toward the minimalism and mime of companies like Theatre Smith-Gilmour of Toronto or Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland, without going as far as he could.  In the post office siege, for instance, he has the Poles inside use cardboard rifles.  But he has no need of props.  Since he has previously used broomsticks, he could easily have used those instead.  The advantage of a more fully minimalist style is that it allows a small number of objects used as props in different situations to accrue meaning as symbols that in turn help reinforce the connections and meaning in the narrative.  With a greater emphasis on mime, cards would not be necessary to show actors playing skat and or chains to show a strongman’s bonds.  Visually and dramatically, the staging is far busier than it needs to be which is no help in telling a complicated, episodic story.  Hanratty’s direction is also not incisive enough since he is content merely to tell Oskar’s story without making clear the historical allegory that Oskar’s life represents. 

While Hanratty has created some very clever means of enacting Oskar’s story, such as having the cast make all the sound effects, he has not encouraged the cast to give particularly remarkable performances.  The main disappointment, surprisingly, is Jesse Aaron Dwyre, who has shown such potential elsewhere, as Oskar.  He doesn’t seem to have a handle on Oskar’s complex personality and never even suggests the central doubt in the novel whether Oskar is or is not insane.  Dwyre narrates in a generally enthusiastic manner but if there is a split between Oskar’s Goethe-loving and Rasputin-loving sides, we never see it.  Luckily, Dwyre is an excellent drummer and, like Oskar, seems to communicate more through his drumming and silent gestures than through speech. 

All the other actors play two or more roles.  Unhelpfully, however, only Shira Leuchter and Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, distinguish their various roles clearly.  Leuchter is very funny as Oskar’s grandmother Anna, who hides an arsonist under her skirts and conceals from the police that she is being pleasured by him.  Leuchter creates the show’s most memorable character in the mysterious “somnambulist” Roswitha Raguna, who can feel a person’s fortune with her hand.  Lancaster, meanwhile, gives Hedwig, Jan’s meek, uninquisitive wife, quite a different personality from fiery Maria, who becomes Oskar’s lover despite being married to his father.  She also has a fine cameo as a strongman.

Scott Clarkson makes the Jewish toy-seller Sigismund Markus an introvert and the dwarf circus manager Bebra an extrovert, but he does nothing to distinguish them in voice and doesn’t even attempt a Yiddish accent for Markus despite the text.  Cyrus Lane’s best character is the slimy Jan, but his depiction of a Nazi speaker is little different and in portraying the Jew Fajngold, he does not make it clear whether Fajngold’s family actually is with him or Fajngold only imagines it.

Gordon Bolan plays Alfred, one of Oskar’s potential fathers, and the museum worker Herbert, who has a fantastic story to tell about every scar on his back, but relies solely on a costume change to differentiate them.  The same is true of Margaret Evans as Oskar’s duplicitous mother Agnes and the postal worker Kobyella.

UnSpun Theatre should be applauded for taking on such an ambitious project but it also should rethink its presentation of its stage adaptation to capture more of the feel of the magic realism in the novel.  As director Hanratty has to make greater sense of the structure of the narrative, such as the repetition of triangular relationships, and of the narrative’s reflection of history.  He also has to develop a uniform acting style in his cast that matches the size of the tall tale of the novel ironically being told by its deceptively small narrator.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Gordon Bolan, Jesse Aaron Dwyre, Margaret Evans and Cyrus Lane; Jesse Aaron Dwyre as Oskar Matzerath. ©2013 Keith Barker.

For tickets, visit www.unspuntheatre.com.