<b>✭✭✭✭</b>✩
<b>by Nicolas Billon, directed by Ravi Jain
Factory Theatre with Why Not Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
March 7-24, 2013;
Why Not Theatre, The Theatre Centre
April 25-May 14, 2016
</b>
“A Play about God and Mammon – not Iceland”
After a sold-out run at last year’s SummerWorks Festival, Nicolas Billon’s <i>Iceland</i> returns for a run at Factory Theatre to sate the curiosity of those who wondered what all the fuss was about. The fuss was about Billon’s strongest play to date given a sharp, succinct staging with a deeply committed cast. It’s a neat little mystery/thriller that works well on its own terms. Just don’t expect it to have anything to do with financial crisis in Iceland of 2008 as the author and the publicity for the show have stated.
<i>Iceland</i> is the second of a trilogy of one-act plays published this year under the title <i>Fault Lines</i>. It follows <i>Greenland</i> (2009) and precedes <i>Faroe Islands</i>, which still awaits a full production. <i>Iceland</i> uses the same structure as <i>Greenland</i> in telling its story through three successive monologues. This structure, made popular by Irish playwright Brian Friel in <i>Faith Healer</i> (1979) and <i>Molly Sweeney</i> (1994), emphasizes that the three characters are mentally isolated from each other so that the inherent question becomes how the three have differing points of view on the same subject. In <i>Iceland</i> much of the tension arises not just about the characters’ perspectives but from the mystery what three such different people could possibly have to do with each other.
We first meet Kassandra (Lauren Vandenbrook), an Estonian student working on a degree in history at the University of Toronto, who has to work for an escort agency to earn enough money to live here. (Billon ignores the detail that she would have had to prove she had sufficient funds to enter the country on a student visa.) Next we meet Halim (Kawa Ada), a Canadian real estate agent of Pakistani descent, who fully believes in that anathema to liberals, the “C-word” (capitalism), and the power of money to buy all things and overturn all professed values and beliefs. The third speaker is Anna (Claire Calnan), a fundamentalist Christian with a repressive background who washes her own mouth out with soap whenever she chances to say a “bad” word. Billon parcels out this information so carefully that we know at the beginning of Anna’s monologue that the three must all have something to do with a body found in an apartment in Toronto’s Liberty Village, but how exactly is not clear until Anna finishes speaking.
Technically, the play is masterfully accomplished. Metaphorically, however, it is all rather fuzzy. Money, at first, seems the primary link. Kassandra unwillingly has to prostitute herself while Halim believes the world runs on the basis of prostitution. Anna simply can’t find an affordable place to live. But beyond that it’s hard to see how the play fits with what Billon claims as his inspiration: “The collapse of Iceland’s three major banks ..., considered one of the catalysts that precipitated the credit crisis, became the starting point for the play. I drafted a series of interconnected monologues that examine the different facets of the financial crisis.” This sounds a bit like what some have noted as Canadians’ “disaster envy”. In order to feel like one of the big countries, Canada often depicts itself as just as crime-ridden as the others are – which it isn’t – or in this case just as affected by the financial crisis as they were – which it wasn’t. Canada wasn’t because Canadian banks, unlike those in Iceland and the U.S., are heavily regulated and, unlike the U.S., potential home-buyers must prove they can make a substantial down-payment before they are allowed a mortgage.
Billon tries hard to make Halim the villain of the piece and has him talk as if he were a right-wing American, calling such things as universal health care and social services “communist”. Besides that, he’s a male chauvinist who enjoys degrading the prostitutes he hires as a confirmation of his belief that no one has a belief that money cannot overturn. Yet, in the play Halim may be guilty of hiring a prostitute but his main illegal financial dealing is to evict a tenant by claiming he will move into her condo and then putting the condo on the market without ever moving in. This still has nothing specifically to do with the “financial crisis” since people were flipping condos well before it occurred.
Because of this, it is not clear at all why Billon should make the financial meltdown in Iceland such a central symbol in the play. Halim may be a self-admitted capitalist, so much so that he is more of a caricature than a character, but it makes no sense that he should applaud the banking crisis in Iceland. If anything, the collapse of Iceland’s banks in 2008 should serve as a warning of the dangers of bank deregulation rather than as a byword for capitalism as Halim uses it. It’s a pity that Halim’s pro-capitalist rant should make up one third of the hour-long play since it never establishes a link between the crisis in Iceland and Halim’s actions other than greed, which has certainly existed before and will exist after any specific historic event.
Yet, plays do not always embody what their creators intend them to. Shaw’s plays often much more complex than Shaw’s prefaces would lead one to believe. What comes across in <i>Iceland</i> is not the effect of unbridled capitalism but of a clash of belief systems. It’s curious that in a modern play Billon should embody religious belief in a white Christian woman and secular nonbelief in a nonwhite Muslim-born man. Perhaps he does so to show that medieval religious and racial stereotyping has not yet died away. If we forget what Billon thinks his play is about it becomes a gripping clash between two recalcitrant individuals that catches Kassandra in the middle. Her symbolic name also connects her to belief since Cassandra was the Trojan prophetess doomed never to be believed.
When the show ended I fully agreed with the women sitting in front of me that “it ended too soon”. That’s because Billon has created three characters each of whom could be the subject of a separate play. We’d like to know more about how Kassandra copes with the tragedy she’s witnessed and more about her twin brother whom she speaks so much about. We’d like to know how Anna became the bizarre, unhappy person she is. Does she cling to religion because of her family or in spite of it? As for Halim, we’d like to why and how he became such a despicable person?
The prime reason we’d like to know more is because the cast gives such powerful performances. Newcomer Vandenbrook (replacing Christine Horne of the SummerWorks production) gives a compelling performance as Kassandra and has mastered a convincingly Baltic accent. She makes her character warm, totally engaging and sensible so that her choice of prostitution as the best job to finance her studies seems a logical, dispassionate decision. Ada, who because of his good looks and great smile has been cast so often as a nice guy, clearly revels in the chance to play a totally contemptible person. Ravi Jain has directed him to play Halim as if he were a comic, disappointed that the audience doesn’t respond to his crude jokes or sympathize with his negative view of women. Ada gives a man so full of himself he doesn’t realize that charm won’t cover up the crassness of his ideas. Calnan gives one of her best-ever performances as Anna, who first appears only mildly unhinged but whose serious derangement becomes clearer with every word she says.
Jain has directed the play with utter simplicity. There are only three chairs on stage, one facing front where the monologuist of the moment sits under one of Kimberly Purtell’s perfect squares of light, while one or both of the other actors sits facing into the wings. The austerity of the production only heightens the intensity of the suspense.
Go to <i>Iceland</i> and appreciate it for what it is and not for what it claims to be and you will experience an hour of high level theatre. <i>Iceland</i>, may not be about the 2008 financial crisis as the author thinks, but what he has created is deeper and even more powerful – a depiction of the clash between idealism and materialism that leaves us wondering which of the two is more dangerous.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Claire Calnan, Lauren Vandenbrook and Kawa Ada; Lauren Vandenbrook and Kawa Ada. ©2013 Joanna Akyol.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.theatrewhynot.org">www.theatrewhynot.org</a>.
<b>2013-03-16</b>
<b>Iceland</b>