Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✭✩✩ / ✭✭✭✩✩
by Samuel Barber / by Jean-Paul Sartre, directed by Pratik Gandhi / Sarah Thorpe
Soup Can Theatre, Ernest Balmer Studio, Distillery District, Toronto
March 27-30, 2013
Inez to Garcin: “You can’t throttle thought”.
Soup Can Theatre that brought us a revival of Marat/Sade in 2011, is now presenting an unusual double bill of an opera and a play. The opera is A Hand of Bridge by Samuel Barber to a libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti from 1959. The play is No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre from 1944. The two directors, Pratik Gandhi and Sarah Thorpe, bring a number of insights to bear on each of the works but the two pieces could have been tied together more closely and the insights applied more consistently.
Initially, a person might wonder what an opera about card-playing and a play set in hell would have in common. The answer is many things. Both works have four-person casts. Both are about people’s façades and the reality underneath. Both are about entrapment in a situation. And both are about game playing – literal and psychological in Bridge, only the latter in No Exit. In that way the ten-minute-long opera serves as an excellent prelude to the themes explored more extensively in the play.
In A Hand of Bridge we meet two couples – David (Keith O’Brien) and Geraldine (Taylor Strande), Bill (Alvaro Vazques Robles) and Sally (Shilpa Sharma) – who play bridge together every week, more out of habit than pleasure it seems. Menotti clever libretto follows the game they are playing and allows the characters a short aria that gives us a glimpse into their preoccupations. There is a relation between the cards played and the characters but it all goes by so fast you would need a second viewing to take in everything Menotti suggests.
What we know is that both couples have fallen out of love. Sally’s mind is focussed entirely on a peacock-feathered hat she has seen and wants to fill her sense of emptiness. Bill hopes that his wife won’t find out about his infatuation with a woman named Cymbeline. Geraldine’s mother is dying and Geraldine is concerned that she did love her enough when she was well. David, a seemingly macho stockbroker, has hidden his copy of early sexologist Havelock Ellis and expresses his odd fantasy of wanting to watch twenty naked girls and twenty naked boys making love. Is this why his marriage to Geraldine isn’t working?
O’Brien and Strande have powerful voices and their arias stand out as the strongest in richness and interpretation. One feels sorry for Sharma, whose character is stuck repeating the same line throughout the entire opera, and some of Robles’ words go missing due to unclear enunciation. Director and conductor Pratik Gandhi has had the idea of updating the action to the present so that all four play bridge on laptops, iPads or iPhones. Students might do this but I doubt serious bridge players would give up the feel of real cards. The update allows us to see each of the four as self-involved, but it prevents us from seeing the mechanics of the game which are also important. With each of the singers separated from the others we don’t get the contrast of above- and under-the-table activity that the libretto refers to. So the idea of virtual bridge is interesting in theory but loses out in effectiveness in practice.
One problem with the opera-plus-play idea is that the short opera puts one in the mood for another short 20th-century opera or two – The Old Maid and the Thief (1939) or The Telephone (1947) by Menotti, Trouble in Tahiti (1952) by Leonard Bernstein or Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (1968) by Ned Rorem. I was surprised to see the 14-piece orchestra putting their instruments away and leaving after Bridge because I thought they could be used to supply music in No Exit, especially in the scenes where the three characters look back at life on earth to see what has happened after their deaths.
I was also surprised that the two directors did not co-ordinate their ideas more on how the two works should be presented in tandem. The lengthy set change from Bridge to No Exit is quite unnecessary. Why not simply have four chairs and a table (plus bell and ugly statue) for Bridge and take away one chair and the table for No Exit? That way the theme of entrapment in society (“Hell is other people” as Sartre has it) would be visually underscored in both works. There are an infinite number of separate rooms in Sartre’s hell, and Barber’s unhappy suburban couples could be imagined to be occupying one of those rooms.
In No Exit four actors replace the four singers of Bridge. In Sartre’s plays, three people who have never met before are escorted to their room in hell by the Valet. The first part of the play concerns their trying to work out why they of all the dead sinners in the world should be lodged together for all eternity. The second half concerns various strategies and alliances the three try to use to cope with their predicament. Kim Collier’s production of the play for Electric Company Theatre, where the three are shut in a room out of sight but whose voices and actions are monitored by the Valet on video screens (seen by the audience), still remains the most effective version I have ever seen.
Nevertheless, of more conventional, non-high-tech productions, Ryan Anning as the Valet, Carolyn Hall as Estelle and Tennille Read as Inez give performances of their roles that could hardly be bettered. Tall, thin and feline with a soothing voice and enigmatic smile, Anning suggests an intermediary who has never tired of his guests distress at the infernal joke that has been devised for them. Hall perfectly captures both the comedy and the fragility of the spoiled, dim-witted rich girl who just can’t quite believe something as terrible as this has happened to her. Read is wonderfully nuanced as a woman who sees through others in an instant but whose knowledge brings her no comfort. I do wish translator Stuart Gilbert had not translated “femme damnée” in the original French as “damned bitch” in English, since the French has an allure of depravity and none of the suggestion of “bitchiness”. Leaving it French would have given it the right connotations.
The main difficulty in No Exit is Daniel Pagett’s performance as Garcin. Neither he nor director Thorpe have worked out what his character is about. The result is that, unlike the others three, Pagett gives us a series reactions that don’t go together to built a unified personality. At times he seems the clown of the group, at times the most distressed, which causes some of his serious remarks to receive unintentional laughter. It doesn’t help that he tends to rush his lines, fails to enunciate clearly and resorts to shouting to express emotion.
While Kim Collier used a separate closed chamber to emphasize the trio’s claustrophobic isolation and video to reveal their lack of privacy, Thorpe accomplishes this easily (as does Gandhi) by staging the play in the round. The island of the stage shows their isolation. Our eyes on all sides show them under relentless observation. Halfway though the action, Thorpe decides to make the Valet also a symbolic figure and to enter the room silently to help the three act out events from the past or the sights the see back on earth. It’s a fascinating way to use an underused character, but Thorpe really should have begun using the Valet in this way with all the reminiscences and re-enactments. That would make the figure embody memory and foresight and thus lend the Valet additional significance as their trio’s jailer.
Ultimately, the double bill of A Hand of Bridge and No Exit is a display of fascinating insights not fully realized. It’s rare to see a fully staged production of Bridge with a chamber orchestra, so collectors of opera rarities will want to see it, even if it is only ten minutes long. Those new to No Exit will find that Anning, Hall and Read really make the play come alive in unexpected ways. It certainly does not seem like the historical curiosity it did at Stratford back in 2003. All Soup Can Theatre needs to do is focus its diverse energies more to achieve greater consistency and impact.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Alvaro Vazquez Robles, Taylor Strande, Shilpa Sharma, Keith O’Brien, Ryan Anning, Tennille Read, Daniel Pagett and Carolyn Hall. ©2013 Soup Can Theatre.
For tickets, visit http://soupcantheatre.com.
2013-03-28
A Hand of Bridge / No Exit