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by Judith Thompson, directed by Dean Gabourie

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

August 13-September 22, 2013

“Thrilling Acting, Schematic Play”

In Judith Thompson’s latest play The Thrill, a man tries to kill a woman by giving her such a prolonged kiss that she will suffocate.  This is quite a theatrical way to do someone in, but Thompson seems to forget that people breathe through their noses.  Since the man does not close the woman’s nose she will not suffocate.  This is just one of many examples in Thompson’s play where her dramatic imagery is undermined by a lack of basic, often obvious, facts.  The Thrill deals with important themes and features great parts for four actors but its storyline is so improbable and artificial that this play is only for people who can appreciate fine acting in the absence of a coherent story.

Thompson’s play is based on the life and writings of Harriet McBryde Johnson (1957-2008), an American attorney and disability rights activist who lived in Charleston, South Carolina.  She had a congenital neuromuscular disease that confined her to a wheelchair and was eventually the cause of her death.  She was famous for protesting the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethons for twenty years because of their “pity-based tactics”.  In 2002 she also debated Australian philosopher Peter Singer, an advocate of “practical ethics”, because of his view that parents ought to be able to euthanize severely disabled children.

For The Thrill, Thompson has kept the location in Charleston, South Carolina, but has changed the name of the lawyer to Elora Dixon (Lucy Peacock).  As we learn in her discussions with her gay home-care nurse Francis (Robert Persichini), she is outraged that an author named Julian Walker (Nigel Bennett) will be coming to Charleston to promote his book.  Julian is Thompson’s Peter Singer equivalent, but Thompson has made him Irish, not Australian, and has made him not a philosopher but just an ordinary man who has written a book about the death 45 years ago of his severely disabled sister Ruthie.  Thinking about her death not as a sad event but as a deliverance from unbearable pain, he has come to the point of view of “practical ethics”.  He advocates the position that parents should have the right to euthanize severely disabled children to save them from a life of suffering.  This is not compulsory eugenics, but a choice, and must be done out of compassion.

Thompson lends an irony from Singer’s life to Julian’s.  Despite a point of view that favours euthanasia, Julian, like Singer, cares for his mother Hannah (Patricia Collins), who has Alzheimer’s disease, for as long as he can before putting her in a nursing home.                

To Elora, Julian is worse than Satan.  She thinks that if her parents had followed his advice she would never have been allowed to live and to her every moment of life is precious.  On behalf of her group “Not Dead Yet” (the same group that Johnson founded), Elora disrupts Julian’s book launch and make a statement about the rights of the disabled.  To her surprise, Julian invites her to debate him in public.  To the audience’s surprise and disbelief, they fall in love.  It may be possible that two ideological enemies could fall in love over time, but in the minimal time Thompson gives Elora and Julian, it looks like dramatic expediency triumphing over probability.

Thompson’s purpose for this strange turn of events is to cause both characters to take on the other’s point of view.  When Elora learns that her disease is definitively taken a turn for the worse, she sees euthanasia as not so evil an idea.  When Elora asks Julian to help her die, he refuses because he can’t kill someone he loves.  This turnabout is believable on the part of Julian, since we already have his treatment of his mother as an example.  On the part of Elora, it is not.  Indeed, this scene makes the entire structure of the play look forced and schematic. 

Despite this, director Dean Gabourie draws surprisingly intense performances from the entire cast.  Peacock, taking a position in her wheelchair not unlike Stephen Hawking, is restricted to acting with her face and voice alone.  The humour, rage and glowing humanity she expresses are a triumph of acting.  Her constant demands as Elora not to pity her have their effect.  We see her as she intends – a human being with life full of ideas and pleasures.      

Bennett gives his best-ever performance at Stratford as Julian.  He never has been give so rich a part before and rises to its challenges.  After we’ve heard about Julian only as a monster, Bennett demonstrates within just a few a minutes that he is not.  The Irish lilt in his accent lends a softness to everything he says.  His speech is humble and self-effacing, not expansive or argumentative.  In reacting with his mother we see how he repeatedly controls his frustration to deal with her gently, and this gentleness comes out in his love for Elora.  Thompson could have provided Julian with a rationale for his sudden attraction to Elora, such as a transfer of love from lost sister.  Though Thompson doesn’t, Bennett somehow conveys this possibility in his interactions with Elora. 

Patricia Collins is frighteningly real as Julian’s mother.  She is a helpless woman whose only way to preserve as sense of independence is noncompliance.  She easily and eerily slides from lucidity into fantasy as she imagines she sees the dead Ruthie or her favourite dead cat.  Thompson gives her a long monologue in Act 2 about how ordinary her life has been.  Collins delivers it with great dignity, even if its point within the play is obscure.

Robert Persichini’s role is primarily as Elora’s confidant.  There is no whiff of the gay stereotype about his character.  Rather, Persichini plays Francis as a realist and sceptic who performs the useful function of calming Elora on the frequent occasions when she flies into a rage. 

Eo Sharp has given the play a stark, abstract design.  The playing area is a diagonally oriented square and the actors play against a smaller upright square of light that serves as the only background.  Why wires rise from three of the four corner of the square on the floor is a mystery.  The spare set allows lighting designer Itai Erdal full range in creating moods and effects.  His strangest effect is having nine squares of light blink on and off in a checkerboard pattern between scenes.  This could reinforce the notion of game-playing if it existed in Thompson’s text.  Unfortunately, most viewers will be reminded of the television game show Hollywood Squares, hardly an appropriate reference.

While Thompson trumpets her own bravery in her Author’s Note in the programme, it’s clear she has not done sufficient research into her topic.  We can understand how Elora would be opposed to the active euthanasia of severely deformed children.  But what neither she nor Julian ever mention is that the withholding of life-sustaining measures for such newborns is within acceptable standards in both the United States and Canada.  In fact, a 2007 report from the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that “It is inappropriate for life-prolonging treatment to be continued when the condition is incompatible with life or when the treatment is judged to be harmful, of no benefit, or futile”.

Thus, the debate that Elora and Julian enter into that Thompson sets in the present is a debate about whether the barn door should be open or closed after all the horses have fled.  The notion that there are approved alternate options to active euthanasia never enters Thompson’s purview.

Thus, while Thompson raises lots of flags about difficult issues, the play that raises them is far too artificially constructed to be effective.  What is effective are the four great performances Peacock, Bennett, Collins and Persichini.  Peacock is already one of the stars of the Festival.  I only hope that the exceptional work of the other three raises their profiles and brings them the richer roles they deserve.

  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Lucy Peacock and Nigel Bennett. ©2013 Cylla von Tiedemann.