Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
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by Rex Deverell, directed by Richard Quesnel
Lost & Found Theatre, Kitchener-Waterloo Little Theatre, Waterloo
November 5-15, 2014
Sprugg: “People should be more content with not being able to understand things”
There are some plays that come to have a description attached to them that does not accurately reflect the play’s content. One famous example is Shakespeare’s Hamlet, forever burdened by the narrator’s description of it in Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film, “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind”, a notion that makes indecisiveness Hamlet’s “fatal flaw” and an idea impossible to wrench from students’ minds once they’ve seen the film.
On a smaller scale something similar has happened to Rex Deverell’s play Boiler Room Suite from 1977, now receiving a welcome revival by Kitchener’s Lost & Found Theatre. The description of the play on the website of the Playwrights Guild of Canada states, “Two of life's losers pass an evening huddled for warmth in the basement of a derelict prairie hotel. Together they act out their fantasies, trying to bring "a little warmth, a little kindness to each other's lives”. This description also appears on the paperback edition of the play. The problem with this description is that it is mistaken. Seeing the play in performance only underscores how this description incorrectly summarizes the action and diminishes the subject matter of the play.
In Boiler Room Suite, two aged alcoholics, Aggie Rose (Kathleen Sheehy) and a man named Sprugg (George Joyce), climb in through the basement window of the grand Provincial Hotel to find warmth beside the boiler. This “boiler room suite” is Aggie Rose’s secret hideout. She has only met Sprugg today and invites him into her place for the first time. We learn that Aggie Rose was once an actress who fell into her present condition because she was unable to find enough work in Canada. Sprugg tells us that he is a failed poet but strangely he is unable to remember what his last name is or even where he comes from. Yet, despite this, he claims he has to leave tomorrow to meet other people.
The first half of the play seems to be heavily influence by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) by showing us how the two tramps while away the time by playing various games. The first key difference between Boiler Room Suite and Godot is that Deverell’s two tramps do not have the excuse that they are waiting for anyone and therefore have no assigned purpose or duty. The similarity is that whether the tramps have an appointment or not, one cannot escape the notion that they are waiting for death.
The second key difference is that while the relationship of Beckett’s tramps is complementary, that of Deverell’s is not. The phrase which is patently false in the PGC description of the play is “Together they act out their fantasies”. It is quite clear in viewing the play that together they act out Aggie Rose’s fantasies. Of Sprugg’s fantasies, we know nothing. Sprugg has the role of suggesting scenes for Aggie Rose to act out and he plays supporting roles in these fantasies, but the fantasies are always hers. This means the dynamics of Boiler Room Suite are quite different from those in Godot, and lead us to wonder why there is such an imbalance between the characters.
Aggie Rose tells Sprugg that lying below in the basement, she likes to imagine the lives the of the privileged folk on the floors above. This leads Sprugg to have Aggie play one of these people and she becomes the haughty Madame Avoirdupois and Sprugg the waiter from whom she orders baked “peasant [sic] under glass”. After this scene has played out, Sprugg encourages Aggie to something even grander – to play the Prime Minister of Canada. The third fantasy is grander still when Sprugg encourages Aggie to play God herself, who commands Hawaii to move into the centre of the Prairies.
By this point it should be clear that Deverell has not written an absurdist drama like Beckett but an allegorical one. Deverell even has the tramps discuss the symbolism of the boiler room. Deverell has Sprugg say, “Look at it – furnace, fire, demonic keeper with demonic laugh, infernal light, heat, it’s all here. It’s a symbol of hell, Aggie”. Aggie, however, disputes this interpretation and says that instead, the boiler room is “A symbol of heaven” because “It’s nice and warm down here” and “When I first came here, I thought this was a Godsend”.
In her final fantasy, Sprugg asks Aggie to imagine herself somewhere beyond this specific time and place, and she imagines herself as Cleopatra on her barge with Sprugg as the bargeman. Aggie subsequently goes to sleep and remains asleep for the rest of the action. Given the tramps’ earlier discussion it’s difficult not to imagine that Sprugg is a very different bargeman, let’s say Charon, and that Aggie Rose’s Nile is more likely the Styx. One key to this interpretation is that Sprugg’s earlier speech about the universe: “The universe, my dear, operates with precision and the order of a divinely ordained dial-the-time-lady service” in that time goes on indefinitely and therefore must have been created. Not only that, but Sprugg exclaims, “I and the time-lady are one”.
Given that Rex Deverell was a rural Ontario Baptist minister before he became a playwright, it would not be unusual for him to have written an allegory about time, death and dying. Lost & Found revived the play because it deals with the issue of homelessness, yet its realistic and symbolic layers allow it to support multiple interpretations.
Director Richard Quesnel tries to keep both in balance, but when he has Sprugg produce a flower magically out of the air, he suggests that the character may be more than just another tramp.
The play is a wonderful showcase for its two principal actors. Sheehy, in particular, gets a wonderful chance to show her range by contrasting the frowsy, grumpy Aggie Rose with Madame Avoirdupois and her increasingly grand successors. Yet, at the same time as Sheehy’s Aggie Rose rises to greater heights in her fantasies, she also becomes more exhausted after each one so that we feel we see Aggie Rose declining before our eyes.
Joyce’s Sprugg is a delightful roué with more than a touch of the con man about him. To make the two levels of the action clear, Joyce always gives the impression that he is not so much inside Aggie Rose’s fantasy as observing her play within it. It is as if his character in expanding her horizons of what role she can play is easing her to playing a role beyond time and space in general. Alan K. Sapp makes for genial Pete, our hidden onstage audience, who bears no malice toward the tramps.
Designer Nicole Lee Quesnel has created a convincing grungy boiler room for the set, with a fire ablaze in the boiler to stand for the warmth that becomes such a symbol in the play. Richard Quesnel’s direction could be tighter and the transitions from reality to fantasy and back smoother, but overall his staging of the play reveals that it is more than merely a realistic comedy/drama about homeless people. Quesnel’s production makes one wonder why Deverell’s play is not better known and more often produced and studied. We owe a debt of thanks to Lost & Found Theatre for bringing this undeservedly obscure Canadian play to light.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top), George Joyce and Kathleen Sheehy; Kathleen Sheehy and George Joyce. ©2014 Tom Vogel Creative.
For tickets, visit www.lostandfoundtheatre.com.
2014-11-16
Boiler Room Suite