Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✭✩
by Elizabeth Kuti, directed by Matthew Gorman
Cart/Horse Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto
November 20-December 7, 2014
“Deep Waters”
Cart/Horse Theatre is current presenting the North American premiere of British playwright Elizabeth Kuti’s Fishskin Trousers. Kuti’s play uses the structure of interwoven monologues pioneered by Brian Friel in Faith Healer (1979) and Molly Sweeney (1994) and taken up later by other Irish playwrights like Conor McPherson in This Lime Tree Bower (1995) and Mark O’Rowe in Terminus (2007). Kuti rings new changes on this type of play that only deepen the aura of mystery it is capable of engendering. Though it is only 75 minutes long, the Cart/Horse production is so quietly powerful the world it draws you into will stay with you long after the performance ends.
In the four plays mentioned above, the speakers are all contemporaries and witnesses to different aspects of the same events. Kuti links her three monologuists by place since the phenomena they describe all occur in Orford in Sussex, England. However, she makes a radical change to this type of play’s typical structure by having her three characters speak from completely distinct time periods. The question the play raises is how these three stories are related.
The first speaker is Mab (Arlin Dixon), kitchen servant to Bartholomew de Glanville at Orford Castle in 1173. She gives us an eyewitness account of how fishermen one day found a sea creature, half-fish half-man, struggling in their nets. Knowing de Glanville is interested in freaks of nature, they take him the creature, later known as the Wild Man of Orford in the account given by chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall in 1200. He is not a traditional merman in that his scaly legs ending in finned toes are separate. Thus, he looks as if he were wearing fishskin trousers. The lord and his men imprison the creature in the castle keep and torture him in an effort to get him to speak.
The next speaker is Ben (Craig Pike), an Australian radar scientist in 1973 seconded to work on the top secret Cobra Mist project on Orford Ness. The project was built to test experimental over-the-horizon radar that could detect aircraft over 2000 nautical miles away. Ben, a post-grad at Stanford, is brought in when the system is plagued by unexplained noise. On his own Ben finds a different sort of noise that he can’t account for and that his supervisor believes is simply an error. When not at work, Ben strikes up a friendship with a local barmaid named Mabel, who is fascinated by the lost city of Dunwich. Once the capital of the medieval East Anglia, storms, floods and erosion caused two-thirds of the city to sink into the sea. Mabel, like many locals, claims she can hear bells tolling from the sunken churches.
The third speaker is Mog (Julia Course), a school teacher in 2003, who finds she is pregnant by the married man she has been having an affair with. The difficulty is that a sonogram of her fetus shows an anomalous deformation of the legs and her doctors recommend a “discontinuation” of the pregnancy. They give her pills to begin the process and send her off. The news hits Mog hard since it comes just before her 30th birthday. To seek some solace and to reflect on her decision she drives to Orford where she grew up.
The characters do not interact but stay fixed in their chairs speaking directly to the audience in several rounds of the same sequence – Mab, Ben and Mog. With each round the speakers take their stories farther and reveal details that build parallels among tales that initially seem to have little in common. All three speakers are unmarried, all three feel alienated from their environment and all three encounter a strange being from the sea. While each story presents a mystery in itself, the growing parallels among the stories creates a greater mystery that encompasses all three.
Thus, although Kuti presents her three speakers as existing in different time periods, she suggests, via Ben’s speech, both that these periods may be simultaneous and that what the three speakers encounter may be eternal. As Kuti has Mog note about her fetus, we all begin as fish.
The three stories in Kuti’s play are engrossing in themselves and even more engrossing in relation to each other. It is amazing how Kuti is able to allude to so many fascinating aspects of history, myth and science in only 75 minutes, thus stimulating more ideas in a short time than do many modern plays two or three times that length.
Kuti also creates three distinct characters with whom we feel an instant bond. Arlin Dixon’s Mab knows she’s no master storyteller, yet Dixon makes Mab’s simplicity and lack of artfulness a virtue, her sincerity and restricted vocabulary only emphasizing her sincerity and making the fantastic sights she sees more concrete. Mab’s Suffolk accent and archaic language at first seems incomprehensible but soon enough we adapt to it as Dixon draws us into her story.
Pike’s Ben tells his story with a self-conscious irony totally lacking in Mab. He is the only one who quips or indulges in a little nudge-nudge-wink-wink with the audience. Pike makes a brave attempt at an Australian dialect especially in its mutation of vowel sounds, but he misses the difference in cadence and accentuation. Yet, Pike fully masters Ben’s change of mood when his tale takes a turn from the mundane to the extraordinary and the joking drops out to be replaced with wonder.
Course presents Mog as a complex young woman. As a narrator she tries to maintain a sophisticated distance from her topic, but gradually this wears away to show the distress that Mog has tried in vain to keep in check.
Designer Jenna McCutchen’s simple but effective set places each speaker on a chair appropriate to the period and place of his or her time and dresses each speaker in period-appropriate costume. The three chairs are placed diagonally on a what looks like several dried blue-green fish skins sewn together and in the process of being stretched, ropes passed through holes in the skin and tied to metal cleats around the perimeter of the stage. Kaileigh Krysztofiak’s lighting moves its strange glow from speaker to speaker. Andy Trithardt’s sound design underscores the eerie atmosphere.
Like your reviewer, you may never have heard of Elizabeth Kuti before much less this play with the peculiar title. Yet don’t let that prevent you from experiencing a poetically told tale that opens mysteries within mysteries and asks where the boundary really lies between the natural and the supernatural.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Arlin Dixon and Craig Pike; Arlin Dixon and Julia Course. ©2014 Matthew Gorman.
For tickets, visit www.artsboxoffice.ca.
2014-11-21
Fishskin Trousers