Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✭✩
by Duncan Macmillan, directed by Weyni Mengesha
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
March 4-30, 2014;
December 31, 2014-January 25, 2015
W: “I’d be giving birth to the Eiffel Tower”
Lungs may be a play that follows the relationship of a young couple from its first crisis to its end, but what will impress you most is that it is a tour de force for two actors. With Brendan Gall and Lesley Faulkner as the note-perfect actors and Weyni Mengesha as the director, the Tarragon Theatre has a major hit on its hands.
The action of British Duncan Macmillan’s 2011 play begins when a guy, M (Gall), while in the checkout line at IKEA, asks his girlfriend, W (Faulkner), if they should think of having a baby. W immediately freaks out to the point where they have to leave the store without buying anything and sit in the car to hash things out. Hashing things out, however, is exactly their problem. In this spot-on satire of ultra-politically correct twentysomethings, W can’t answer the question about whether to have a baby without factoring in all the socio-politico-economic implications of such an act but especially the ecological impact that adding a new pair of lungs to an already overcrowded would have. As W says, “I could fly to New York and back every day for seven years and still not leave a carbon footprint as big as if I have a child. Ten thousand tonnes of CO2. That’s the weight of the Eiffel Tower. I’d be giving birth to the Eiffel Tower”. Perhaps, instead of having a baby, they wonder, they should just plant trees instead.
Hilariously, M and W are so prone to overthinking their actions that they are in danger of never acting. Even when they finally decide to conceive a child, W wants M to get rid of the murderous look of lust he sometimes has during sex and instead adopt an attitude that signifies the enormous commitment and sacrifice they are making. Of course, M finds this impossible.
While Macmillan’s play is focussed on the question of having a baby, the play is uproariously funny. But then, about 40 minutes into its 70-minute running time, Macmillan suddenly switches gears to deadly seriousness. The seriousness itself is not the problem. Rather its is the change from satire to the abrupt introduction of a melodramatic plot. While this change provides a great opportunity for the actors to display their range, it does completely halt the play’s momentum that has build up again from that point.
Macmillan’s plot involving the strain on the relationship of M and F gradually works it way from earnestness to satire again, but never regains the dazzling high-energy appeal of the first half. The play ends on a quiet note of poignancy. But after the play is over, we do wonder why Macmillan added 20 minutes of unnecessary plot complications when he could have segued directly into the ending after the first 40 minutes. Macmillan seems to have thought the play would have more heft if it were longer, but, in fact, the play would have even greater impact without the plot at 50 minutes than it does with it at 70.
For this reason, the work seems best viewed as a showcase for two actors. Macmillan specifies in this introduction, “The play is written to be performed on a bare stage. There is no scenery, no furniture, no props and no mime. There are no costume changes. Light and sound should not be used to indicate a change in time or place”. Macmillan means all the attention to be placed on the actors and their words. It’s a bit amusing, therefore, to see Ken Mackenzie credited for the set and costume design, Kimberley Purtell as the lighting designer and Oz Weaver as the associate lighting designer. Other than Mackenzie’s choosing clothes to make the two look absolutely ordinary, there really is nothing to design. Rather
Ultimately, all does depend on Gall and Faulkner who both give best-ever performances. Faulkner in particular perfectly negotiates W’s long rumination aloud filled with multiple self-interruptions, contradictions, repetitions and incomplete thoughts. It’s a highly accurate portrayal of how most people speak nowadays when flustered but for an actor to reproduce such syntactic chaos with such ease and clarity of purpose is a stunning accomplishment.
In contrast to W, M never launches into tirades. He is just an ordinary guy who has the knack of saying exactly the wrong thing to his girlfriend no matter what the occasion. Thus, M is constantly setting W off and trying, with limited success, to calm her down. Gall is excellent in this role, with a look that shifts from bewildered to exasperated with the scenes he keeps initiating. Though we sense that M is not quite as liberal as W, Gall wins our sympathy with his variations on loveable dumbfoundedness since his M is not self-analytical enough to divine why what he is doing or saying is always wrong.
Since Macmillan has banned mime, the play is theatrically exciting because of its insistence on the use of speech alone to define time and place. Without a pause a character will refer to something new and we realize through this non sequitur that we have just skipped forward in time, changed location or both. The effect of this process is intellectually liberating. Macmillan’s writing and Weyni Mengesha’s absolutely precise direction make us realize we don’t need the encumbrances of set or costume changes to tell when or where we are. Macmillan’s process also gives us the impression we are hurtling unstoppably through time, our thoughts like W’s racing, but not quite able to absorb everything we encounter. The humour of M and W’s attempts to consider all possible outcomes of having a baby is that it is a futile activity, and so, by implication, is any prediction of the outcome of an event.
If I were given to puns, I would say that Lungs may be the most breathtaking 70 minutes you’ll spend in the theatre this year.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Lesley Faulkner and Brendan Gall; Brendan Gall and Lesley Faulkner. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit http://tarragontheatre.com.
2014-03-06
Lungs