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<b>by Václav Havel, translated by Paul Wilson, directed by Tyler Séguin
Thought For Food Productions, Unit 102 Theatre, Toronto
April 25-May 10, 2014
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“Thought For Food Shows Us We Haven’t Come Far from 1965”<i>
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“Ra ko hutu d dekotu ely trebomu emusohe, vdegar yd, stro reny er gryk kendy, alyv zvyde dezu, kvyndal fer teknu sely”. Thus runs the first line of the play, <i>The Memorandum</i> from 1965 by Czech writer and statesman Václav Havel (1936-2011). This is also the first line of the titular memorandum that Director Andrew Gross has received and reads aloud in a vain effort to make sense of it. As Gross discovers, the memo is written in the artificial language Ptydepe (pronounced “p’TĔ-dĕ-pē” in the show) that has, without his knowledge been introduced into the organization as a clearer and more precise method of communication. The problem is that Gross can’t find anyone to help him translate the document.
It has taken surprisingly long since the death of Havel, the first president of the Czech Republic, for someone to stage one of his works in Toronto. Luckily, Thought For Food has filled this gap with a production of Havel’s best known play, the title shortened in Paul Wilson’s 2012 translation to <i>The Memo</i>. It would be pleasant to think that Havel’s portrait of bureaucracy gone mad has dated since it first appeared in 1965. But, in fact, the play seems more relevant than ever and the central character’s complaint that we are losing touch with the totality of our humanity has even more resonance in our digital age than Havel could have imagined fifty years ago.
The efforts of Gross (Paul Rivers) to have the memo translated bring him into conflict with the Deputy Director Balas (Helen Juvonen), who clearly wants his job, and her mysteriously silent comrade Kubs (Michael Rinaldi). Gross’s quest for simple answers takes him into a cyclical bureaucratic nightmare and ultimately result in his humiliation and firing.
Such a situation reminds one of the efforts of Josef K., the chief financial officer of a bank, to discover why he is on trial in Czech author Franz Kafka’s <i>The Trial</i> (1925) or of K.’s struggle in Kafka’s <i>The Castle</i> (1926) to gain access to the authorities in the village castle that have sent him a note saying he no longer has a legal claim to live there. Why Czech authors, writing either in German as Kafka or in Czech as Havel, have viewed modern man’s alienation from the world in terms of bureaucracy may stem from the history of the Czechs being shuffled from one empire to another over centuries. But Havel, like Kafka does not merely satirize bureaucracy but also shows how man confronts the threat of the meaninglessness of existence. Havel has Gross say, “We are like Sisyphus – we push the boulder of life up the hill of illusory meaning only to have it roll back down again into the valley of our own absurdity”. One of the founders of Existentialism, Albert Camus, dedicated a book-length essay to <i>The Myth of Sisyphus</i> (1942) as an image of life’s absurdity.
Within <i>The Memo</i>, the central image of absurdity is the language Ptydepe itself. In an effort to be more precise than the “dilettantish” natural languages, Ptydepe winds up being so complex that all but one in J.V. Brown’s Ptydepe classes has dropped out. Ptydepe is so precise that even simple interjections differ depending on how they are used. The word for “boo!” is radically different depending on whether the speaker is concealed or not, whether the person being surprised is concealed or not and whether the person being surprised expects or does not expect to be surprised, among other factors. To make certain that no word in “Ptydepe” can be confused with any other word, the language deliberately seeks a superfluity of letters so that no two words are spelled even remotely alike. In a triumph of bureaucratic reasoning, Ptydepe may make office memos longer than they were before, and illegible to most people, but now they are even more precise.
Paul Rivers’s set design transforms the sometimes uninspiring Unit 102 Theatre space into a bright office area through the use of a back and side wall that conceal the brick and concrete behind. He uses a hexagonal motif not merely on the walls but for the central table, for a cupboard door and as a design on the backs of the notebooks the office-workers use. This geometric design not only suggests the 1960s when the play was written but also the notion of the unnamed organization as a beehive where workers are meant to have no individual ideas outside of the hive mentality. Costume designer Miranda VanLogerenberg has clothed everyone in the same shade of grey with accents, whether pocket squares or ties, in the same dusky tan.
The cast is uneven but there are many standouts. Chief of these is Thomas Gough as J.V. Brown (“Perina” in the original), the Ptydepe instructor. His lessons using an overhead projector on the value and use of Ptydepe are satire at its most sublime. The reason for this is the utter seriousness verging on menace with which he promotes what objectively is clearly an insane idea. Yet, the absolute conviction he manifests for Ptydepe is both hilarious and frightening as all good absurdist drama should be. Gough’s performance alone is worth the price of admission.
Paul Rivers gives a fine performance as Andrew Gross (“Josef Gross” in the original). He is excellent at suggesting Gross’s inherent weakness, a lack of ruthlessness, that makes him a prime target to be exploited and disdained by those under him. As his search for a translation becomes more complex, he makes us understand Gross’s frequently expressed wish just to be a little boy again and start over. Indeed, he wins our sympathy by seeming like a little boy who suddenly realizes that he can no longer control the world around him.
Helen Juvonen and Michael Rinaldi make a good team of Gross’s Deputy Director Balas (male in the original) and her yes-man sidekick. Like Gough and Rivers, Juvonen plays her role with unswerving earnestness and creates the necessary atmosphere of menace that gives suspense to the action. Even mostly mute Rinaldi, whose role is more clown-like, helps amplify the general sense of unease.
Annie Briggs as Alice (“Maria” in the original) gives us a strong portrait of a secretary so used to being bullied and spied upon that she needs to force herself to concentrate simply to get her work done. Alice becomes Andrew’s love interest in the play, and Briggs is very funny during a scene where Andrew’s incessant philosophizing prevents him from giving her the kiss she longs for.
The rest of the cast generally tries too hard to be funny. In an absurdist play, as in farce, any effort to be funny is counterproductive. Absurdism shows us a world that is humorous from one point of view but sinister from another. Trying to be amusing ruins the necessary atmosphere of menace. To capture both sides of an absurdist world, many actors in the show would do well to take Gough as their model and play their parts in deadly earnest. Therefore, director Tyler Séguin (not to be confused with the NHL hockey player) should have aborted all attempts at mugging, funny voices or funny walks. The world that Andrew Gross lives in is one that should cause us to cringe as much as laugh.
Anyone interested in classics of 20th-century European drama and Absurdism in particular should not hesitate to see <i>The Memo</i>. Neither should anyone who wishes to see a satire of corporate culture that is still bitingly pertinent. People will find in Havel’s Ptydepe a metaphor for all the types of euphemisms of political correctness that have crept into the language from academia or for all the doublespeak one hears from the government where bills are given names that mean the opposite of their intended effect. We have to thank Thought For Food for bringing this play to Toronto and look forward to its next production.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Paul Rivers as Gross and Annie Briggs as Alice (foreground) with cast of <i>The Memo</i>; Thomas Gough as J.V. Brown. ©2014 Sunny Kaura.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://thought4food.ca">http://thought4food.ca</a>.
<b>2014-05-04</b>
<b>The Memo</b>