Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✭✭
by Edward Bond, directed by Eda Holmes
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
June 11-October 12, 2014
Hatch: “I don’t know if you’re all ghosts or if you still have time to save yourselves”
The Shaw Festival’s current production of Edward Bond’s 1973 play The Sea is the third I have seen and is by far the best. The cast is impeccable and features two truly outstanding performances, those of Fiona Reid and Patrick Galligan. Director Eda Holmes captures the darkly comic mood of the play but not at the expense of serious moments. Her direction makes the sea the central symbol of the plays as it should be. Unlike some of the playwrights the Festival has touted as neo-Shavians, Bond actually does fit that description. The long prefaces to his plays, his socialism, his skewering of sentimentality all link him to Shaw. It is a relief that in a year when Bond, one of Britain’s greatest playwrights, is celebrating his 80th birthday, at least one of Ontario’s classical theatre companies is staging one of his plays.
The Sea is set in a seaside village in East Anglia in 1907. It begins like Shakespeare’s The Tempest with an enormous storm. Unlike Shakespeare’s play where no one is hurt during the storm, Bond’s tempest claims the life of a young man, Colin, who was engaged to marry Rose (Julia Course), the niece of Mrs. Rafi (Fiona Reid) the queen bee of village society. Colin’s best friend Willy (Wade Bogert-O’Brien), who was sailing with Colin, survives the wreck, but no one from the volunteer coast guard helps him. Only Evens, the village recluse, labelled as the town drunk (Peter Millard), provides Willy with any assistance. We discover later that the draper Hatch (Patrick Galligan), the head of the coast guard, believes that the storm was manufactured by aliens to disguise a landing and that Willy is one of those aliens.
In the play Bond’s question, answered in ambiguous fashion, is “What use is society to the individual given the omnipresence of death?” Bond explores this question by looking at three aspects of the small society on stage. Society as presented by Mrs. Rafi is rigidly hierarchical and headed by a woman who bullies all those around her, including her paid companion Jessica Tilehouse (Patty Jamieson) into submission. At the other end of the social scale are the workers, like Mrs. Rafi’s truant gardener Hollarcut (Ben Sanders) or a merchant like Hatch, whose livelihood Mrs. Rafi can ruin at will. In between are Willy and Rose, the only two whose mourning for the dead Colin is deep and real and who no longer feel comfortable in the artificial society that Mrs. Rafi represents.
Holmes and set designer Camellia Koo have devised an ingenious way of reminding us of the sea as a symbol throughout the production. To effect scene changes actors come to the front of the Court House Theatre stage underneath a billowing blue fabric and then retreat when the set has been changed as if waves were constantly washing away an old location and setting up a new one.
The play contains two of the most remarkable scenes in late 20th-century British drama. The first of these occurs when Mrs. Rafi comes to Hatch’s shop to cancel her order for a huge amount of curtain fabric that he has specially ordered for her and cannot return. Mrs. Rafi’s fickleness has brought Hatch to the brink of bankruptcy and madness. As Mrs. Rafi blames Hatch for blaming her for changing her mind, Hatch desperately tries to force Mrs. Rafi to buy the fabric by cutting it into lengths, thus insuring it can never be used by anyone.
If the coldness Fiona Reid lends to Mrs. Rafi’s view of Hatch is frightening, Patrick Galligan’s depiction of Hatch’s descent into madness is shattering. Galligan has never had to play such an extreme character before, but he does so with overwhelming intensity. As he ruins the fabric and his future in the village, Galligan’s mixture of pleading and anger is so real that we almost feel embarrassed to see a person sinking so low right in front of us. This is one of Galligan’s finest performances.
Holmes manages this out-of-control singing battle beautifully and Fiona Reid’s imperiousness is as hilarious as Jamieson’s depiction of a meek woman trying to slip out from under her superior’s thumb. Reid masterfully gives Mrs. Rafi’s reflection on the incident a wonderful mixture of rueful self-awareness that she herself is stuck in her role in the village along with self-justification of her innate superiority. I have never seen this gruesomely comic scene and its denouement done with greater finesse.
Bogert-O’Brien and Course are excellent as Colin’s mourners who in the midst of depression find they both have the same internal conflict – duty to the deceased and awareness of growing affection for the other. In light of how Mrs. Rafi and Hatch have treated Colin, they fear their love will also be a type of desecration. Strangely, because of the sensitive way these two enact it, we want the mourners to choose a life together and let the past be the past, partially because choosing life will meaning escaping the stultifying world of the village.
The play ends with a long speech by Evens to Willy that is his credo, “I believe in the rat”. Peter Millard delivers this speech with exactly the right mixture of rationality tempered with spent anger. The speech praises survival and we hope that Willy, to whom it is addressed, will take this course.
This is a great production of a great play that shows the Shaw Festival ensemble at its finest. It is one of the plays at this year’s Festival that no serious theatre-goer should miss.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Jenny L. Wright and Jacqueline Thair; Patrick Galligan as Hatch; Fiona Reid as Mrs. Rafi, ©2014 David Cooper..
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2014-08-13
The Sea