Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
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by David Young, directed by Diana Leblanc
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
September 2-October 4, 2014
Glenn Gould: “The purpose of art is ... the gradual lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity”
Soulpepper has become English Canada’s de facto national theatre company by regularly remounting Canadian plays that that have won acclaim in the past. The latest of these is Glenn (1992) by David Young. I first saw Young’s stage portrait of Glenn Gould at the Stratford Festival in 1997. Then I thought it tedious and curiously unenlightening. The current production features excellent performances from the entire cast and brings more out of Young’s text than did the Stratford production. Yet, I found my interest waning before the end of the first act and never became re-engaged in the second.
Young’s play is structured in the form of an aria and 32 variations in imitation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741), Gould’s recording of which in 1955 made him famous. It may seem incredibly clever to structure a play about a musician in such a way, but Young runs out of things to say about Gould halfway through the show. Variations can be fascinating in music, but on the stage they rapidly become repetitive.
Young has deliberately chosen an associative rather than chronological method of depicting Gould’s life and the evolution of his thinking by dividing Gould into four characters. These are from youngest self to oldest The Prodigy (Jeff Lillico), the Performer (Mike Ross), the Perfectionist (Steven Sutcliffe) and the Puritan (Brent Carver). Gould’s life is told sometimes by the four as narrators sometimes through their interactions. To divide Gould’s personality in this way is ironic considering that the Perfectionist ridicules the idea of people applying labels to him.
Nevertheless, dividing a personality into several characters is not new even in Canadian drama. In his play Albertine en cinq temps (1984), Michel Tremblay divides the characters Albertine into five characters representing different decades in her life from Albertine at 30 to Albertine at 70. Since each of these decades could instead be categorized by Albertine’s point of view – Albertine the Unhappy Mother or Albertine the Old Woman – Young’s method is not significantly different.
The problem that can arise in Albertine is the same that arises in Glenn. A play that consists of a series of narrations or of interactions of different aspects of a self is essentially static. Jean Stéphane Roy recently solved this problem in a production of Albertine for Théâtre français de Toronto last year. But then Albertine is only 90 minutes long while Glenn runs for two hours and forty minutes. Much as director Diana Leblanc has enlivened the first act of Glenn, there is little she can do about its second act which adds nothing new to what Young has already said.
What Leblanc has done to enliven this productions is very much the same as Jean Stéphane Roy’s approach to Albertine. Rather than conceiving of the play as a fractured biography, Leblanc like Roy approaches the central personality as a symbolic figure. Roy had the various Albertines represent the stages of any woman’s life. Leblanc has the four Glenns represent four stages of an artist’s life from early enthusiasm to a crisis between public and private to cynicism and finally retreat from life.
Treating Young’s Glenn as symbolic is a good idea since the play is so unsatisfactory as a biography. Young’s Glenns are frequently on the phone to someone called “Jessie”, apparently a cousin, about whom we know nothing, including why she, of all Gould’s relatives, should be the one he confides in. While Young gives us list of all the medications Gould takes, he gives us no idea why a man so obsessed with the spirituality of art should also be obsessed to the point of hypochondria with his own body.
Young pictures Gould as someone so delicate he refused to let anyone touch him and who believes the only ecstasy is to be found in art. From Young’s portrait you would think Gould died a virgin and martyr to purity. Yet to do this Young has to omit the fact that Gould had a passionate physical relationship with the wife of American composer Lukas Foss that lasted from 1967 to 1972 that caused Foss’s wife Cornelia to move to Toronto with her two children to live next to Gould.
What Young’s play provides is a more a series of unresolved paradoxes than variations on a theme. He becomes a public figure yet craves isolation. He believes in the ecstasy achieved in channelling the divine through playing music, yet believes that perfection can better be achieved in the studio and by splicing together multiple takes. Young’s play is frustrating because even after running twice as long as it should, we feel we don’t understand Gould any better than we did before. There are certainly anomalies like genius that no amount of biographical data or quotations from the source can explain. Young’s play proves that Gould is one of these anomalies.
Leblanc has drawn fine performances from the entire cast. Lillico shows us the energy and fear of a young man who knows his mental level is far above those around him but does not have the personal skills to deal with his situation. Ross well portrays Gould’s mounting crisis with performing in public, where his quest for perfection leads to debilitating performance anxiety. Sutcliffe’s Perfectionist seems to represent Gould as a smarmy satirist who is amused at the attempts of the critics and the public to pigeonhole him. The finest performance, however, comes from Carver. Rather than representing only one aspect of Gould, his last, most reclusive self, Carver conveys all the qualities of the other three and shows how they have combined to create the man he is at the end of his life. The Puritan as a summary of the previous three incarnations may not have been part of Young’s plan, but it leads to the most complete vision of Gould as a character on stage, a complex figure who in comfortable isolation has recovered some of the zeal of his youth and sometimes is, sometimes is not aware of his own contradictory nature.
Young’s play is so constructed that he gives the audience little impetus to return after intermission except to see how Gould faces death, which, however, Young does not depict. The highlight of Act 2 is the quartet of Glenns singing the hymn “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded” in beautiful four-part harmony. The low-point of Act 2 is the exit music, Petula Clark’s 1964 hit “Downtown”, which is just about the last thing one would want to hear after so much Bach.
The best way to celebrate Glenn Gould is simply to play one of his recordings. If you want to hear the difference between the younger and older Gould, listen for the differences between his 1955 recording and his 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations. Yet, if you must see a version of Gould on stage, go to see Carver’s performance which goes far to redeem a severely flawed play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Steven Sutcliffe, Mike Ross, Brent Carver and Jeff Lillico. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.
2014-09-03
Glenn