Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✭✩
by Jon Lachlan Stewart, directed by Georgina Beaty
Surreal SoReal Theatre, Next Stage Theatre Festival, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto
January 8-18, 2015;
McManus Studio Theatre, London
January 22-24, 2015
“I wish life were more like an action movie”
The 8th Annual Next Stage Theatre Festival opened only yesterday but already it has presented its first must-see show. This is Big Shot, a solo show from B.C. written by and starring Jon Lachlan Stewart. Big Shot has toured Canada since its creation in 2008, but now at last Toronto has the chance to see the show in its final form with its newly envisioned video background by Matt Schuurman.
We are introduced to the story by a 12-year-old boy who is obsessed with Hollywood action movies. He sees real life as so boring that he even says he wishes “life were more like an action movie”. He hates independent art films like one called The Stop, set on a commuter train, because nothing happens. Just after seeing that film he gets in the Vancouver Skytrain to go home when he witnesses the kind of real action he has hoped would give life a thrill. He sees a shooting involving a policeman, an alleged drug dealer and an aged Japanese man. Stewart shows us the events on the Skytrain from six points of view, both forward and backward in time, all played out between when the bullet is discharged to when it strikes its victim.
To tell the story the boy introduces a character and then instantly becomes that character. Jon Lachlan Stewart’s transformation from one character to another is so amazingly complete in voice and gesture that the effect is as if the boy introduces us to an already existing, entirely distinct person. The first is the alleged drug dealer who, in fact, is a recovering heroine addict. The addict who is also gay has first grudgingly, then assiduously, followed the tenets of his group therapy leader and is trying hard, despite temptation, to get through the night without incident.
Next, we meet the languid chain-smoking Gloria, whose husband abandoned her and their young son, with grandiose ideas about making money in the movie business. She smokes, she says, because it at least reminds her she’s breathing. Next, the aged Japanese immigrant, always mistaken for Chinese, who encounters racism in Vancouver and rather than pursuing his career in computer engineering as he had expected has to open a flower shop to make money. In a petty sort of revenge, he has taken to picking pockets such as lifting the transfer pass from the pocket of the recovering addict on the Skytrain.
Earlier that fatal evening the former addict had been invited to a movie business party and had accidentally bumped into the fifth character we meet, the man in the black blazer, a man who spends the evening pitching his ideas to uninterested producers. After the former addict helps clean off the pitchman’s blazer, the pitchman calls him a faggot and they fight. The final character we meet is the policeman Byron who confronts the former addict for not having a transit pass. The Japanese man is involved and the man in the blazer and the boy witness the events. Gloria learns about them afterwards.
One metaphor for the play is that it is a kind of puzzle. There seems to be virtually no overlap between the first four characters’ histories, but as Stewart cycles through the characters again and adds the fifth and sixth characters the extent of their interconnectedness becomes quite startling. Even the title comes to acquire at least three meanings.
A second metaphor for the play is that it is a kind of Möbius strip. It is a strip of paper that seems to have two sides, but because of a twist, is a surface with only one side. The play begins with the boy as a kind of narrator. About three-fourths through the action Stewart suggests that everything we have seen is only the pitch by the man in the black blazer for a film. By the end of the play it becomes a question that some may find exciting, some vexing, that we are uncertain as to whose consciousness, the boy’s or the man’s, encompasses the other. Some may think that Stewart takes his story a twist too far; some may feel the final twist is exactly right.
Stewart’s performance is beyond praise. He radiates charisma, yet, he sinks so deeply into each character and differentiates them in such detail that it is hard to believe that they are all played by the same person. At one point Otō-san, the Japanese man, recounts a terrible incident that happened in his shop in impeccable Japanese. Stewart becomes Gloria simply by sitting on the floor and removing his shoes. He is not a man playing a woman; you believe he has become a woman. Stewart’s movement across the stage is like modern dance and transitions from character to character are accompanied by precise, acrobatic choreography.
Director Georgina Beaty has inextricably linked Stewart’s movement to Dave Clarke’s sound design and Schuurman’s projections. Unlike many directors, she does not make the mistake of having either the sound or the projections overpower Stewart’s acting and mime. Stewart is clearly a major Canadian talent and we can only hope that we in Toronto will have more occasions after this to see him and his work.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jon Lachlan Stewart in Big Shot. ©2012 Surreal SoReal Theatre.
For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com.
2015-01-08
Big Shot