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by Howard Barker, directed by Dean Gabourie

The Castle Collective & Red One Theatre Collective, Storefront Theatre, Toronto

November 27-December 13, 2015

Stucley: “I know the source of our religion!  It is that He in his savagery is both excessive and remorseless and to our shrieks both deaf and blind!”

Howard Barker, who is considered one of Britain’s most important playwrights, has written over fifty stage plays, but you would hardly know it given how little his work has been seen in Canada.  Richard Rose directed the North American premiere of Barker’s Seven Lears in 1996, Equity Showcase presented the Canadian premiere of The Power of the Dog in 2004 and just this year Desiderata Theatre Company presents the North American premiere of Lot and His God.  The Castle from 1985 is one of Barker’s most acclaimed and most difficult plays.  It is a brave for The Castle Collective and Red One Theatre Collective to take it on, and even if the production doesn’t quite work, it still does a tremendous service in helping us get to know this playwright better.

Set in England in the 13th century the action follows the return of the knight Stucley (Benjamin Blais) from the Crusades to his home.  He finds his castle in ruins and in his seven years away, the women, in the absence of men, have established their own non-hierarchical government, lived in harmony with nature, peopled the country by using the few aged men left behind and created a new religion worshipping

Mother Earth.  Worse than this for Stucley is that his wife Ann (Linda Prystawska) is now in a lesbian relationship with the widow Skinner (Claire Burns), a witch and priestess of the new religion.  Though love of Ann is all that has kept Stucley going throughout the wars, Ann now rejects him and tells him to leave.

Stucley, however, will not leave and sets about restoring what to him is order.  The main means of achieving this is to rebuild his castle and to make it even bigger than before.  He will do this with the help of the Arab engineer Krak (Mike Dufays) – possibly named for the famed Crusader castle in Syria – whom he has brought to England. 

Therewith ensues a battle between male and female over government, religion, land use and society in general.  If the plot description makes it seem as if The Castle is a comedy, you would be half right.  Much of the play, including the entire first act, is very funny as the idealistic Stucley discovers just how far away from his notion of order the women have turned things.Yet, the second act heads toward tragedy, both for the main characters and for the world of Stucley’s estate in general. 

One of the reasons Barker’s plays are difficult is that his style is very like that of the satirical tragedies so common in Jacobean drama.  Shakespeare left only two examples of this style in his Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602) and Timon of Athens (c. 1605).  But this was a widespread style at the time.  Most of John Marston’s plays, including his masterpiece The Malcontent (c. 1603), are written in it as are many of Thomas Middleton’s plays like The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606).  In all four plays mentioned the satire is so virulent that a sense of danger lurks beneath until it finally breaks out. 

It is very difficult to pull off this kind of play, mostly because our main models for poetic tragedy in English come from Shakespeare’s other tragedies where comic elements are few and serve to vary the otherwise doom-laden mood.  Director Dean Gabourie and his cast have not quite succeeded in this. 

The comic sections are not comic enough and the danger that underlies them is not salient enough so that we may laugh while also feeling disquiet about what may happen.

As Stucley, Benjamin Blais is the most attuned to this style.  Seven years of war, during which he questioned his beliefs, have already brought him to the brink of madness and Ann’s rejection of him, besides all else the women have wrought, pushes him over the edge.  The plans for the castle which become ever more elaborate are a sign of how his attempt to re-establish order is getting out of control.  Blais is excellent at delivering neo-Jacobean poetry with clarity and flair and at catching the fervour of Stucley’s mind torn between love for Ann, revenge for what she has done and his mania for furthering the male point of view which he thinks gives him his identity.

Linda Prystawska plays Ann primarily as a serious character, one disturbed by her husband’s arrival and furiously trying to ignore his presence.  She could play up the comic aspects of Ann’s remarks more to match the balance that Blais achieves. 

As the witch Skinner, Claire Burns errs in the other direction with the added problem of playing the comedy with gestures and vocal inflections too modern for the poetic language Barker has written.  The highpoint of her performance is the fantastic scene where after having been tortured she shows a woman’s mind vacillating between the terror of what she has experienced and the need to revile those who did it. 

Mike Dufays gives a fine performance as Krak, who designs Stucley’s castle both to please him and to destroy him.  Dufays uses Krak’s general taciturnity as a means of suggesting the wrath roiling underneath the surface of his few precise words.  Other fine performances come from Michael Spencer Davis as Nailer the ex-priest who is willing to change his theology to whatever his returned master desires, no matter how ludicrous; from Sean Sullivan as Holiday, Stucley’s master builder whose comic fear of sudden death sums up the idea of satirical tragedy in

one person; from Lynne Griffin, wonderfully dotty as Cant, a widow who despite the women’s regime still longs for sex with a man; and from Robert Nasmith, a bewildered ancient man whose surprising virility has helped him sire half the infant population.

Set designer Claire Hill and costume designer Holly Lloyd have both achieved much with little.  The burlap surrounding the acting space sets the rural medieval scene and the stand of dead birch forest signifies the ruin of Stucley’s estate.  Lloyd’s costumes cleverly use a mix of modern materials to suggest generally medieval garb.  As usual, Melissa Joakim does wonders with the restricted lighting grid at the Storefront theatre.  

A delightful feature of the production is the use of shadow puppets, courtesy of Caterwaul Theatre, to depict certain events in the play but most particularly the absurd erection, physical and metaphorical, of Stucley’s castle on the land the women had let return to nature.  The puppets are also very effective in portraying the social catastrophe that Stucley’s castle leads to.

Barker’s play lead to an emblematic encounter between Ann and Skinner – Ann is swollen with child and Skinner has had a corpse chained to her in front.  This is a visual equivalent of Pozzo’s famous remark from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more”.  Given the transience of human life, how, Barker’s play asks, should it best be lived – along the lines of Stucley’s masculine construction of “order” with all its faults or along the lines of Ann’s feminine preservation of nature with all its faults?  Even if the production needs a firmer hand, it does get Barker’s essential question across, essential since Barker’s plays are all about questions, not answers.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Linda Prystawska as Ann and Mike Dufays as Krak; Benjamin Blais as Stucley; Mike Dufays as Krak; Lynne Griffin as Cant and Claire Burns as Skinner. ©2015 John Gundy.

For tickets, visit http://thestorefronttheatre.com.