Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
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by Nikki Loach with Peter Balkwill, directed by Nikki Loach
Quest Theatre, Young People’s Theatre, Toronto
February 10-19, 2015
“How Kindness Can Bring a Neighbourhood Together”
Young People’s Theatre is hosting the first-ever visit to Toronto of Calgary’s Quest Theatre. Quest Theatre has been producing theatre for young audiences since 1984. Its present offering, the wordless hour-long play Snow Angel, shows how well attuned the company is to young people. It is a thoroughly delightful show and held the young audience (and the old) completely engaged from beginning to end.
Snow Angel is set in rural Alberta with Loïc Lacroix Hoy’s wonderfully stylized set of wooden houses as a backdrop. The three actors – Léda Davies, Christopher Duthie and Len Harvey – appear in costume both with and without masks. They first appear without masks and encourage the audience to take the sheets of paper they all have been given, crush them into balls and throw them on the stage. Much excited squealing and laughter ensues as the stage fills up with paper balls. The children, as we soon discover, have just contributed to a major snowfall on the small town and the actors get into a big snow battle before settling down to enact their story.
We first meet Harvey in a crescent moon-shaped mask as the Old Man. The first child we meet, Duthie in a mask as Ethan, doesn’t like the Old Man because he gets angry when kids take a short cut to a field by crossing through his front yard. The Old Man’s main pleasure is a bright red bird, rather like a fat cardinal (a puppet manipulated by Duthie). Davis in a dumpling-shaped mask with earmuffs is Angela, a little girl who would like to play with her brother, the hockey-playing Ethan, who ignores her since she doesn’t even know how to skate. Along comes Harvey in a square-jawed mask as Buddy, proud of his hockey sweater, who makes fun of Ethan’s lack of a sweater but condescends to play hockey with him anyway.
On the way back Buddy tromps through the Old Man’s front yard without a care and then through a snow angel Angela has made while the unwilling Ethan follows. When a Delivery Man (also Harvey) comes to deliver groceries for the Old Man, Angela signs for them. Her idea of taking them to the Old Man is disrupted by Buddy. His idea is to leave the groceries out at the gate to the Old Man’s front yard, pour water on the path the man has cleared to make it slippery and then to wait for the Old Man to fall. Buddy, won’t pour the water himself, but when Ethan refuses, Buddy accuses him of being chicken. So Ethan does and as predicted the Old Man does fall.
The children who had responded positively to all the falling and slapstick that has gone before, interestingly, recognized that the Old Man’s fall was different and did not laugh, and grew silent when it was clear that he arose with difficulty, had hurt himself and now limped. Angela and Ethan now feel ashamed for having associated with Buddy and for having sat by and watched the Old Man fall. The two now try to be nice to the Old Man. Angela leaves a stick for him to use as a cane and Ethan shovels his pathway for him, although, hoping to buy a hockey sweater, demands too much money for it and only makes the man angry. To make matters worse, just when Angela has gained the Old Man’s trust by expressing her admiration for the red bird the Old Man loves, Ethan, playing with Buddy’s slingshot, accidentally shoots down the birdhouse and hurts the bird. At this point we can’t see how the play will end happily. But so it does, and with more warmth and good feelings than we could have expected.
Davies, Duthie and Harvey are experts at mime and the clarity with which they convey complex emotions while wearing masks is extraordinary. It all comes down to the precise positioning of the head in relation to the body and the exactness of posture and gesture. Unmasked all three are quite different from the characters they play marked by donning a mask. Even then, Harvey radically differentiates his three masked characters. Children will love how the three imitate ice skating by wearing felt shoes to glide over the stage floor.
The paper balls as snow is a major feature of the show. It is constantly being shovelled to clear sidewalks or scraped away in a field to make a hockey rink. Unmasked, the actors enter again and again with baskets full of paper balls that they scatter over the acting space while lighting designer Terry Middleton projects a swirling image of a snowstorm followed by a red light to signify dawn, an effect that drew oohs of admiration from the children. All the mime is timed to a soundtrack of lively banjo music by Tim Williams.
Recommended for children in junior kindergarten through Grade 3, this is a lovely show that parents will enjoy as much as their children. In its simple way it raises complicated questions. First it asks why people like the Old Man automatically dislike children. Second it asks what impulse would make a basically good boy like Ethan try to emulate a bully like Buddy. Finally, since it shows that kindness in the face of opposition is ultimately more effective than continued aggression and can bring unexpected rewards, it asks why this should be so.
Such a thoughtful show that is also so skillfully staged and acted and that is so much fun is one that parents should make sure their children have a chance to see.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Len Harvey as Buddy, Léda Davies as Angela and Christopher Duthie as Ethan; Léda Davies as Angela and Christopher Duthie as Ethan. ©2015 Trudie Lee.
For tickets, visit www.youngpeoplestheatre.ca.
2015-02-12
Snow Angel