Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
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by Howard Barker, directed by Harrison Thomas
Desiderata Theatre Company, Citizenry Café, Toronto
June 13-28, 2015
Drogheda: “The filth was divided equally between those who practised filth and those who looked on filth without revulsion”
Desiderata Theatre Company is presenting the North American premiere of Lot and His God from 2012 by British playwright Howard Barker, a playwright better known in the rest of Europe than in Britain, and much better known in Britain than in Canada. The hour-long play is Barker’s take on the biblical story of Lot and his wife who were told to flee God’s destruction of the city of Sodom. Barker’s alternate view, set in the present or the near future, is provocative theatre that is both physical and intellectual. Given the production’s insightful direction and its persuasive performances, Lot and His God provides a perfect introduction to the complex world of a prolific playwright who should not be ignored.
Barker’s approach to the story of Lot in Genesis, Chapter 19, is to turn it on its head. In the biblical account two angels in human form visit Lot, who is the only righteous man in Sodom, and tell him to flee the city with his wife and two daughters. The male citizens of Sodom gather around Lot’s house and demand that he turn the strangers outside so that they can rape them. Lot refuses, but though a righteous man, offers to send out his two virgin daughters instead. Offended the men of Sodom threatened to attack Lot himself but before they could do so, the angels blinded them, thus giving Lot and his family time to escape. The angels warn them not to look behind them when they flee, but Lot’s wife disobeys and is transformed into a pillar of salt.
Barker’s version eliminates Lot’s daughters and reduces the number of angels from two to one. Scholars have speculated whether Sodom is destroyed because of its permission of homosexuality (hence the term “sodomy’) or for its gross inhospitality. Barker never specifies why Sodom will be destroyed except that it is “filthy” physically and morally.
The play opens when the angel Drogheda (Prince Amponsah) waits in one of Sodom’s “filthy” cafés to meet Lot’s wife (Stefne Mercedes). Barker gives her name as “Sverdlosk" in the text, but her name is never spoken during the play, and one of her complaints is that people know her only as “Lot’s wife”. Drogheda is meeting Sverdlosk because she refuses to pack her bags to leave Sodom, but the more the angel insults the haughty, fashion-conscious Sverdlosk, the more she likes him. And, indeed, despite his view of Sodom as filth, he admits he is attracted to her.
Barker paints Lot as a pedantic and prudish scholar of 13th-century manuscripts. Lot not only finds the idea of sex repellant but even the words “intimacy” and “union”. Barker makes us ask what kind of God would find Lot the epitome of a righteous man. Meanwhile Sverdlosk and Drogheda carry on their flirting and more right before Lot’s eyes. We wonder how Lot can stand to be cuckolded, even by an angel, until we learn that Lot and Sverdlosk do indeed love each other. She respects his need for love without sex and he understands her need for sex without love.
In this ability to recognize their contradictions, Lot and Sverdlosk define what is human in contrast to Drogheda, who so compartmentalizes his thoughts that he never sees adultery with Lot’s wife as contributing to the moral filth of Sodom. More disturbing, we learn that everything Drogheda does is sanctioned by God. An inattentive Waiter (Andrew Pimento) stands as an example of inhospitality in Sodom, but Drogheda’s increasingly drastic punishment of the Waiter is distressing even to Lot. The human ability for compassion trumps the capriciousness of all-powerful will.
In this context, it is not hard to see why Lot’s wife, faced with a future in the desert and remorseful for her need to betray Lot, should look back at Sodom. Barker does not portray the transformation but the whole force of the play is to explain her action not as chance emotion but a conscious decision.
Director Harrison Thomas fully understands the text and Barker’s critique of the Old Testament God, who, in the person of the angel, so easily participates in the moral turpitude of the city he intends to destroy because of it. Like the angel, God is shown to inflict pain without care and to choose as his model for behaviour a man whose “goodness” stems from psychological problems.
Tayves Fiddis perfectly embodies Barker’s conception of Lot as a fastidious and scholarly character not unlike Tesman in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1891). Yet, Fiddis’ Lot is also the most compassionate of the three, the only one troubled by the tortures the angel inflicts on the hapless Waiter. The role of the Waiter by primarily a physical one and is the only character on stage from first to last. Andrew Pimento illustrates each of the punishments the angel inflicts on him with agonizing clarity.
Barker deliberately divides our attention between the intellectual conversations of the main three actors and the Waiter’s continual writhing in pain. This situation harks back to the first speech about Sodom that Barker gives Drogheda when he says: “The filth was divided equally between those who practised filth and those who looked on filth without revulsion”. Barker’s play shows us those who inflict pain (Drogheda and Sverdlosk) and look on it with no revulsion, versus Lot, who inflicts no pain and does look on it with revulsion. Barker thus asks us which is worse, pain and destruction as a punishment or the so-called “filth” that is being destroyed.
In Luke 17:30-32 the apostle conjures up a vision of the Apocalypse and implicitly compares it to the destruction of Sodom in saying, “Remember Lot’s wife”. Barker also wants us to remember Lot’s wife but to see her in a more complex light, realizing that what is divine may also be inhuman. Perhaps that is why Barker names the angel after the Siege of Drogheda in 1649 when Protestant forces massacred the Catholic civilians of Drogheda as part of Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland. The historical reference makes God’s plan look more partisan and cruel.
Lot and His Wife is performed on the back patio of the by no means filthy Citizenry Café at 982 Queen Street West, where overheard conversation in apartments, birdsong and the chasing of squirrels makes us feel conscious of the larger world outside the café where the action takes place and which will also be destroyed. The setting thus makes us part of that world in peril. We have to thank Desiderata for bringing this play to us in compelling a production.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Prince Amponsah as Drogheda and Stefne Mercedes as Sverdlosk); Tayves Fiddis as Lot. ©2015 Lauren Horejda.
For tickets, visit www.eventbrite.ca/e/lot-and-his-god-tickets-17081381873?aff=es2.
2015-06-17
Lot and His God