Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✭
by Mark Brownell, directed by Sue Miner
Pea Green Theatre, Next Stage Theatre Festival, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto
January 6-17, 2016
Jay: “I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours”
Three Men in a Boat, a comic novel by Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927), has never been out of print since it was first published in 1889. In 2013 Pea Green Theatre presented Mark Brownell’s stage version of the book at the 2013 Toronto Fringe Festival to great acclaim – so much acclaim that the show was invited to a theatre festival in Mumbai. Now it is playing at the Next Stage Theatre Festival. It is an absolutely delightful show. If you missed it before, now is your chance to see it. If you saw it before, now is your chance to see it again.
Jerome’s book concerns a two-week boating trip on the Thames from Kingston to Oxford and back. Brownell abbreviates this to a six-day trip. The play begins with three friends – Jay (Matt Pilipiak), George (Victor Pokinko) and Harris (Scott Garland) – who decide that they have all become run down from doing nothing, or rather from “overwork” as they put it. Jay, in particular, has unfortunately chanced upon a medical dictionary only to discover that he has the symptoms of nearly every disease listed therein. To restore their health, to see historical sights and to visit the many wonderful pubs along the way, they decide on a boating trip and take Jay’s dog Montmorency with them.
It would be simple to call the three friends typical British twits, but the word “twit” implies an annoying person and these three are endearing not annoying. They are rather like the male characters of Brandon Thomas’s classic farce Charley’s Aunt (1892) or, to choose an example from the next generation, they are like P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster and his pals from the Drone’s Club, but without, significantly, the wisdom of Bertie’s manservant Jeeves to get them out of fixes. They may be dimwitted, upper class young men, but what endears them with the audience is their perfect innocence. Since they know nothing at all about boating or camping, every mundane aspect of what should be a simple, straightforward holiday is fraught with the unknown and magnified into danger. To them, a journey down the Thames becomes is rather like a journey down the Amazon.
Jay’s narration and the friends’ dialogue is very funny and the series of set pieces from the book are hilarious. They stop off at Hampton Court Palace to visit the maze and, despite Harris’s confident leadership, get hopelessly lost. Having forgotten to pack a can opener, the three wage an epic battle with a tin of pineapple. Jay and Harris, never having peeled potatoes before, are so assiduous in getting rid of every eye and blemish that have virtually nothing left for George’s “famous” Irish stew.
Meanwhile, as they struggle to rise to the everyday challenges of boating and camping, Jay waxes poetic about the beauty of nature and the feeling of benevolence and oneness with mankind it induces – all likely inspired from having been taught the British Romantic poets.
The concept of the production and Sue Miner’s direction are supremely imaginative. The boat is indicated on stage solely by a stool and a chair on its side. Nina Okens’ spiffy costume evoke the period, but otherwise it is the cast’s amazing ability at mime that conjures up all the properties (save for Montmorency) that the fellows have and sights they visit along the way. Their highly coordinated actions instantly tell us when they are in the boat, on shore, listing badly or capsizing.
An unexpected pleasure is the number of songs the fellows sing. There is a Victorian boating song arranged by J. Rigzin Tute, but they also lend their lovely three-part harmony to other songs including one about “little babes in the wood” that ends in a negative way they’d forgotten about when they begin it.
Matt Pilipiak is ideal as the principal narrator Jay. He radiates a sunny disposition and, although Jay may think he is racked with innumerable maladies, Pilipiak plays Jay as the most optimistic of the trio. Victor Pokinko’s George is the most effeminate and grumbling, but he has his pleasures as in making a whatever’s-at-hand Irish stew or playing his new banjolele. Pokinko also makes a few appearances as rough-and-tumble characters the travellers meet along the way who he makes completely distinct from George. In contrast to Pokinko’s George, Scott Garland’s Harris is the most outward manly an imperturbable of the three with whisky as his main mood enhancer. Garland has a virtuoso scene when Jay and George visit a tavern and Garland plays four different eccentrics who each claim to have caught the trout mounted over the fireplace.
Brownell’s adaptation retains the pleasure of the novel – its whimsicality and its celebration of friendship and innocence. It’s a wonderfully warm and inventive show guaranteed to lighten you mood. Don’t miss it.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Victor Pokinko as Geroge, Matt Pilipiak as Jay and Scott Garland as Harris.
For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com.
2016-01-07
Three Men in a Boat