Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✩
by Laura Wade, directed by David Ferry
Coal Mine Theatre, 1454 Danforth Ave., Toronto
October 26-November 13, 2016
“When a man has lost all happiness, he’s not alive. Call him a breathing corpse”
Messenger in Antigone by Sophocles, lines 1166-67.
Just in time for Halloween the Coal Mine Theatre opens its third season with the gripping thriller Breathing Corpses by British playwright Laura Wade. Wade’s play from 2005 is really a kind of deconstructed mystery. Wade confronts us with a dead body in the first scene and then in succeeding scenes from the past proceeds to give us information that may explain that death and the other deaths that occur during the story. The play begins as a dark comedy but gradually the humour seeps out leaving us in the final scene with the unsettling intimation of impending doom. Top-notch performances from the entire cast make the play disturbingly effective.
The action begins with Irish hotel maid Amy (Erin Humphry) coming across another dead body in one of hotel rooms. As a note left by the dead man explains, he has committed suicide because he has not been able to handle the shock of discovering a dead body in a box. “Who is the dead man?” “Why did he commit suicide?” “Who was the dead body he found?” “What was the cause of death?” Already Wade primes us to listen carefully to everything we hear in the following scenes for clues to answer these questions.
Amy’s is the first of three discoveries of dead bodies in a play that focusses on how that experience affects the discoverers in three completely different ways. Of these Amy’s is the most comic not only because it somehow has happened to her before but because she has no fear of the dead. Instead, in the winning, sympathetic performance by Humphry, Amy talks to the body, massages it and comforts it. Amy realizes these actions have no real effect, but we see that these kindnesses are Amy’s way of showing compassion for a person whose life had become so unbearable that death seemed the only way out.
The scene then shifts to a storage facility run by Jim (Richard Sheridan Willis) with the help of a trainee Ray (Simon Bracken). Jim and his wife Elaine (Severn Thompson) may argue, but like the comfortably married couple they are, their disagreements arise mostly out of habit rather than any serious differences. The couple’s conversation is interrupted when Ray, whom they regard as rather dim, insists that Jim should really have a look at unit B16 which is emanating an unpleasant smell, one not unlike the time a man forgot about his supplies of kebabs.
The most ominous word uttered in the scene is “box”. This is how Elaine refers to her house (“Going back to my box”). It also reminds us of the box containing a woman’s body that led the suicide of the dead man in Scene 1. Wade thus links two initially separate sets of people with the word while also making us wonder how different storage units are from hotel rooms since they are essentially only different kinds of boxes.
In the third scene comedy shifts to danger. Kate (Kim Nelson), who runs an employment agency, is having trouble with her boytoy Ben (Benjamin Sutherland). She has reached the point where she can no longer stand Ben’s dog, particularly its barking. What has exacerbated Kate’s already volatile feelings is that while walking Ben’s dog, it uncovered the body of a dead girl in the bushes of a park. Completely unlike Amy, Kate simply can’t handle the experience and seems to blame the dog, and by extension Ben, for causing her to have such a distressing experience. This is the tipping point in their relationship because Ben, already the victim of Kate’s physical abuse, sees Kate’s abuse of his dog as the last straw in how much punishment he will take from her.
Nelson and Sutherland beautifully act the scene with Nelson conveying Kate’s perilously confused mix of emotions and Sutherland bringing out Ben’s patiently suffering nature which gradually morphs passivity into violence during the course of the action. When Ben finally turns on Kate it is truly frightening.
The fourth scene brings us back to Jim, Elaine and Ray. Thompson and Bracken deftly show that a serious change has come over Elaine and Ray. The essentially contented natures of both characters have been completely overturned by what has happened to Jim and been replaced by doubt and fear they can ill conceal. Willis with grim effectiveness reveals that Jim’s discovery of the body in unit B16 has plunged him into deep depression. Jim has just finished removing all the doors of his and Elaine’s house. He gives no reason but anyone responsive to the imagery of confinement suggested by the word “box” in the first two scenes can understand that Jim is trying symbolically to free himself. He can’t get the image of the dead woman out of his mind or her smell out of his nose. As often with severely depressed people, Jim feels insulted by the simplistic solutions Elaine offers.
The fifth and final scene is the most difficult. Structurally, it seems to finish off the play neatly by showing Amy this time encountering a live body, Charlie (Jonathan Sousa), in a room of the same hotel. In terms of content, however, the fifth scene blasts the play open. Though Charlie is Wade’s least developed character, Sousa expertly captures his dual nature of a superficial charm that conceals an alarming instability.
One of the pleasures of mysteries whether on the stage or on the page is the trust that reason can can solve the enigma of death, symbolized by the death of a specific person or persons. In Breathing Corpses, Wade appeals to this notion by having each scene supply information that helps elucidate the questions that arise in the previous scene. Though the scenes do not appear in strict reverse chronological order to fill in the past, we soon get our bearings and come to understand more what has happened both through what is said and through the nature of the characters’ emotions.
In the fifth scene Wade deliberately overturns this system by giving us an encounter that fits thematically into the story we have constructed as an explanation but not into the chronology we have assembled. The outcome of the fifth scene is something that we assume will be unsettling, but the way Wade has presented it purposely unsettles the entire notion that the mystery can fully be solved. We can construct our own story to make the fifth scene fit into the narrative of the rest of the play, but Wade does not help us. Indeed, the mere fact that we have to make up our own story to connect this scene with the others should make us wonder how much we have been constructing our own narratives ourselves based on the “clues” that Wade has given us.
This is probably the most profoundly disturbing aspect of what initially seems like a play in the mystery genre. Wade takes her title from Elizabeth Wyckhoff’s 1954 translation of Sophocles’ Antigone: “When a man has lost all happiness, he’s not alive. Call him a breathing corpse”. These sentences come from the speech of the Messenger who has come to announce the suicide of Haemon upon discovering the death of his beloved Antigone, an extreme reaction to a death not unlike that of the dead man found in the hotel room.
Though Wade does not make the meaning of her play clear, her title suggests that since all human beings must die they are in one sense all “breathing corpses”. The horrendous effect that finding a dead body has on Kate and Jim suggests that even though we may know at some vague level that death lies ahead, actually being confronted with it is a reality too disturbing to handle. The question then that Wade does not answer is why someone like Amy is able to cope with a gruesome discovery while Kate and Jim are not. What makes all of the characters unhappy is the feeling of confinement – whether in a down-market hotel like Amy, a box of a house like Elaine or in an abusive relationship like Ben and Kate. But does death mean freedom as the hotel suicide seems to think or confinement as the dead woman in the box seems to symbolize?
Whatever the play’s ultimate meaning, what remains undeniable is its dramatic effectiveness. Wade catches us up in a mystery, carries us along and then plays with our desire to make all the pieces of the puzzle fit neatly together. Director David Ferry has a keen knowledge of exactly how to negotiate the play’s shifts in tone and attitude. And Steve Lucas has created a highly inventive set that can be easily transformed into the very different locations Wade demands. The insightful production and the fully committed performances of the entire cast bring out the best of Wade’s play, a play that seems to say that death is a mystery that human reason ultimately cannot unravel.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Kim Nelson and Benjamin Sutherland; Erin Humphry and corpse; Severn Thompson and Richard Sheridan Willis. ©2016 BensoPhoto.
For tickets, visit www.coalminetheatre.com.
2016-10-27
Breathing Corpses