Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✩✩
by David Hare, directed by Larry Moss
Hidden Cove Productions, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
June 15-July 9, 2016
Kyra: “You don’t value happiness. You don’t even realize. Because you always want more”
Hidden Cove Productions is staging the first professional production of David Hare’s Skylight in Toronto since 2001. It’s a rich play that certainly merits a revival particularly because of the complex roles of its two main characters. Although written in 1995 its critique of the wealthy seems uncannily up-to-date. Yet, under veteran director Larry Moss the actors present a strangely superficial reading of the play. Although David Hare writes in a much more discursive style than Harold Pinter, like Pinter’s plays Skylight is as much about subtext as about what is said. Here the subtext is almost entirely missing.
The action takes place in the cold, grungy North London apartment Kyra Hollis (Sara Topham), well designed with stains and missing wallpaper by Debra Hanson. Shortly after Kyra returns home from teaching primary school in the tough neighbourhood of East Ham, enters 18-year-old Edward Sergeant (played by Tim Dowler-Coltman, who well projects the teenager’s confused emotions). With much comic awkwardness he tells Kyra how poorly his father Tom has been doing since his wife Alice died last year. We wonder, of course, what all this has to do with Kyra, but gradually we realize that she had been Tom’s employee and live-in mistress for six years before she left abruptly three years ago. Those six years were the happiest of Edward’s life and now that Tom has become consumed with gloom, Edward finds living with him unbearable. Edward’s wish, therefore, is that Kyra return to his father which for Kyra is out of the question.
Later, when Kyra is making herself dinner, Tom (Lindsay G. Merrithew) himself arrives. He never states why he has come to see Kyra for the first time in three years, but have to assume it is to ask Kyra to come back just as Edward had. In response to Kyra question about how he is doing, Tom launches into a detailed account of his thriving business as a restauranteur and hotelier while denigrating the shabby conditions Kyra is living in, the unfashionable location of her apartment and the drudgery of her job. After their first conversation in three years it comes as a complete surprise when Kyra asks Tom to dismiss his waiting chauffeur so that they can spend the night together.
In a well directed production, such as that at the Tarragon in 2001, Tom’s reason from seeing Kyra and her reason for having him stay were abundantly clear even though neither states their reasons explicitly. In that production we knew that Tom’s speech about how well his businesses were doing was typical miscalculated middle-aged male bluster to make himself still seem desirable to the woman who left him three years earlier. Rather than talk about his feelings, his loneliness and continued love for Kyra, be boasts about himself and runs her down to make living with him appear as the obvious solution to her “problem”.
Kyra, of course, living outside the protective bubble of wealth and making a difference in the lives of disadvantaged students, is happy with her new life and, while not living in comfort, still feels fulfilled. Nevertheless, she knows why Tom is speaking in the way he does and can read the emotions he is so unable to express. The fact that despite his boasting and disdain he still loves her and that she still loves him explain why she would ask him to stay the night.
Unfortunately, in the present production this entire subtext is missing. All Merrithew plays is a self-important businessman who is quite good at making jokes about Kyra’s choices in living her life. At no point do we see the desperation that lies behind his braggadocio or the implication behind his insults that Kyra would be so much better if she came back to live with him. Needless to say, we also do not see that he has come to reaffirm his love for Kyra.
For her part, Topham (so sorely missed at Stratford) does suggest that Kyra does understand why Tom is speaking and acting as he does, but, strangely for an actor as expert as Topham, she does not suggest that seeing Tom acting so foolishly fills her with warm memories of the past. That’s why her suggestion that Tom stay the night seems to come out of nowhere.
Act 2, depicting the early morning a few hours after they’ve had sex, comes off much better than Act 1. This is likely because the conversation between Tom and Kyra becomes more overtly a debate between the two different world views they have come to represent. Six years previously, both were different people. Kyra was trying to free herself from her wealthy father and Tom, born poor, was trying to make himself out of nothing. Now they have become opposites in every attitude –male versus female, rich versus poor, conservative versus liberal, materialist versus idealist, unfulfilled versus fulfilled.
Kyra had sworn she would leave Tom if ever his ailing wife found out about them, and she remained true to her word. They are both guilty of betraying Tom’s wife and they both dealt with their guilt by throwing themselves into work. Tom’s work, however, only involves buying and spending. To make Alice’s last years happier after Kyra left, he moved house and built her a bedroom with the beautiful skylight that gives the play its title so that she could have more light. Kyra, in contrast, took up working with disadvantaged children so she could enlighten them.
The problem with the way Moss has directed this debate is that it comes off more like industrialist Andrew Undershaft’s debates with his daughter-turned Salvation Army worker in Shaw’s Major Barbara than a debate between two former lovers. While it is amusing to see how the two wittily score points off each other, what should be apparent is that this debate about world views is really a debate about personality and emotion. In defending their political positions, both are also defending who they are and the right they have to determine the outcome of this renewal of physical intimacy. In the Tarragon production we had the feeling that beneath all the rhetoric both were fighting to save their lives. In the current production there is no such urgency.
Moss does make one point that I do not recall from the 2001 production. Kyra says that finding just one student with exceptional potential to nurture is what makes teaching worthwhile. Throughout the action Moss has had Tom emphasize how Kyra is wasting her potential in shutting herself off from the world (with no newspapers or television) and making teaching her only reason to live. When Topham speaks Kyra’s lines about finding the one exceptional student, she pauses with a slightly shocked look as if realizing that she was once that student with potential when she first met Tom. It is a wonderful moment gone too soon. After this, you can’t help but think that if Moss had directed the entire play with such insight it would have been so much more vital and engaging than the mildly entertaining theatre piece he has allowed it to be.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Linsday G. Merrithew and Sara Topham; Linsday G. Merrithew and Sara Topham. ©2016 Matthew Plexman.
For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.
2016-06-22
Skylight