Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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by Nino Haratischwili, translated by Birgit Schreyer Duarte, directed by Matthew Jocelyn
Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
January 26-February 12, 2017
Lore: “We only know the things about each other that we want to know”
Canadian Stage is currently presenting not merely the North American premiere but the English-language premiere of the play Liv Stein by Nino Haratischwili. The work by Haratischwili, a Georgian-born playwright who now lives in Germany, had its premiere in Heidelberg in 2009 and has since been taken up by other German-language theatres. Liv Stein is an unusual play that shifts genres during the course of its 105 minutes and keeps you on edge about what turn it will take next. Unfortunately, the final two turns that it takes into melodrama and then into Agatha Christie-like mystery make a plot that was already abandoning realism seem far too improbable.
The action focusses on Liv Stein (Leslie Hope), a world-famous concert pianist who has sunk into a deep depression and given up music after the death of her son Henri to brain cancer. Her ex-husband Emil (Geraint Wyn Davies) and her manager Simone (Caroline Gillis) try in vain to pull her out of her mourning that has lasted more than a year. Liv pushes them away and it is no help that Emil has remarried, his new wife Helene (Nicola Correia-Damude) being only half his age.
In an effort to give Liv’s life a new purpose, Emil sends Lore (Sheila Ingabire-Isaro), a young pianist who claims to have known Henri in boarding school, to visit Liv and ask to be taken on as her student. Liv is instantly dismissive towards Laure until she learns that Lore knew Henri. The two strike an agreement that Liv will give Lore lessons in exchange for stories about Henri, who spent most of his life away from his family at school.
But then Haratischwili shifts genres yet again when she shows that Lore is also helping to improve the relationship of Emil and Helene and is buoying up Simone’s mood in ways that have nothing to do with Liv’s career or Lore’s lessons. At this point it seems as if the play is becoming some sort of modern fairy tale. The question is what sort of model the playwright is using.
In Ibsen’s The Master Builder (1893), an optimistic young woman much like Lore enters the household of Halvard Solness, who has lost two children in a fire and who has lost his enthusiasm for his work. She re-energizes Solness to complete a great work and enlivens the household. Her attempt to have Solness conquer an underlying fear, however, leads to tragedy. On the other hand, Lore’s involvement with Emil, Liv and Helene begins to make her look like a female version of the title character of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964), where a stranger enters a dull home and enlivens both inhabitants, playing each off the other, for his own benefit.
In either case, we begin to think of Lore less as a person and more as a symbolic figure and we become intrigued by how the playwright has kept opening up the initially realistic situation to an ever wider interpretation. Unfortunately, once Liv returns to the concert stage and does so with Lore as co-performer, the play takes a sharp unwelcome turn toward melodrama and any notion of wider implications crashes down to earth. Worse, the play concludes with an exposition of the action from Henri’s point of view that narrows the play’s meaning even further and makes the motive underlying the action so far-fetched that the play no longer makes sense from either a realistic or a symbolic standpoint. The end is rather like one of Agatha Christie’s more outrageous summings-up where Hercule Poirot solves a mystery by relying on a wealth of information hitherto kept artificially hidden from the reader.
It is sad that Haratischwili should end her play in such a way because it had held us in suspense by its very unpredictability. For at least for three-fourths of its length we are intrigued by the play’s three most salient characters. Liv Stein is a fine role since the character has such a wide emotional arc to traverse from deep depression to elation, outrage and chagrin. Leslie Hope, a Canadian actor best known for her roles in American television series like NCIS and Suits, returns to the stage after over a decade to play Liv. Unlike some television actors, Hope has not forgotten how to project but she does tend to deliver all her lines in the same flattened tone. More modulation and a greater variety in vocal production would help her to communicate Liv’s changing moods more subtly and without recourse to shouting as her only means of heightening emotion.
As played by Geraint Wyn Davies, Emil is a wonderfully complex character. He is a man still in love with his ex-wife while also in lust with his new second wife. His Emil is justly angry that Liv wants to make the loss of their son into only her loss, not his. At the same time, he doesn’t want his life to be defined by that loss or by guilt as it seems Liv does.
Sheila Ingabire-Isaro is a brilliant choice for Lore. She presents Lore as filled with an almost Pollyanna-like optimism while simultaneously hinting at an underlying aggressiveness that humours people along until they they give in to her demands. As the action progresses, Ingabire-Isaro repeatedly demonstrates how Lore appears to be completely morally detached from all the good that she causes around her. It is, in fact, this air of detachment that leads us to think that the playwright intends Lore to represent more than just a quirky individual. Ingabire-Isaro is so good at depicting Lore as an ambiguous, not quite definable character that I would have been most happy if Haratischwili has ended the play on a note of doubt and left it to us to solve the mystery of what Lore does or does not represent.
Both the characters of Helene and Simone are underwritten. Helene is simply a young, sensuous woman bored with Liv’s problems and with Emil’s lingering interest in her. Simone is a woman who become dowdy because she has let business take over her life. Nicola Correia-Damude plays Helene with feline moodiness and physicality while Caroline Gillis lends Simone a comic air of resignation. But we can’t help but wish the author had given them more to do. Young Marc-Andre Blanchard skillfully combines tones of hurt, anger and icy calculation as the voice of Henri.
Debra Hanson has given the production an elegant design that places the set of a sumptuous foyer-cum-stitting room in the middle of the stage with the working lights at the sides and above still visible so that we are constantly reminded that we are watching a production on stage. Director Matthew Jocelyn has lighting designer Michael Walton use an unusual lighting technique for all most all the scenes. Actors enter and take their places; then there’s a blackout; then the scene begins. Along with the visible lighting instruments, this technique also underscores the artificiality of theatre, but it’s hard to see what else it could mean. Each scene seems to begins with a blink from the stage which would be great if the play were about photography, but it isn’t. It’s about music.
Ultimately, Liv Stein is a disappointment since Haratischwili seems unaware of how her ending needlessly boxes in the resonance of a play that had the potential to be much broader and, given recent talk of “alternative facts”, much more relevant. Canadian Stage has brought Toronto works from many recent German-language playwrights – like Lukas Bärfuss, Tankred Dorst, Philipp Löhle, and Roland Schimmelpfennig. If Liv Stein doesn’t quite match plays by these authors, perhaps others by Nino Haratischwili do. In any case we have to be grateful that Canadian Stage continues to pierce any incipient bubble of provincialism in Toronto theatre by keeping audiences apprised of theatrical developments in the world outside Canada, Great Britain and the United States.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Leslie Hope and Sheila Ingabire-Isaro; Leslie Hope as Liv Stein; Leslie Hope and Geraint Wyn Davies. ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.
2017-01-28
Liv Stein