Review - Poison - Coal Mine Theatre, Toronto

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by Lot Vekemans, translated by Rina Vergano, directed by Peter Pasyk

Coal Mine Theatre, 1454 Danforth Avenue, Toronto

November 15-December 3, 2017

He: “Suffering can become addictive”

The Coal Mine Theatre is currently presenting the Canadian premiere of Poison, a play by Dutch playwright Lot Vekemans that has already had dozens of productions worldwide since its first performance in Ghent in 2009. It is unfortunate but true that drama written in Dutch usually receives little attention outside the Netherlands and Flanders, so one wonders what it is about Poison that has led it to being so embraced by around the world. One answer is that it takes a situation common to hundreds of one-act plays and makes it feel new. A divorced couple meet again after a long period of separation and speak about the past. Vekemans takes this situation and avoids all the clichéd plot developments that usually attend it. In fact, she gives the situation a twist the full import of which may not occur to you until days after you have left the theatre.

The premise of Poison is that the divorced couple known only in the text as He (Ted Dykstra) and She (Fiona Highet) meet in a room at a cemetery in the Netherlands after not having seen or heard from each other for nine years. He now lives in Normandy and has driven back to the Netherlands because he received a letter from the cemetery representatives wishing to speak personally with all the relatives of those buried there because the cemetery was going to have to exhume and rebury almost 200 graves because the the groundwater of the cemetery had become tainted with poison.

Gradually, we discover that Jacob, the couple’s son is buried there. He was hit by a car when he was ten. After his death the couple’s marriage fell apart because they could not deal with the grief. More specifically, He could no longer cope with how completely grief had overtaken his wife. He left She without saying a word at 7:10 on New Year’s Eve 1999, and they have not seen each other since.

They wait alone in the all-white cemetery chapel, beautifully austere in Patrick Lavender’s design that echoes the sparse dialogue, and try to catch up with what has happened over the past years to fill the time. Old grievances rise up again as do the tenderer feelings that first drew them together. All this is very much what one would expect from this kind of situation. What is different from other two-person plays of this kind it its focus on grief. She has never gotten over the death of her son and, despite seeing psychiatrists and therapists, has never “moved

on” with her life. As He tells She, “Suffering can become an addiction”. The greatest blow to She is that He not only has moved on but has started a new life. He has remarried and his wife is pregnant.

Recriminations naturally follow. He feels that She is wallowing in her grief. She has allowed unhappiness to become so natural that she is afraid to leave it. She, on the other hand, feels that their son’s death could not have affected him as much as it did her and that He was escaping both by simply abandoning her without a word.

Vekemans depicts the points of view of both with balance and compassion. Neither one is completely wrong. Neither is completely right. And more than this her characters are wise enough to know that some of their more extreme statements are extreme and apologize immediately after making them.

It’s impossible not to see the play’s title as metaphorical. Grief has acted as a poison on He and She individually and has destroyed their marriage. The question that Vekemans brings up is whether there is any antidote to grief. She claims that all she wants is to be happy again as she was before the son’s death. Yet, at the same time, She seems to need to feel constant grief in order not to betray his memory. He claims that it is unrealistic to hope to return to the happier time before. Instead, He feels we have to take the life we have as it is.

For some time it seems as if He and She have reached a philosophical impasse that they cannot breech. As it turns out there is a way to breech it and it involves He and She relieving a painful experience from the past. I cannot reveal it because it turns out not only to be the way forward for the couple but the key to understanding the entire play.

Peter Pasyk, who last directed Tracy Letts’s Killer Joe for Coal Mine in 2016, proves he is equally adept as directing a delicate, understated play like Poison as well as a brash, hyperbolic play like Letts’s. The flow of the dialogue, the pauses, the hesitations, the characters’ unexpected laughter at themselves or each other come across as completely unforced and natural.

Both Dykstra and Highet give exquisite performances of of two people who once knew each other too well and now have to navigate the areas between them where they feel comfortable and those that have become treacherous. Neither wants to alienate the other but both feel there are things they need to say. Highet’s character naturally appears the more distraught and the more needy, yet is the one who has no wish to rekindle even friendship with He. Dykstra appears more at ease and satisfied with life, attitudes that only aggravate She, but Dykstra gives his account of the miracle that returned his happiness such rapturous expression that we fully believe him even if She does not.

He recounts hearing a man sing the song “It Must Be So” by Leonard Bernstein. The programme provides no gloss for this song, but it is very helpful in understanding the direction where Vekemans takes the play. The song is “Candide’s Meditation” from Bernstein’s 1956 operetta Candide based on Voltaire’s 1759 novel of the same name. Candide is an eternal optimist and is tutored by his master, Dr. Pangloss, to believe that this is the best of all possible worlds. Yet, in the operetta as in the novel, Candide encounters one disaster after another and struggles to see how. After his country is destroyed, Candide meditates:

My world is dust now,

And all I loved is dead.

Oh, let me trust now

In what my master said:

“There is a sweetness in every woe”.

It must be so. It must be so.

Neither Vekemans’ He nor She is an optimist, yet He has realized that what has happened in the past must be accepted no matter how painful – “It must be so”. She, however, still fights against such acceptance.

Vekeman’s play begins with simple, nearly insubstantial dialogue, but as it develops her characters naturally enter into a discussion of some of the most salient questions in philosophy – “How does a person life a good life?” and “Why is it that bad things happen?” Does philosophical reflection provide an antidote to the poison of grief? Or is the antidote something even simpler?

To find out you must see this remarkable play that broaches such fundamental questions about life in such an unassuming manner. If you have given yourself fully to the play – not so difficult to do given how beautifully acted and directed it is – you may find it still provoking insights into the play itself and into life long after the applause has died.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit www.coalminetheatre.com.

2017-11-18

Poison