Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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by Ivan Viripaev, translated by Cazimir Liske, directed by Andrew Shaver and Paul Flicker
SideMart Theatrical Grocery, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto
April 21-May 7, 2017
Denny: “Love teaches how to see others, not only oneself”
SideMart Theatrical Grocery is currently presenting the English-language Canadian premiere of Illusions by contemporary Russian playwright Ivan Viripaev. You may not have heard of Viripaev until now, but you will certainly want to know more after you see this brilliant comedy.
This year has seen a number of plays that have pushed the boundaries concerning how a play is constructed from Guillaume Corbeil’s Five Faces for Evelyn Frost (2013) to Greg MacArthur’s A City (2017) and Guillermo Calderón’s Kiss (2014). Viripaev’s Illusions (2011) is another such play. Rather than create comedy from the direct actions of its characters, it does so through the stories that the characters tell and especially through the way these stories interlock. What initially seems to be a series of earnest tales about love gradually acquires both a profound irony and a deep metaphysical resonance. The stories are not merely about the misapprehensions of a two sets of elderly married couples but about humankind’s misapprehensions about reality.
Four actors enter the auditorium from the lobby in formal wear as if from a party, barefoot and seemingly already a bit tipsy. The first to speak is First Woman (Laurence Dauphinais) who begins innocently enough with, “Hello. I want to tell you about a married couple”. Her story is about Denny and Sandra, who have been married for 52 years. Denny senses that he is about to die and takes the opportunity to tell Sandra how important she has been to him throughout that time. Denny’s focus is on the love he and Sandra shared. This was the miraculous experience of true love which he sees is only mutual love. This love made him change, taught him to love others and, though there is no afterlife, will remain in the world after his death and hers.
At first, we take the First Woman’s account of Denny’s speech seriously and are overcome with how endearing it is. Yet, as Denny’s speech continues and becomes increasingly hyperbolic, we begin to wonder whether the First Woman’s account hasn’t shifted into parody and is actually the set-up for an elaborate joke.
Indeed, the First Woman’s next focus is Sandra, who lives only one year longer than Denny. Sensing she is about to die, she asks that Denny’s best friend Albert visit her. Denny and Albert had been best friends since childhood and Albert had been Denny’s best man at his wedding to Sandra. Sandra, however, confesses that from the very first moment she saw Albert, now 53 years ago, he knew that she loved only him even though he was already married to his lovely wife Margaret. All this time she has harboured an unrequited love for him and now that she is about to die she has finally decided to tell him the truth. That love was what Denny had perceived as love for him. That love give her life meaning and allows her to die happy.
Thus, the First Woman’s story is imbued with the deepest irony. Denny claims that mutual love is the only true love and believed that that is what empowered him and changed his life, yet as we learn the love he felt was not mutual. Denny therefore dies deceived about the truth and for 52 years has lived in an illusion.
The ironies, however, do not stop there. The Second Woman (Marie-Ève Perron) wants to tell is another story, this one about Albert and Margaret. What we learn from her completely overturns Sandra world view and shows it to have been an illusion and then wreaks the same havoc upon Albert’s world view. After an interruption from the First Man (Brett Donahue) and the First Woman, the Second Man (Andrew Shaver) has a story to tell about Denny and how he came to take up the practice of never lying. After a miraculous experience as a boy he considers telling his parents but then realizes that they will not believe him: “Because people constantly tell one another lies, no one believes anyone anymore”.
From this point on, Viripaev’s comedy shifts its focus from the question whether mutual love or unrequited love is the only true love to whether the world actually does or does not make sense and whether a belief that the world does make sense can actually be true. Viripaev’s comedy suddenly shifts from a comedy about love to a comedy about epistemology, the criteria for judging truth and belief and whether one trumps the other or not. Given where the play started, this shift into the realm of philosophy could not be more mind-bending.
The text of the play has no description of the four storytellers or of their interactions. All of this has come from co-directors Andrew Shaver and Paul Flicker. Their direction makes full use of the space, even using a window that looks in on the theatre from outside. They also assign the four players distinct personalities. Laurence Dauphinais tells her first tale beautifully with air of bemusement and sympathy. She ends it with a wonderfully ambiguous smile that corresponds perfectly with the ambiguity of her story and her manner for the rest of the play maintains this noncommittal sense of play.
Marie-Ève Perron is absolutely hilarious. The directors have decided that, alone of the four, she will use small figurines to represent the four characters in her stories. Holding one in her hand and balancing the speaker on her arm she tries to speak at the figure nearest her without having it fall to the ground. What makes the wackiness of this idea so delicious is that Perron pursues it with complete seriousness as if the dolls are necessary aids to her presentation of the facts rather than absurd distractions. Speaking in a strong Québécois accent, Perron occasionally will mispronounce a word whereupon Shaver will correct her – all this an improvisation on the script. Just as Dauphinais projects the wry knowingness of Viripaev’s stories, Perron embodies their blending of the deadpan and the ridiculous.
The directors have also set up a contrast between the two men. Brett Donahue plays First Man as an assertive game-player who butts in one time with a shocking story about the characters that turns out just to be a joke. He seems particularly keen to dominate the unassertive Andrew Shaver’s Second Man who is only emphatic about correcting Perron’s mistakes speaking English. Strangely enough, however, its is Donahue, who becomes the most emotional when telling his longest story and Shaver, who seems the most detached. The two men thus also reflect in their method delivery the duality of tone in Viripaev’s play. All four narrators taken together show how the text can be interpreted in ways completely opposite to each other – not unlike the the question in the stories of whether the truest love is mutual or unrequited.
The essential mystery of the play is who the four speakers are and why they are all telling us these stories. They as a group already know all the details of the lives of the four elderly people who are the characters so there is no motivation for them to tell these stories to each other. On the other hand, especially given lighting designer Martin Sirois’s mysterious fadeout at the end, we almost feel that the four are rather like the three speakers in Samuel Beckett’s Play (1963), whose eternal punishment it is to have to retell the same story of their sordid lives for all eternity.
With four speakers and four characters in the stories we are frequently tempted to identify a speaker with a character. Perron as Second Woman who is known for her “very fine sense of humour” could likely be Margaret, and the directors almost confirm this when the spotlight goes out on Perron when she tells of Margaret’s death. Dauphinais, as the First Woman with her sphinx-like smile could likely be Sandra, who has borne a secret for more than 50 years. The directors have Donahue and Shaver play scenes between Denny and Albert as if Shaver were Denny and Donahue Albert. Yet, given that the ultimate theme of the play is indeterminacy, we can’t be sure whether such identification of speaker with characters is useful or even justified by the text since everyone eventually plays everyone else.
Viripaev takes the epigraph for Illusions from Pierre Corneille’s comedy L’Illusion Comique (1634) where a father consults a magician to learn what has happened to his son:
Toutefois, si votre âme était assez hardie
Sous une illusion vous pourriez voir sa vie,
Et tous ses accidents devant vous exprimés
Par des spectres pareils à des corps animés. (Act 1, Scene 2)
In any case, if your soul is brave enough
As an illusion you could see his life,
And all the events expressed before you
By spirits like to animated bodies.
In Corneille’s highly metatheatrical play, the father sees the spectres act out the people in his son’s life, including people playing actors who are playing characters in the theatre. Just as Corneille deliberately blurs the line between actor and role, so does Viripaev between his speakers and the characters in their stories, except that they as a group represent the characters as a group. What is it that unites the world? The first answer in the play is love. The second answer is belief. What is it that convinces us that Viripaev’s play has meaning? The answer may be the same. It may be love of theatre and belief that fiction is a way of understanding truth.
Illusions is marvellous play to experience in the theatre and to contemplate afterwards. Be sure to see it.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (top) Brett Donahue, Laurence Dauphinais, Andrew Shaver and Marie-Ève Perron. ©2017 Fraser Elsdon.
For tickets, visit http://crowstheatre.com.
2017-04-22
Illusions