<b>✭✭✭✩✩</b><b>
</b><b>by David Greig, music by Gordon McIntyre, directed by Tamara Bernier Evans
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre, Toronto
April 26-May 28, 2017
</b>
Bob: “We all come from the past and are going to the future”
The Tarragon Theatre ends its 2016/17 season with <i>Midsummer (a play with songs)</i> by Scottish playwright David Greig with songs by Scottish indie rocker Gordon McIntyre. It’s an extremely lightweight play especially compared with the much more difficult contemporary British plays being tackled by companies much smaller than the Tarragon. (Think of Philip Ridley’s <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/623262CB-064A-4533-B78F-A49F8DC2A8F3">Radiant Vermin</a></i> by Precisely Peter Productions or Dennis Kelly’s <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/CF98E7C2-C518-4FF8-8CE0-7073BCBE07CF">Orphans</a></i> by the Cola Mine Theatre just this year.) <i>Midsummer</i> tries so hard to be whimsical that the effort undermines the desired effect.
A person can hardly write a play in English called <i>Midsummer</i> without some reference to Shakespeare’s <i>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</i>. Indeed, both plays have a character named Helena, but <i>Midsummer’s</i> only other character is named Bob. Greig takes his epigraph from Shakespeare’s play: “Four days will quickly steep themselves in night; / Four nights will quickly dream away the time” (Act 1, Scene 1). In Grieg the two lovers, Helena and Bob, do not get lost in a magical forest but rather get caught up in a weekend of bizarre events in the fog of modern-day Edinburgh.
Bob (Brandon McGibbon) is a pretty criminal, divorced and naturally despondent, who does odd jobs for a local gangster called Big Tiny but who once had dreams of being a poet. He still fantasizes about travelling about Europe busking the songs of the Scottish band Jesus and Mary Chain. Helena (Carly Street) is a 35-year-old high-end lawyer who goes to a wine bar to get drunk after the married man with whom she’s having an affair calls off their tryst at the last minute. At the bar she spots Bob, who is drowning his sorrows over turning 35, and decides that he, though totally not her type, will be her target for “extremely wild, uninhibited sex”. After their awkward hook-up they separate and meet again several times until Bob proposes they try to spend a hot bundle of money he has over that very weekend.
The 100-minute-long show feels like a long-form improv sketch where the two performers have taken a miscellany of suggestions from the audience to work into their show. These include New Zealand Sauvignon blanc, a pink car, a talking penis, a bridesmaid’s dress stained with vomit, the Balmoral Hotel, Goth kids, <i>kinbaku</i> or Japanese rope bondage and guitars. The fun in improv is to see how the performers will works all these elements into their story. Since <i>Midsummer</i> is not improv, the show feel as if it is striving for wacky humour for its own sake rather for any metaphorical relevance to the tale of two people experiencing the early throes of a midlife crisis.
The dramatic structure has the narrative told by the two characters in alternation, one often contradicting or denying what the other has just said, and this structure proves to be the surest path to humour in the play. The funniest extended sequence is when Bob and Helena experience terrible hangovers after their night of sex and launch into long series of comparisons in the formula ”If my hangover were – , it would be – ”. Otherwise, the humour of the story is strictly hit and miss. The story itself doesn’t quite make sense especially when it involves Bob’s boss. Bob tells us that Big Tiny is a gangster and uses his son as an enforcer. Yet, when Bob eludes Big Tiny, Bob acts as if he has no more worries. How Bob’s spending all his hot money will help when he has been observed with it, Greig decides to gloss over.
Taking her cue from Bob’s desire to busk his way across Europe, director Tamara Bernier Evans’s concept is that Bob and Helena are Scottish actors who tour their portable play <i>Midsummer (a play with songs)</i> from place to place as if it were a Fringe show. She therefore has the two enter the completely bare Tarragon Mainstage each pulling in a pair of trunks. Evans’s conceit is the same as that in Albert Marre’s original production of <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/CB77D783-E6B4-43FB-94BD-12E23D56304D">Man of La Mancha</a></i> in 1965. There all the props and costumes were found in the single trunk that Cervantes brought with him to prison. In <i>Midsummer</i>, all the props and costumes are found in the four trunks that Bob and Helena bring in with them. It’s still an ingenious idea. It’s just that anyone who knows their music theatre history will know it is not original.
Other than having the actors use the trunks to create a bar, a bed and a car, Evans’s direction is not very inventive. For unknown reasons, Evans, with few exceptions, keeps McGibbon stage right and Street stage left throughout the entire show as though they existed in different mental or emotional spheres contrary to what happens in the play.
The primary pleasure of the show comes from the performances of McGibbon and Street. McGibbon is in his element as a comic hangdog loser striving to find a bit of meaning in his otherwise purposeless life. As some will know from his appearance in the Toronto production of the musical <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/EA923DDB-D2B2-4DA5-955B-23A7671F1745">Once</a></i>, McGibbon is also a fine singer and guitar player.
Street is also a fine singer though not quite as natural on the guitar as McGibbon. She makes Helena’s frequent contradictions in behaviour thoroughly believable and gives her a sympathetic kind of heroism as Helena pushes herself to keep going on despite one minor humiliation after another. Both actors also play a range of other mostly clichéd characters and both are expert at keep these roles varied and distinct.
After about an hour of fitfully amusing narration and forgettable songs, Greig decides to inject the show with a bit more substance. Therefore, he has Bob muse, “We all come from the past and are going to the future”. That’s about as deep as it gets. The lesson the two learn from their artificially zany weekend is <i>carpe diem</i>, “seize the day”, an ancient sentiment suitable for a <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/054C7BF4-BD44-4785-B282-7E9BED03354F">Shirley Valentine</a></i> crowd. McGibbon and Street are both such talented, witty, resourceful performers that it’s a pity <i>Midsummer</i> is not an improvised show. By the end we are sure that anything they could devise on the spur of the moment would be better and truer to life than what Greig has written down.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Brandon McGibbon and Carly Street; Brandon McGibbon and Carly Street. ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.tarragontheatre.com">www.tarragontheatre.com</a>.
<b>2017-04-28</b>
<b>Midsummer (a play with songs)</b>