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by Edward Albee, directed by Diana Leblanc

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

January 18-February 17, 2018

Agnes: “Do we dislike happiness?  We manufacture such a portion of our own despair.”

In the midst of a sexual harassment scandal, Soulpepper has decided to go forward with one of the two plays it had scheduled to begin the winter season.  A Delicate Balance (1966) is the second play of Soulpepper’s 2017/18 season after The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (2000) to commemorate the great American playwright Edward Albee who died in 2016.  The language of A Delicate Balance is highly literate and often poetic but for many the play is frustratingly enigmatic.  Director Diana Leblanc and her excellent cast give the play the clearest, most insightful production I have yet seen.  For fans of existential drama in general and of Albee in particular, this is a production not to be missed.

The play concerns the monied Agnes (Nancy Palk) and Tobias (Oliver Dennis), who have nothing but leisure since they have servants to cook and clean for them.  They haven’t been able to enjoy an empty nest, however, since Agnes’s sister Claire (Brenda Robins), a deliberately non-recovering alcoholic, has been living with them for an unknown period of time.  Agnes and Tobias had two children.  Julia (Laura Condlln), is returning home after the failure of her fourth marriage.  Teddy, whom Julia thinks replaced her in her parents’ affections, died young.

Before Julia returns, a strange event occurs.  Agnes and Tobias’s very best friends for over 40 years, Harry (Derek Boyes) and Edna (Kyra Harper), suddenly turn up at the door.  Unlike Agnes and Tobias, they truly do have an empty nest and that night they were suddenly overtaken by what they call the “terror”.  They can’t go back home and ask to stay the night.  Even more bizarre, the next morning they decide to move in to live with Agnes and Tobias.  Julia naturally is furious that her parents have given their friends her bedroom, while Agnes and Tobias have to ponder just how far the boundaries of “friendship” can extend.

The last time I saw this play was at the Stratford Festival in 2007 when it was also directed by Diana Leblanc.  Again Leblanc brings a clear understanding of the play’s structure to the production.  First of all she underlines the presence of so many sets of doubles among the characters.  We first meet Tobias with Agnes and Claire, two sisters with exactly opposite attributes – the first representing order and repression, the second disorder and expression.  When Harry and Edna enter fleeing an unnamable terror, it is clear that they are alter egos of Tobias and Agnes, who have never fully dealt with the unspoken void in their lives, the death of their son Teddy.  It’s from that time that Tobias began sleeping in a separate bedroom since he couldn’t bear for Agnes to have another child.  Indeed, when Harry and Edna settle in, they begin acting exactly like Tobias and Agnes.

When Julia enters a second parallel is created.  We have two sets of intruders into the ordered life of Agnes and Tobias – Harry and Edna who are their “closest friends” and Claire and Julia, who are relatives.  This sets up a central question of the play, “Who has a greater claim on our love – a close friend or a relative we may not actually like?”  How important really is a blood relation in determining who does or does not have a claim on our time and space?  The interaction of these multiple parallels brings out a remarkably rich view of life as a balancing act between order and disorder, sanity and madness, repression and expression, male and female and the roles of host and guest, friend and intruder, friend and relative.

The main difficulty with the previous productions of the play that I have seen is in misidentifying the work’s central character.  In play called A Delicate Balance when a character like Agnes speaks of herself as the “fulcrum” of the household, we may assume that she is the focus of the play.  Since, however, Agnes and Claire are set up as opposites, Agnes’s belief that she is the fulcrum is simply another sign of her outsized belief that she is the maintainer of order in the family. 

Most directors latch onto Claire as the main character, simply because she is the clown of the family and provides a steady stream of comic commentary on the action.  Yet, again because she and Agnes are set up as opposites, it throws the play askew to focus on Claire.  Soulpepper’s current production is the first to achieve the proper balance between Agnes and Claire. 

The surprising truth, that Leblanc seems to have realized since 2007, is that it is actually the seeming quiet Tobias who is ultimately the plays central figure.  It was his action in reaction to Teddy’s death that led to the loveless life that he and Agnes now live.  It is left to his action to solve the question about what to do about Harry and Edna.  His speech to Harry in Act 3 is the most impassioned and most important in the play and its surprising conclusion clarifies the whole nature of the play.  Agnes and Tobias have a “terror” to face of their own.  Harry and Edna’s presence has actually brought Tobias and Agnes back together, allows all four of them to distract themselves from the void in their lives, gives him others to referee between Claire and Agnes and gives Tobias and Agnes a reason not to accept Julia’s repeated returns home to her room which seems to represent her desire never to grown up.

We hear more than once that Julia is on her way to becoming another Claire, and Laura Condlln in word and posture shows this to be true.  Condlln shows that Julia’s immediate impulse to return home to her room after every marital disaster is not only childish but part of a general desire never to have to grow up. 

Derek Boyes and Kyra Harper are excellent as the mild Harry and Edna who first appear to us so terrified that they can barely speak of what it is that has driven them to seek shelter with their friends.  Once they move in with their friends, both actors ratchet up an aggressiveness that hardly seems suitable for guests, although this sudden air of superiority has had a more chilling effect in some previous productions. 

Oliver Dennis, in yet another masterful performance, does not give us Tobias as a henpecked wimp as he too often appears in other productions.  Rather, his Tobias, whose drinking comes in second only to Claire’s, is clearly troubled from the very beginning.  Initially, we think his anger is directed at the constant bickering of Agnes and Claire.  But in his long passionate speech about euthanizing a cat who no longer loved him, Dennis makes us realize that Tobias is wrestling with a guilt that goes beyond the cat story and remains in the present.  Dennis suggests that Tobias holds himself responsible for killing off love in his household, a situation that only drink has made barely tolerable for him.  Tobias’s long speech to Harry about Harry and Edna’s presence in the house covers a wide range of confused emotions from anger to embarrassing self-abasement that Dennis delivers with absolute naturalness and assurance.  It is the peak moment in the play and Dennis’s performance is unforgettable.

Soulpepper’s current production is the best production of this elusive play I have seen so far.  We are in a world that is slightly askew as the large carpet in Astrid Janson’s set demonstrates, but it is not so askew that it does not bring up essential questions of what does and does not bind people together and whether all relationships, including marriage and family, have boundaries that can be overstepped.  A Delicate Balance is a play that was puzzling when it first premiered, but over the years people have begun to see beyond the superficial comedy of Claire’s remarks and the absurdity of Harry and Edna’s invasion to see the far more serious themes that Albee explores.  What binds people more closely together – fear of existence, dread of the unknown ... or love?  See the Soulpepper production and see where the debate leads you.    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Oliver Dennis and Derek Boyes (foreground) with Kyra Harper, Laura Condlln, Brenda Robins and Nancy Palk (background); Laura Condlln (foreground) with Oliver Dennis, Derek Boyes, Nancy Palk and Kyra Harper (background); Nancy Palk and Oliver Dennis. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit https://soulpepper.ca.