Stage Door Review

Winter Solstice
Tuesday, January 21, 2025
✭✭✭✭✩
by Roland Schimmelpfennig, translated by David Tushingham, directed by Alan Dilworth
Necessary Angel Theatre Company with Canadian Stage & Birdland Theatre, Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto
January 17-February 2, 2025
“To Odin!”
Necessary Angel is currently presenting the English-Language Canadian premiere of Winter Solstice (2015) by the German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig. If the qualifier sounds complicated, it is because Théâtre français de Toronto presented the Canadian premiere of the play as Solstice d’hiver in French in 2022. Both the TfT production directed by Joël Beddows and the Necessary Angel production directed by Alan Dilworth are excellent. There are differences in emphasis, as one might expect, but it is impossible to say that one is superior to the other.
Necessary Angel (NA) had planned a production of the play to open May 14, 2020, but, of course, COVID scuttled that. To present the play like this now about the resurgence of the far right, just before the US inauguration, seems even more relevant. The play is a parable about how the insidious ideas of the far right can infiltrate and take over a household of people who view themselves as liberal. As we look at the world of the present day where so many countries are turning to the right, we justifiably wonder how this is possible. Schimmelpfennig’s play basically provides a step-by-step dissection of how and why a return to the right comes about. For that reason, beside its superb acting and direction, it is chilling but necessary viewing.
In brief, the story concerns the household of the successful couple Albert, an author and specialist on fascism, and Bettina, a filmmaker whose producer encourages her to create films about the end of the world. It is Christmas Eve. Every year Bettina invites her widowed mother Corinna, to spend Christmas with them and every year she does so even though the two can’t stand each other. This year the couple has also invited over Albert’s childhood friend Konrad, who is the painter of the enormous canvas unseen on the fourth wall.
What is different this year is that Corinna has invited a guest, a Dr. Rudolph Mayer, whom she met on the train into town when it was stopped for a long period by a snowdrift. Both Albert and Bettina are uncomfortable with Corinna’s having invited a complete stranger to the house, but Corinna is so enamoured with the charming Rudolph that she is oblivious to their concern. Albert becomes even more uncomfortable with the stranger’s presence the more Rudolph speaks.
Rudolph is from Paraguay, the son of German immigrants. Corinna thinks this is so exotic. For Albert, however, this fact sets off warning bells since he knows Paraguay was on the side of the Axis Powers in World War II which is why after the war the country became a haven for Nazis fleeing prosecution. As the action proceeds Rudolph makes one remark after another that suggest he is an unrepentant fascist, yet only Albert picks up these clues and only he is disturbed by them.
For detailed analysis of how Rudolph’s remarks become increasingly obvious signs of his ideology, I refer readers to my long review of the TfT production. I will repeat here a discussion of the clever dramatic strategy Schimmelpfennig employs. For the first third of the play a character whose name we do not know serves as an omniscient narrator. Part of the play’s humour is the disparity between what the narrator says the characters on stage are thinking and what we hear them say. Another part is seeing the characters take an action which is exactly as he has described it as when he says Corinna “makes a smile that she has seen in the movies”. The narrator also does the voice of Albert and Bettina’s little daughter Marie.
Other characters, especially Albert and Bettina, occasionally narrate their actions despite the presence of an outside narrator. The surprise comes when the outside narrator enters the play as the character Konrad, the painter and Albert’s best friend with whom Bettina has been having an affair. As Konrad he still narrates the action but we note he is no longer omniscient. He merely describes what he sees.
We have heard Rudolph’s negative appraisal of Konrad’s painting saying that it does not represent the beauty of the cosmic order but rather the mental disorder and sense of inferiority of the man who created it. What is so shocking is that Konrad completely agrees with Rudolph and he and Corinna become Rudolph’s most ardent admirers. At this point Konrad ceases to narrate the action, a function taken over by Albert, Bettina and even Corinna.
Schimmelpfennig makes us experience theatrically in relation to Konrad, what Albert and Bettina experience in relation to Rudolph. Just as Corinna unquestioningly accepts everything that Rudolph says, so Schimmelpfennig has had us accept what Konrad says when we think he is merely the narrator. Once he enters the limited world of the action, he loses his omniscience and we begin to see his true nature. Similarly, when Rudolph enters the world of the action, Albert, in particular, begins to see Rudolph’s true nature. Disturbingly, it is Rudolph who speaks the last narratorial words of the play as if he has taken it over.
Both the TfT production and the NA production have minimalist designs. Whereas as the TfT production had a wall with an empty space where we imagine Konrad’s painting to be, Lorenzo Savoini for NA has given us an empty rectangle surround by a wall of bench-height with a gap in the back representing the door to Albert and Bettina’s apartment. Within this rectangle Savoini uses squares of light to indicate various rooms – the kitchen, the living room, Corinna’s room and a bathroom to which Albert frequently retreats. The TfT production used different film clips to represent Konrad’s painting. Savoini leaves the painting entirely to our imagination.
Director Alan Dilworth has previous experience directing Schimmelpfennig and directed the playwright’s Idomeneus (2008) for Soulpepper in 2018 and The Great Fire (2017) for the Stratford Festival in 2024. Under his guidance all the actors are equally adept at Schimmelpfennig’s technique of auto-narration which requires them to slip seamlessly out of and back into character, usually with a simple change in tone of voice.
As Albert and Bettina, Cyrus Lane and Kira Guloien provide excellent portraits of two liberal-minded intellectuals who are too weak to do anything about the threat they perceive from Rudolph. Dilworth emphasizes that a large component of their weakness is their own guilt. Because both have been having affairs they have kept from each other, neither feels they have the moral authority to turn away a man like Rudolph simply because of the right-wing slant of his ideas. Guloien shows how superficial Kira is when Bettina stops objecting to Rudoph because he does so well at keeping Corinna occupied, thus freeing Bettina of that chore. Lane shows that Albert puts mental comfort before action in that he keeps popping anti-anxiety pills until he makes himself sick. Lane clearly traces the steps of Albert’s decline as the increasing number of pills he takes has an increasing number of negative side-effects.
Nancy Palk plays Corinna exactly as she is described by both Konrad as narrator and by Albert and Bettina. She is acting just like a teenager again. Palk’s portrayal is wonderfully nuanced. She demonstrates that Corinna is acting girlish because it is so long since Corinna has received any attention from a man. At the same time Palk suggests that Corinna partly knows that she is relying on old-fashioned techniques of flirtation because those are the only techniques she knows. Palk also shows us that Corinna senses her daughter and son-in-law’s judgement of her but tries to force it out of her mind.
Frank Cox-O’Connell is excellent in the slippery role of Konrad. He is very fine as the outside narrator and speaks his lines with a wry tone of voice that leads us to believe, falsely, that the play will be primarily amusing rather than unsettling. Once Cox-O’Connell enters the apartment and becomes Konrad, his voice loses its satirical edge and reflects the awkwardness of his position as the betrayer of his best friend’s trust.
In the TFT production Joël Beddows had the actor playing Rudolph become more aggressive and obnoxious as the action proceeded, his behaviour matching the increasing vileness of his thoughts. In the present production Alan Dilworth has Diego Matamoros retain an unflappable coolness as Rudolph as if he were comfortably assured of the correctness of his views. Beddows’s approach gives the role more immediate impact, while Dilworth’s makes the role a calm certainty which is perhaps even more frightening. Matamoros is a master at playing enigmatic characters and this is no exception. He subtly conveys that Rudolph is toying with Corinna and is enjoying his conquest. Matamoros makes Rudolph’s ploy of leading the other characters into toasting the winter solstice (long celebrated by pagans) instead of Christmas into a evil kind of triumph that shows up the weakness of the others’ politeness. They all even clink glasses “To Odin!”
There could hardly be a better play to stage in the current right-leaning political atmosphere than this one. Rudolph’s praise of the beauty and order seems innocuous until we start to realize its implications. When he claims that those who are against beauty and order don’t deserve to live, we should tremble and ask exactly what he means by beauty and order. Winter Solstice is an intense, riveting play that warns of the danger of complacency in the face of evil.
Christopher Hoile
Photos: Frank Cox-O’Connell as Konrad, Kira Guloien as Bettina, Cyrus Lane as Albert, Diego Matamoros as Rudolph and Nancy Palk as Corinna; Kira Guloien as Bettina and Cyrus Lane as Albert; Nancy Palk as Corinna and Diego Matamoros as Rudolph. © 2025 Dahlia Katz.
For tickets visit www.canadianstage.com