Reviews 2005
Reviews 2005
✭✭✩✩✩
by David Gow, directed by Richard Rose
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
January 4-February 6, 2005
Anyone expecting the vibrancy of David Gow’s best known play Cherry Docs will be disappointed with its 1999 follow-up Bea’s Niece only now receiving its Toronto premiere. It’s a cross between a hospital drama like Whose Life is It Anyway? and a ghost-as-advisor play like Proof with some Kabbalah and postmodern fiction-as-reality games thrown in to make its shallowness seem deep.
Maria Ricossa plays Anne Hirsch, a world-famous writer, who has been institutionalized after becoming delusional after her husband’s death. Severe depression would seem to be the cause, but Gow, relying on the feisty patient stereotype, makes Anne so lucid and articulate she seems merely obnoxious rather than mentally ill. Nothing Ricossa does can make this ill-conceived character convincing let alone sympathetic. We don’t care about Anne, her problems or their solution.
Fiona Highet is stuck in the parallel stereotype of Anne’s tough-love psychiatrist Beth, though Highet doesn’t project enough authority. John Bourgeois is understated as Anne’s husband Bill, whether ghost or memory, who reminds Anne that for him their married life was not so happy. Only Patricia Hamilton as Anne’s rambunctious, perhaps fictional Aunt Bea and later as a hausfraulich rabbi injects any life into the play making one wish Gow had made her and not her niece the focus of the play.
Director Richard Rose pulls off some neat theatrical tricks, but they are not enough to save the first act from cliché and the second from pretentiousness. Writers like Yasmina Reza and Joe Penhall have explored Gow’s fiction-versus-reality theme with far greater wit and economy.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2005-01-13.
Photo: Patricia Hamilton, Maria Ricossa and Fiona Highet. ©2005 Michael Cooper.
2005-01-13
Bea’s Niece