✭✭✩✩✩

by Stephen Massicotte, directed by Richard Rose

Tarragon Theatre/Great Canadian Theatre Company, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

November 16-December 17, 2006

In his latest play, The Oxford Roof Climber’s Rebellion, Calgary-based playwright Stephen Massicotte chooses four fascinating historical figures from 1920s Britain but finds nothing interesting to say about them.  We meet T.E. Lawrence aka “Lawrence of Arabia” (Tom Rooney), the poet Robert Graves (Jonathan Crombie), his feminist wife Nancy Nicholson (Michelle Giroux) and Foreign Secretary and former Viceroy of India Lord Curzon (Victor Ertmanis), who all happen to be at Oxford University at the same time.  There to write about his exploits, Lawrence finds a kindred soul in Graves, still shell-shocked from fighting in World War I.  

The scenes over the mere 85 minutes seems less like a coherent play that excerpts from a larger work.  The “rebellion’ of title turns out to be only the childish pranks that the adult Lawrence and Graves play as some sort of outlet for their depression and repressed desire.  If the point is to make them seem foolish, Massicotte succeeds.  Massicotte raises topics about the price everyone pays for war but does not developed them and his style is relentlessly unwitty.  Richard Rose’s static direction leaves little to hold our attention but Rooney’s urgent portrayal of a man ineptly searching for who he really is beneath the legend that the world has made of him.                   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2006-11-23.

Photo: Tom Rooney and Jonathan Crombie. ©2006 Paul Toogood.