Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✭✩✩
by Tony Kushner, directed by Jon Michaelson
Mercury Stage Productions and Culturate Inc. ,
Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
May 21-June 9, 2007
Homebody/Kabul (2001), now receiving its Canadian premiere was Tony Kushner’s first play after his colossal two-part epic Angels in America. It consists of two linked plays unequal in both length and quality. The one-hour Homebody is a miniature masterpiece on its own. In it the eccentric Englishwoman (Fiona Reid) who is the title character attempts to tell an audience of her enthusiasm for an out-of-date guidebook to Kabul, Afghanistan, and of her excursion from the house to buy festive hats for a party. This might seem simple enough except that her tale is hampered in her view, enhanced in ours, by her propensity for digressions within digressions and by her bookish love of elliptical phrasing and use of extraordinarily abstruse vocabulary. Her love of language for its own sake reflects her love of the world for its own sake. Reid gives a tour-de-force performance that captures the all the fascinating contradictions and self-awareness of a woman for whom books and the peculiar histories contained therein are more real than her own family or the world outside her home.
The two-hour play Kabul finds us in that city in 1998 under the repressive Taliban regime. The Homebody’s husband Milton (Michael Spencer-Davis) and daughter Priscilla (Lesley Faulkner) have travelled to Kabul after learning that the Homebody has disappeared there. The official story is that she died a gruesome death at the hands of a mob. Priscilla wants to discover the truth and from the poet Khwaja (Sanjay Talwar) hears that, in fact she may still be alive. As has become typical in this kind of quest-for-the-missing-person story, the deeper Priscilla goes the more confounding the results so that it ultimately becomes impossible to tell reality from illusion.
Unlike Angels in America, here the allegorical structure moves the action not the characters’ motivations. Spencer-Davis and Faulkner do the best they can but Kushner has given them impossible characters. We are often asked to take the Milton seriously even though he speaks and acts like an archetypal British twit. The changes that Priscilla undergoes in her quest are neither convincing nor clear. The single outstanding performance in Kabul comes from Deena Aziz as Mahala, a former librarian officially labelled as insane. Her central emotional speech pleading with Priscilla in at least six different languages to be taken to England is an amazing experience, much like Reid’s performance, in which erudition and madness are inextricably entwined.
Through the East-West conflict of Homebody/Kabul Kushner explores the paradoxes of the known and unknowable, the fact that absolute definitions of right and wrong like those enforced under the Taliban regime also seem the most alien. Kushner goes about this in manner that is much too discursive and seldom persuasive, especially when compared to an elegantly concise play on a similar theme like Carole Fréchette’s Helen’s Necklace (2001). No theatre-lover will want to miss the performances of Reid and Aziz, but, at the same time, they will have to admit that while Homebody is as brilliant as Kushner’s best work, Kabul is disappointing.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-05-22.
Photo: Fiona Reid. ©Virginia MacDonald.
2007-05-22
Homebody/Kabul