Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Daniel Brooks
Necessary Angel Theatre Company, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
May 15-June 1, 2008
In Daniel Brooks’ latest play The Eco Show the physical production far outshines the dull but obviously heartfelt script. The overt point of the play is to explore the coming ecological disaster by exploring the “ecology” of the family. As Brooks tells us via the pedantic central character Hamm (Richard Clarkson), the word “ecology” comes from the Greek work “oikos” meaning “house” so that “ecology” can be a study of an abode and its inhabitants in the broadest, or, in this case, narrowest sense.
The problem is that Brooks’ exploration is completely static so that the 100-minute-long play seems more like three hours. Scenes showing Hamm’s relationship to his wife Gwen (Fiona Highet), his teenaged son Joe (Joe Cobden) and his 9-year-old daughter Fifi (Jenny Young) do not develop but are simply repetitions with variations that soon become tedious. Hamm, like his namesake in Beckett’s post-apocalyptic Endgame (1957), is wheelchair-bound, a far too obvious symbol of his intellectual paralysis. He can spout mind-numbing fact after fact about how we are destroying the planet but can do nothing about it and has no good word for the work or play of those about him. Making people aware of the situation cannot succeed when people, like his own family, become tired of listening. Yet, even Hamm avoids confronting the impending death of his father (Geza Kovacs) as much as humanity avoids confronting the death of the planet. Once these symbolic points are in place, the play has nowhere to go and nothing more to say.
Fortunately, the performances are excellent. Cobden really catches the dilemma of the teenager both despising and dependent on his parents. Highet builds her anger at Hamm’s disrepect of her slowly until it justifiably bursts out in a torrent of frustration. However, what one will remember most is the superb coordination of Andrea Lundy’s lighting, Richard Feren’s sound design and Ben Chaisson’s video design. In a blink Julie Fox’s three-walled set can become a forest glade, a pool of water or a view out the back and side windows of a moving car as the family goes on one of its virtual rides. From a ghostly appearance of the dying grandfather to a travelling image of a bright sky with fluffy clouds, the show has frequent moments of visual brilliance. Once they are over we return to Brooks’ words with a thud wondering when the play about the world ending will ever end. Brooks’ view of intellectual paralysis at the heart of humanity does not help us cope any better with the impending disaster much less encourage us to action. For Brooks the earth may as well already be dead--hence the play’s subtitle, “An Elegy.”
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-05-19
Photo: Richard Clarkin and Jenny Young. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2008-05-19
The Eco Show