Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✭✩
written by Caryl Churchill, directed by Alisa Palmer
Mirvish Productions, Panasonic Theatre, Toronto
January 26-February 21, 2010
Toronto hasn’t seen a professional production of Caryl Churchill’s brilliant 1979 comedy Cloud 9 since 1984. To remedy the situation Mirvish Productions has assembled a flawless all-star cast of leads from Soulpepper and the Stratford and Shaw Festivals directed by Alisa Palmer, who recently helmed Soulpepper’s highly acclaimed production of Churchill’s Top Girls. Back in 1984 the first act was hilarious and the second did not quite gel. Strangely enough, the reverse is true now.
Churchill’s play is about the changing relationships among family members and friends over a 25-year period. Churchill’s stunning theatrical audacity sets our first encounter with the characters in Act 1 in British colonial Africa in 1880 and our second in Act 2 in 1980 London. To emphasize that the play is about the construction of identity, the characters we meet in Act 1 are played by entirely different actors in Act 2, and actors are cast in roles regardless of gender, race or age. Thus, the repressed wife Betty is played by Evan Buliung in Act 1 and by Ann-Marie MacDonald in Act 2. Her homosexual son Edward is played by MacDonald in Act 1 and by Buliung in Act 2. Churchill thus forces us to sort out the characters’ identities as they sort out their own. In Act 1 everyone knows his place in a hierarchical, male-dominated world where the father as head of the family is like the monarch (paradoxically a Queen) to her Empire and God to his creation. Characters comically uphold or chafe against this supposedly inviolable order. In Act 2 the hierarchy has collapsed though remnants still remain, but now characters comically grope about to construct their own sense of order.
The show is a feast of exquisite acting as one might expect from the likes of Buliung, MacDonald, Ben Carlson, Megan Follows, David Jansen, Yanna McIntosh and Blair Williams, all of whom shine in their dual or triple roles. Under Palmer’s direction Act 2 has precisely the right pacing and sense of cohesion whereas Act 1 misses perfection on both counts. In part, this is because Palmer encourages an exaggerated acting style in Act 1 that only works if the exaggeration is uniform across the cast. Churchill’s frank discussions of sexuality no longer shock as they once did, but her satirical yet sympathetic depiction of the difficulty of extricating one’s self from the meshes of the past remains as relevant as ever.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-01-27.
Photo: Evan Buliung and David Jansen. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2010-01-27
Cloud 9