Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✩✩✩
by Vern Thiessen, directed by Geoffrey Brumlik
Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company,
Al Green Theatre, Toronto
November 2-21, 2010
Lenin’s Embalmers is an unfocussed play that needs strong direction to glide over its shortcomings. That is not what it receives from director Geoffrey Brumlik. The uneven acting styles only accentuate the wavering tone of the text.
Based on actual events, Vern Thiessen’s play tells how in 1924 Stalin (David Fox) enlisted the help of two scientists to preserve the Lenin’s body, against Lenin’s wishes, for eternity, thus making him a symbol of the undying revolution. Lenin (Harry Nelken), who is free to speak after death, says he feels like a joke without a punchline. That’s could describe the play itself. Thiessen is interested in two ironies--that Stalin would create a secular reliquary for an officially atheist country and that Stalin turned on the two scientists whose chemical breakthroughs help Lenin achieve material immortality. The second irony is hardly unexpected from a tyrant, especially when the two make ever greater demands for their biannual re-embalming services. The first act seems to aim for tone of black comedy though that stops dead, so to speak, in the silent, drearily overlong embalming scene. The second act makes unconvincing stabs at serious drama.
Theoretically, the two scientists Boris Zbarsky (Martin Julien) and Vladimir Vorobiov (Hardee T. Lineham) should be our main focus, but Thiessen does nothing to engage our interest in them. They both are Jewish, but their differences are greater--Boris supported Trotsky during the Revolution while Vladimir was a tsarist. The differences in acting are also great. Lineham plays his part with completely naturalistic gravity. Julien, however, oddly the only cast member to sport a Russian accent, plays his role as if it were part of a Monty Python sketch. Janine Theriault, who plays the Nadias in the life of Lenin and the two scientists, is too weak a presence to hold her own. On the other hand, the stage lights up whenever Fox or Nelken appear. Fox plays Stalin as a idiot with power, a man ridiculous and dangerous at the same time. Nelken captures the mood that should have guided Thiessen through the play--a wry sense that human beings will always be fools no matter what their beliefs. Death, idolatry and ideology are just some of the many topics Thiessen could have explored, but when Vladimir lectures on death he describes merely the stages of physical decomposition rather than what a death means. Like Lenin’s body, Thiessen’s play has preserved the externals of an historical anecdote without conveying what originally gave it life.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-11-03.
Photo: Martin Julien, Hardee T. Lineham and Harry Nelken. ©Steve Salnikowski.
2010-11-03
Lenin’s Embalmers