Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✭✩
written by Anthony Black, directed by Christian Barry
2b theatre company, Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Opera Centre, Toronto
June 17-19, 2010
It’s always a pleasure when 2b theatre comes to town. The Nova Scotia company is currently presenting Anthony Black’s Homage as part of Luminato. The play is not avant garde in style like some Luminato offerings. Rather, in its own quiet, realistic way, it tells a straightforward tale that resonates with major questions about the nature, purpose and ownership of art.
The title is the name of the first major public work by Canadian sculptor Haydn Davies (1921-2008), created in 1974 for Lambton College in Sarnia and torn down by the college in 2005, a destructive act that scandalized the art world. Black’s play itself thus serves as an homage to Davies and his work. In the space of 90 minutes Black shows how Davies (Jerry Franken), encouraged by his wife Eva (Barbara Gordon), gives up his job in advertising at age 55 to become a sculptor. While Black keeps these real characters and the actual Homage as its subject, he universalizes the story by locating it in an unnamed city that commissions the work to celebrate its sesquicentennial. Through discussions between Davies and Eva, a painter, and among members of the city council in 1974 and 2005, Black brings up in quite an unforced manner scores of questions about art. Central to the building and destruction of Homage is the question whether owners of a piece of art are free to do whatever they like with their property. Or does a work of art always remain in some sense the intellectual property of its creator? Tied to this is the question of what art is worth. The city may have paid $10,000 for Homage, but at what point does the work become priceless?
Black is excellent at capturing a very specific type of Canadian philistinism that views decisions based on money and more important than those based on ideals. Franken and Gordon give lovely, nuanced portraits of the Davies couple that flout clichés both about older people and about artists. Franken makes Davies’ thoughts about his works’ and his own impermanence particularly moving. The other five members of the cast excel in multiple roles portraying the acidic politeness small town narrow-mindedness. Especially significant in a play about sculpture is that the theatre built inside the Tanenbaum Opera Centre is itself a beautifully judged sculpture created by architect Peter Blackie. Davies thought that a sculpture shaped the emptiness inside it. Directed by Christian Barry, 2b theatre has filled this void with a lively, funny-and-sad play of ideas that stays with you long after the applause has died.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-06-18.
Photo: Jerry Franken. ©Nick Rudnicki.
2010-06-18
Homage