Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✭✭
by Anton Piatigorsky, directed by Chris Abraham
Crow’s Theatre with Factory Theatre,
Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
January 27-February 13, 2011
Anton Piatigorsky’s Eternal Hydra is a brilliant play and receives an immaculate production under director Chris Abraham. The play won four well-deserved Dora Awards in 2009 including Outstanding New Play but had all-too-brief a run. Now it makes a welcome return and seems even tauter than before. Like the best of Tom Stoppard, Eternal Hydra is highly intellectual, very funny and emotionally resonant all at once.
Piatigorsky takes the tendentious topic of the appropriation of voice and manages to avoid all the pitfalls of political correctness that surround it. Eternal Hydra is not a social issues play but a play about the nature of art itself. His ingenious plot involves the scholar Vivian (played with delicious comedy by Liisa Repo-Martell), who discovers the manuscript of Eternal Hydra, the encyclopedic masterpiece of James Joyce-like author Gordias Carbuncle (played by David Ferry as a Falstaff of the intellect). Vivian has lived with Carbuncle’s words for so long he has become a visible presence in her life. When she comes to sell the manuscript to a famous publisher (a wry Sam Malkin), she is abashed that he wishes to market the book alongside the latest historical novel by a female African-American writer Pauline Newberry (a vibrant, sympathetic Cara Ricketts). Newberry’s novel features Carbuncle as a character as well as a pioneering black author Selma Thomas. The discovery of Carbuncle’s diary reveals that he may have incorporated Thomas’s work into his novel. T.S. Eliot said, that “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” How can art render theft a moral act?
Like Chinese boxes, the play contains stories within stories. We shift from action in the present to enactments of the fictional and real relationships of Thomas and Carbuncle in 1930s Paris to a dramatization of the central history-based tale Thomas wrote about mid-19th-century New Orleans. Actors expertly play vivid characters in all three settings creating links rich in meaning within and among the settings. Piatigorsky wonders what idea, if any, is original and when, if ever, art does not employ the voices of others. Indeed, as Thomas’s story demonstrates, one of art’s many roles is to give a voice to the voiceless. Piatigorsky’s playful, even-handed exploration of these ideas will convince you that in Eternal Hydra he has added work of real substance to the canon of Canadian drama.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-01-28.
Photo: David Ferry and Liisa Repo-Martell. ©Robin Popkin.
2011-01-28
Eternal Hydra