Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✭✩
by David Mamet, directed by László Marton
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
February 3-March 19, 2011
With Oleanna, David Mamet lobbed a theatrical Molotov cocktail into the already flaming battles in 1992 over political correctness. Those battles are still smouldering and Soulpepper’s riveting production shows that the play is as incendiary as ever though with much broader implications than it had 19 years ago.
The play’s first audiences may have been surprised that the groves of academia harbour as much propaganda as learning, but Soulpepper’s production takes for granted that the world of the play’s two characters is already askew, as evidenced by Teresa Przybylski’s off-kilter set of slanting, unconnected walls. Here occur three meetings between John (Diego Matamoros), a university professor of education, and Carol (Sarah Wilson), one of his students. Carol has come to John because she is failing his course that she must pass. Both actors give such natural performances we feel as if we’re eavesdropping on private conversations. Wilson’s awkward posture and many tics suggest that Carol’s fear that she is “stupid” is bound up with deeper, never revealed personal problems. Matamoros comes across as sincere and sympathetic if slightly naive.
Since, in the second scene, Carol will accuse John of sexual harassment and worse, our interpretation of the whole play depends on how the first is directed. Contrary to some productions, director László Marton does not have John show the slightest sexual interest in Carol. Putting an arm around her is meant solely to comfort her in distress. Thus, when John later reads the formal complaint Carol has filed against him on behalf of her mysterious “group,” Marton has shown us that Carol has misconstrued every detail of what actually occurred.
Marton can’t explain the play’s greatest flaw--Carol’s 180-degree change from cowering and inarticulate to poised and versed in legalese, in the shift from scene one to two. Also, without giving John a hint of dubious motivation, the play seems overwhelmingly stacked in John’s favour. But Mamet is being deliberately provocative. Like the witch trials in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), Oleanna deals with what happens in a hierarchical society when merely to be accused is to be guilty. John says that people view everything through the “screen” of their own beliefs. The play dramatizes an extreme outcome of this as well as asking whether people have so politicized language and gesture that they no longer can communicate with civility or, indeed, at all--a question still painfully topical today.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-02-04
Photo: Sarah Wilson and Diego Matamoros. ©Bruce Zinger.
2011-02-04
Oleanna