Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✩✩
by Kate Cayley, directed by Alan Dilworth
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
March 30-May 1, 2011
Director Alan Dilworth has staged Kate Cayley’s After Akhmatova in a beautifully designed production and has drawn fine performances from the entire cast. If the result is emotionally uninvolving and generates little tension, the fault is the lack of conflict in Cayley’s text.
Cayley sets up a framework where American academic Alan (Paul Dunn) travels to Leningrad in 1968 to interview Lev Gumilyov (Eric Goulem) about his famous mother, the poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), and her masterpiece Requiem, written while he was imprisoned under Stalin in a Siberian labour camp. The interview between the two fades into flashbacks of past events. Tom Stoppard has used this device in both Arcadia (1993) and Indian Ink (1995) where people in the near present try to understand events in the past. In Stoppard this generates humour and irony since the modern folk must drop their preconceptions to find out what their forebears really did. In Cayley this generates neither because Cayley is on Alan’s side in trying to convert Lev to the view that Anna (Sarah Orenstein) wrote Requiem as a sign of love for Lev even if she seemed an uncaring mother during his life. Alan’s convoluted argument is that she immortalized him in a work of art and art lasts longer and than any one human life. Thus, Cayley’s play does not pose a question for us to grapple with but seeks to answer it and, disappointingly, does so with a commonplace.
The interview frame is flawed not just because of its contrivance but because Alan tapes more of his own cogitations than he actually interviews Lev. In the flashbacks, as in Fahrenheit 451, Anna and her friends must memorize rather than write down poetry the authorities would deem subversive, but it is hard to translate the urgency of memorizing into dramatic urgency. Yet some flashbacks do succeed as finely wrought mini-dramas. The single most moving of these depicts the arrest of poet Osip Mandelstam (Richard McMillan) when his wife (Caroline Gillis) feeds him for what may be their last time together. This one largely-silent scene does more to convince us of Stalin’s terror and the motivation behind Akhmatova’s poetry than all of Alan’s agonized sermonizing.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-03-31.
Photo: Paul Dunn, Eric Goulem, Claire Calnan, Sarah Orenstein, Caroline Gillis and Richard McMillan. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2011-03-31
After Akhmatova