Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✩✩
by Diego Matamoros & Daniel Brooks, directed by Daniel Brooks
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
May 17-June 24, 2011
The Aleph is probably more enjoyable if you don’t know the story it is based on. If you do know the famous story from 1947 by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges that gives the play its title, you may find yourself wondering when sole performer Diego Matamoros is ever going to get around to mentioning it. Hearing Matamoros relate anecdotes about his childhood and teens was an amiable way to pass the time, but I couldn’t help thinking as time wore on perhaps the Borges story was not going to appear at all. Then, about two-thirds into the 75-minute running time, the word “aleph” made its first appearance and Matamoros began a version of Borges’s tale.
Every storyteller has to make the story his own and that’s exactly what Matamoros and his co-author/director Daniel Brooks have done. How concerned you will be that there is twice as much Matamoros than Borges will depend on which of the two drew you to the show. If it is Matamoros, you will be pleased because he is, as usual, superb, and you will have the chance to hear him speak about his background for the first time. If it is Borges, you may feel that Matamoros and Brooks have hijacked the story for their own purposes and narrowed its meaning. Recently Brooks has collaborated with Rick Miller on HARDSELL in 2009 and with Daniel MacIvor on This is What Happens Next in 2010. In both cases Brooks turned the life of the single actor into an ultra-self-conscious piece of metatheatre to prove the same deconstructionist point that theatre is about theatre. That seems to be where Brooks is taking Matamoros’ life story, too, except that finally having to tell Borges’ story causes Brooks to pull back from the self-reflexive excesses that made Miller’s and MacIvor’s shows seems so self-indulgent.
Matamoros begins with an anecdote about a (fictional) Broadway production of Hamlet that was to feature a cast made up only of movie stars, except for the title role, to be filled by an unknown. This allows Matamoros to includes the line from the play, “O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space,” that form one of the two epigraphs to Borges’ story.
Following this Matamoros gives us verifiable details of his life. He is the son of a El Salvadoran diplomat. Tired of her husband’s philandering, his mother divorced him when Matamoros was nine and moved to England where she met and married a Canadian. Matamoros attended RADA in London and moved with his family to Canada. Matamoros passes around his first professional headshot taken when he was 19. He tells us he continued to visit his diplomat father every year wherever he was posted and when he was 19 this happened to be in Buenos Aires.
At this point Matamoros’ life story begins to take a fictional turn as he gradually slides into the details that will become important for Borges’ story. Just as Borges (called “Borges” in “The Aleph”) falls in love with his cousin Beatriz Viterbo, so Matamoros falls in love with his cousin Adela Beatriz Soledad. Just as Borges has to put up with the pomposity of Beatriz’s cousin Carlos, a poet, who is planning an epic poem to be called “The World”, so Matamoros has to put up with the pomposity of Beatriz’s brother Vittorio, a playwright director, who is planning an epic drama to be called “Universe, or You-In-Verse”. The changes are significant. The first allows the beloved’s name to start with “A” and thus link up with the title and also gives her a more allegorical surname. The second allows Matamoros and Brooks to turn Borges’ story into an allegory about the theatre.
What follows this long transition is basically Borges’ story with the names changed. The aleph for both is “one of the points in space that contains all other points”. What both see in this mystical point of light is exactly the same and Matamoros recitation of these sights is truly beautiful. This point is called the aleph” after the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, א, that both note “takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher”.
Oddly, Matamoros and Brooks leave out Carlos/Vittorio’s taunt that causes Borges/Matamoros to deny that he saw the aleph. The way Matamoros plays it, he has no reason not to be grateful for so amazing a vision.
As in Borges, Matamoros notes that he now believes what he saw was not a true aleph. While Borges gives examples from histories and fiction to prove his point, Matamoros cites only plays, in particular Corneille’s L’Illusion comique (1636) and Calderón’s La vida es sueño (1635). Both those plays are concerned with the question reality and illusion in theatre and in acting. It is no accident that this question is precisely what Matamoros and Brooks‘ version of “The Aleph” is all about. It’s is easy to see that the place that is all places is the theatre and the person who is all people is the actor. Matamoros and Brooks even give Vittorio a long rant to this effect when Matamoros accuses him of just sitting in a chair and doing nothing, whereas Vittorio counters that he in fact everyone doing everything.
Matamoros and Brooks can only present an interpretation of Borges’ story and it is no surprise that they should interpret it as a metaphor for the theatre. Nevertheless, by doing so they necessarily also lose a larger sense of what the aleph might symbolize. Matamoros concludes the show by finishing the beginning anecdote about the Broadway Hamlet in such a way that only reinforces his and Brooks’ particular meaning of the aleph.
One might laugh at the credit given to Michael Levine for the set and costume design when Matamoros wears a nice but ordinary jacket and trousers and the “set” on the bare stage of the Michael Young Theatre consists of only a swivel chair. Nevertheless, Brooks does have two coups de théâtres planned, that I shall not disclose--one, revealing that there is, in fact, a set, and two, having the set respond to the destruction of the aleph in an extremely effective way. Kevin Lamotte’s lighting almost imperceptibly makes a transition from complete lights up at the beginning when Matamoros is playing himself and interacts with the audience to a pinspot on part of his face in the pitch dark when Matamoros as a youth stares into the aleph.
Now that Daniel Brooks has created three theatre pieces about the theatre as theatre, I do hope that he is able to move on. A major problem with deconstruction is that it makes the same points about whatever text or genre to which it is applied. This is as repetitive as it is reductive. Matamoros’ performance lends a sense of humanity and warmth to what could easily seem an intellectual exercise. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that Brooks had appropriated Borges’ great story for his own purposes rather than exploring it for its own sake.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Diego Matamoros. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For Tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.
2011-06-24
The Aleph