Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✭✭
by Roland Schimmelpfennig, translated by David Tushingham, directed by Ross Manson
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
January 18-February 19, 2012
“This Dragon Breathes Fire”
You must see The Golden Dragon. It’s a brilliant play in a brilliant production. If you saw Volcano’s production of Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God at Luminato in 2010 or its remount at Canadian Stage in 2011, you will know that the German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig is an important, groundbreaking playwright. Director Ross Manson, a longtime friend of the playwright, proves to be particularly attuned to his art.
When you enter the Tarragon Theatre Mainspace you find that the seating area has been divided into two sections facing a playing area in the middle dominated by a long narrow table with drawers holding many secrets designed by Teresa Przybylski. You could be forgiven for thinking you were about to see a remount of Theatre Smash’s outstanding production of The Ugly One by Schimmelpfennig’s compatriot Marius von Mayenburg that played in Tarragon’s Extra Space last year. The two plays do have similarities. Both are composed of a myriad of very short scenes and require the actors to switch rapidly from role to role and both are parables that take a take a subject of current interest and universalize it.
The Golden Dragon (2009) takes place in the Chinese-Vietnamese-Thai restaurant of the title and in the apartments of various of the restaurant’s clients in the same building. The principal story seems simple enough. The New Boy from China (Anusree Roy), one of the five people working in the cramped kitchen, has a terrible toothache. Since he’s an illegal immigrant, he can’t go to the dentist, so the staff try to figure out what they can do to stop his screams of pain. They decide they’ll have to extract the tooth themselves.
Intercut with this story are several others. An aged man (David Yee) wants to tell his granddaughter his greatest wish, but can’t remember it. She, in turn, has something important to tell him. Two female flight attendants (Tony Nappo and David Fox) eat at the restaurant after a long flight, but have nothing to say to each other. The Man in the Striped Shirt (Anusree Roy) is furious that he wife (Tony Nappo) wants to leave him for another man. The husband of a young couple (Dvid Fox) reacts badly when his wife (Lili Francks) tells him she’s pregnant. Henry (Lili Francks), the owner of a convenience store next to the restaurant, invites the Man in the Striped Shirt over to his apartment to see a secret room.
Intermingled with these realistic stories is what seems to be an animal fable of the Cricket (David Yee) and the Ant (Lili Francks). It is winter and the Ant has stores of food but the Cricket has none. The Cricket’s only skills are cleaning and dancing. The Ant decides to let the Cricket work in exchange for food. The Ant decides that he can make even more money if he rents out the services of the Cricket to other ants and lets them pay to do anything they want to the Cricket for a price. In the course of the play’s 90 minutes, the story about the New Boy and his tooth gradually becomes less realistic and the fable of the Cricket and the Ant becomes more realistic so that by the end we know who the Cricket and the Ant really are.
Schimmelpfennig has taken the current topics of rising Sinophobia and concern about illegal immigration and fashioned his parable and his fable within a parable to examine human exploitation of other human beings. He makes us ask what causes one group of people to view another group as expendable. For obvious reasons German plays since the end of World War II have grappled with this question, but younger German playwrights now shudder to find examples of this kind of thinking all over the world. It’s more than ironic that the United States, once so proud of its open borders, should be building a fence to keep undesirables out. The presence of the flight attendants in the play suggests that it is no longer possible to prevent the movements of peoples across borders.
While Schimmelpfennig may focus on exploitation of people because of race, he is also aware that that basis of this thinking occurs within any relationship between people. The one flight attendant Eva (David Fox) is aware that her boyfriend (Anusree Roy) demeans her. But she also wonders why she has so little self-respect that she encourages it. As in Peggy Pickit, Schimmelpfennig wants to instil greater awareness in the audience the spurious reasoning that determines that some people are inferior to others and somehow worth less than their fellow human beings.
The genius of the play and its production is how they oppose each other. In the production the five actors are cast in roles regardless of their age, sex and race. The production itself, in the world of art, represents an ideal world where none of these things matter. In the world of the play, all these attributes slot people into immutable categories and with the categories come prejudices. Schimmelpfennig makes quite clear that the old man, the young husband and the Man in the Striped Shirt all take out their frustrations with their personal lives by harming the Chinese person called the Cricket. The Cricket is abused but ridiculed for allowing herself to be abused.
Manson carefully guides the play from hilarious comedy of its beginning to through the gradual change of tone to tragedy in the end. His ability to juggle the many stories and yet keep each of them clear is above praise. So is the ability of the five actors to morph so precisely from role to role with such ease. Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound cues and Rebecca Picherack’s lighting are essential in immediately establishing each time and place.
In terms of innovative dramaturgy and exploration of theme, The Golden Dragon is one of the most exciting plays the Tarragon has presented in years. It’s a play and production that is sure to inspire audiences, playwrights and director alike.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Lili Francks, Tony Nappo, Anusree Roy, David Yee and David Fox. ©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For Tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.
2012-01-19
The Golden Dragon