Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✩✩✩
by Anosh Irani, directed by Rosemary Dunsmore
Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
March 22-April 15, 2012
“Floating on the Surface”
My Granny the Goldfish comes to Toronto laden with praise after its premiere in Vancouver in 2010. At the heart of the play is the relationship between a young man and his eccentric alcoholic grandmother. Unfortunately, that is the only aspect of the play rings true in this new production at Factory Theatre. Otherwise, the play is both written and directed as if it were a live sitcom. What might have been a gentle two person play about the wisdom of age healing the folly of youth, attempts to be a raucous farce unluckily undermined, however, by a host of factual inaccuracies and dramaturgical flaws.
Author Anosh Irani has his central character Nico (Kawa Ada) introduce himself to us through direct address. He is a hypochondriac, afraid that he is being exposed to germs everywhere. He left Bombay, where his parents live, two years ago to study business in Vancouver. (Why Irani refers to Mumbai as “Bombay” when its name was officially changed back to its precolonial Marathi name “Mumbai” in 1995, is unclear.) To his mingled pleasure and despair he develops a real medical ailment--a lymphangioma the size of an orange that must be surgically removed.
Nico retreats to his hospital bed and is soon surprised by the arrival of his Granny (Yolande Bavan), his mother’s mother, who has flown all the way from Bombay to see him. Why she has come is a mystery not revealed until Act 2. Why is parents Farzeen and Dara (Veena Sood and Sanjay Talwar) know he is in hospital but don’t know or care why is a mystery that is never revealed. Until Act 2, Granny’s main goal seems to be to entertain Nico with tales of her past and to urge him to recover with platitudes like “Never give up” or, less conventional, “Dance if all else fails”.
The only thing that can make Nico’s parents visit him is when Granny tells Farzeen, falsely, that Nico is going to marry a Chinese girl in Vancouver. This unleashes a torrent of racist anti-Chinese remarks from the parents--e.g., “You can’t tell whether they’re awake or asleep because of their eyes”--that I found extremely embarrassing. On the one hand, it’s useful to realize that Caucasians are not the only people who hold racist view of others. On the other, does belong to a minority in Canada give a writer permission to air racist views about other Canadian minorities, even if they come from the mouths of non-Canadians? If that were not all, Irani seems to find midgets a great source of humour and doesn’t mind have one character call the others “retards”.
Although Irani has set his play in a hospital, he seems to know nothing about medicine or hospital protocol. Twice, against Nico’s will, Irani has Granny goes off to speak to Nico’s doctor whereupon she returns to tells him vital information he did not know. Irani seems never to have heard of doctor-patient confidentiality. Just because a woman claiming to be a patient’s grandmother (and using a false name besides!) speaks to a patient’s doctor does not allow him to give her any information unless the patient has given her a consent form. Nico quite clearly has not. In Irani’s play the doctor in question, then, is guilty of malpractice and could have his license revoked. Irani, of course, glosses over such protocol for dramatic expedience, but here probability shows up this expedience as ignorance and calls out for a different dramaturgical solution.
In Act 2 Irani makes a major plot point out of the fact that Nico’s mother is an alcoholic because Granny drank while she was pregnant. Irani seems to have heard about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, but obviously doesn’t know what it is. Drinking while pregnant does not make the child alcoholic, instead it can cause a specific range of physical deformities and mental deficits. Although Farzeen appears quite stupid, she is clearly not a victim of FAS as Irani would have us believe. It’s fairly amazing that the play’s Vancouver dramaturge Rachel Ditor or its present one Iris Turcotte did not bother to do any fact-checking or question the characters’ deprecatory remarks about race and size.
It is good to see Afghani-Canadian actor Kawa Ada, who has played many peripheral roles at the Shaw Festival, finally play a central character. He’s good-looking, funny and brimming with vitality, so much so that it is a bit difficult to imagine him as a hypochondriac. Yolande Bavan is an ideal choice for Granny. The character may be aged in years but she is still as flirtatious, inquisitive and given to improprieties as a young girl. Yet, Bavan shows that behind this eccentric behaviour wisdom and insight lurk, ready to speak out when the time is right.
Veena Sood and Sanjay Talwar are both fine actors, but here all they offer are caricatures. Sood, who created the role of Farzeen in Vancouver, gives absolutely no hint that Farzeen is an alcoholic. Much of this is due to Irani’s writing. He makes Farzeen so hyperactive in word in deed that she seems rather to be on uppers than addicted to a depressant like alcohol. Talwar has made Dara into an innocent dope and it would be quite funny if I hadn’t seen this same shtick several times before.
John Thomson has created a fine looking set for Nico’s hospital room but has not solved the problem of where to put the set also needed for Nico’s parents’ apartment in Bombay. He has they squished together on a too-small sofa stage left watching a television at least twenty feet away stage right on the other side of Nico’s room. When the room has to appear again in Act 2, it is behind the hospital curtain where another patient is supposed to be.
The play ends wonderfully with Nico’s Granny dancing off while singing an Indian tune. That is, it would end wonderfully here, but Irani adds two more unnecessary scenes that spoil the mood. In Canada we are lucky that so many immigrants and children of immigrants from India have used the stage to explore life in that country and in Canada. The plays of Anusree Roy, Anita Majumdar and Sunil Kuruvilla come immediately to mind. My Granny the Goldfish in its present form is simply not in the same league as the best work of these authors. If Irani were willing to eliminate the poorly written characters of the parents and turn the play into a memory play involving just Nico and Granny, he could rescue what the core of the play that n its own would be both more authentically funny and more touching.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Kawa Ada and Yolande Bavan. Photo ©2012 Nicola Betts.
For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.
2012-03-23
My Granny the Goldfish