Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✭✩
by Chloë Moss, directed by Jon Michaelson
Mermaid Parade, Red Sandcastle Theatre, Toronto
March 1-17, 2012
“Not everyone can be all right, Marie. The world isn’t like that.”
Mermaid Parade’s production of This Wide Night proves that great theatre can happen anywhere. Despite its romantic name, the Red Sandcastle Theatre is a storefront venue seating about 50 people on stackable chairs. They face away from the front window towards what looks like the actual back room of a former pottery shop that used to occupy this space. The bathroom that the characters refer to in the play is the actual bathroom for the theatre and to get to it you have to cross the set. Does this fairly gritty set-up in any way diminish the play being performed? No. In fact, the very grittiness of the theatre itself and of Lindsay Anne Black’s Salvation Army-furnished set only enhances the realism of the drama.
This Wide Night from 2008 by young British playwright Chloë Moss looks at a week in the life of two former inmates of a women’s prison. Marie (Claire Burns), a twentysomething subject to sudden mood swings, had a shorter sentence and has been out longer. Her filthy bedsit does have its own bathroom but otherwise the phone is broken and the sound on the TV doesn’t work. The play begins with increasingly frantic pounding on the door. Marie, for any number of reasons, is too afraid to answer it, but when it becomes more desperate she finally gives in. There is Lorraine (Astrid Van Wieren), aged 50, her former cellmate, who has sought Marie out in London, since, as becomes clear, she has nowhere else to go.
Lorraine has just been released after 12 years inside and is clearly disoriented. The two have previously interacted only in an institution, not a private flat, and neither seems quite to know what the etiquette is for acting “normal”. Lorraine has to ask for a drink, to take off her coat, to sit down, before the idea sinks in that Marie to act the host and to Lorraine, her guest. Lorraine keeps apologizing for her every misunderstood gesture or phrase so that her refrain of “Sorry” makes her seem both annoying and pathetic.
Meanwhile, Marie, sensing what Lorraine is too embarrassed to ask (i.e. to stay with her until she gets herself sorted out), is confused and irritated by the change in her living situation that Lorraine’s staying would entail. The first part of the 90-minute play is delicate dance around the question of whether Lorraine can stay. The second part concerns the question how long this “temporary” arrangement will go on.
Marie claims to have a steady job as a waitress in a pub. Lorraine, however, has no skills and no contacts left after twelve years except for her son Ben, whom she last saw when he was seven, and with whom she tries to reconnect. Other than these meagre facts, the play has no conventional plot. Instead, it is a highly detailed, compassionate look at two women who were “best mates” in one setting trying to determine how bound they are to each other in this new one.
Though we never know precisely what crimes either committed to land them inside, we do know that Lorraine functioned as a kind of mother substitute for Marie during the period when she suffered withdrawal from drugs. Marie’s dreams almost always concern visions of a mother she cannot reach. Lorraine’s motherliness alternately comforts and annoys Marie, who wants to think of herself as independent. The two women are now supposedly free, but don’t know how to act in the outside world. At the same time their friendship reminds them of a time their would like to forget, but in each other’s presence that is impossible.
A play like this about constantly, subtly shifting aspects of a relationship will only work with strong performances from both performers. And both Van Wieren and Burns are absolutely superb. Van Wieren is marvellous in communicating all the things that Lorraine would like to say but cannot. We know long before Lorraine says anything about it that she would like to stay with Marie and instantly see through all her apologies and prefabrications. Van Wieren shows that Lorraine was once a women who has some strength but is now completely broken and embarrassed by her own helplessness.
Marie is an entirely different person and what she really thinks is never quite clear. Burns shows that Marie’s contradictory behaviour derives from Marie’s attempt to present herself as self-confident and adjusted to outside world when, in fact, neither is true. Burns makes Marie’s sudden reversals of mood all too believable.
Jon Michaelson has directed the two actors with great sensitivity and insight. They brings home without preaching of any kind that the idea of resuming a “normal” life after time in prison is an idea people hold who have never experienced its reality. Lorraine and Marie may now technically be “free”, but Moss makes its achingly clear that neither feels “free” in the complex world outside or knows how to act as if they were.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Claire Burns and Astrid Van Wieren. ©2012 Virginia Macdonald.
For tickets, visit www.thiswidenight.blogspot.com.
2012-03-02
This Wide Night