Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✭✭
by David Storey, directed by Albert Schultz
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Yonge Centre, Toronto
May 17-June 20, 2012
“There’s No Place”
Soulpepper’s new production of Home offers the kind of exquisite ensemble acting that has defined the company’s best productions over the past fourteen years. The production confirms that David Storey’s play from 1970 is a masterpiece that should be much better known. Like any great work it has only gained in relevance over the years. Like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Home is the kind of play that forces us to broaden our view of what a play is and how it is constructed. Albert Schultz directs it as if it were a piece of music, masterfully guiding us through the hilarity of the opening passages to the dawning heartbreak of the ending. The compassion he feels for all five characters imbues the whole production.
Home has no plot. What draws us in are the engaging characters it presents and a series of questions. Where are we exactly? Who are these characters really? And, once we settle on provisional answers to the first two questions, we wonder “What do the characters think about their situation?”
The play begins innocently enough on Ken MacKenzie’s elegantly minimal set that divides the stage into an upper area and a lower one decorated with only two white ironwork chairs and a table. A screen on the back brick wall of the theatre shows a panorama of slowly moving, changing clouds. Here two well-turned-out men in tweeds with sweater vests and ties greet each other and proceed to have the kind of old-fashioned upper-class conversation punctuated by “By Jove!” and “You don’t say?” that you might expect to overhear in a gentleman’s club or the garden of an English country house. All that is unusual is that Harry (Michael Hanrahan) seems somewhat distrait throughout and falls into the role of listener while Jack (Oliver Dennis), the more voluble one, is noticeably intent on keeping the conversation going even when it seems Harry’s interest starts to flag. They discuss their dreams of what they hoped they would be but strangely hold off on speaking about what they actually became. The humour grows from Jack’s seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of every bizarre incident that has ever befallen even his most distant relations. The two are unwilling to contradict each other even when Harry suggests with uncharacteristic excitement that the Vale of Evesham in Worcestershire was in all likelihood the site of the biblical Garden of Eden.
As soon as Harry and Jack decide to go for a stroll, two frumpily dressed women with lower-class accents, Kathleen (Brenda Robins) and Marjorie (Maria Vacratsis) hurry in to occupy the recently vacated chairs. Their arrival shows that we are not at an upper class gentleman’s club. Their criticism that an unspecified “they” have provided only two chairs outdoors for 2000 people plus their discussion of mealtimes suggests that the setting is really some kind of institution. Precisely what kind of institution remains unclear until we learn that Marjorie habitually cries nonstop for long parts of the year, especially from before Christmas into the New Year, and that “they” have taken Kathleen’s belt and shoelaces away causing her to walk in ill-fitting shoes. Unlike the men, Marjorie and Kathleen freely discuss their lives “outside” and gossip about what the various people they know are “in here for”. The men notice the women on their various turns about the yard and eventually decide to stop and talk and escort them into lunch. Their gentlemanly propriety is severely undercut by Marjorie’s pointed contradiction of most of the personal information we learned about the two men in the first scene. A new question arises about what is and is not the truth about these characters and how we can ever learn what it is given that all four are not exactly what they seem.
Oliver Dennis, who seems unable ever to give a bad performance, is truly outstanding as Jack. The humour he derives from Jack’s emulation of gentlemanly decorum and the deadpan way he recounts the increasingly ludicrous misadventures of his extended family are absolutely priceless. Meanwhile, Michael Hanrahan makes the more taciturn Harry quite a sympathetic character. Jack’s presence seems to raise him from his torpor and Jack’s torrent of words seems to take him out of himself for a time and to revive in him a notion of what he used to be.
Storey uses the two women to provide a complete contrast to the Jack and Harry and in fact reverses the traditional gender roles of the two pairs. While the two men project façades of themselves and become weepy when contradicted, the two women appear the hardened realists by speaking openly about their present situation and what they used to like and are like now. Unlike the men, they are given to sexual joking and find double entendres in almost anything they hear. Maria Vacratsis gives an edge to everything Marjorie says. She seems to perceive the absurdity of life and chides anyone who does not. But at the same time she suggests how Marjorie’s biting satire, if turned on herself, could lead to major depression. Brenda Robins makes Kathleen a humorous figure through her uproarious overreaction to any sexual allusion, intended or not. Yet, she can suddenly state without a change in her lighthearted tone how she tried to gas herself by putting her head in the oven. Robins makes quite chilling the contrast between Kathleen’s outward silliness and her cool statements about longing for self-destruction.
Alfred, well played by Andre Sills, is the fifth character who says little, yet his actions summarize the situation of all the characters. He was supposedly a wrestler who, if we believe Marjorie, has had part of his brain removed. He enters and, after a bit of a struggle, lifts each chair and then the table triumphantly over his head, as if still trying to validate the person he once was.
Home plays on several meanings of the word. In one sense none of the characters has a home any longer. In another the institution where they now live is called a “home” by others and is their home whether they want to think is it or not. The devastating irony is that a “home” can be a place where you grew up and are comfortable or a place where those you grew up with, or society in general, has exiled you. What Storey makes clear is that the “home” where the characters live is not so much an anomalous place for social misfits as it is a microcosm of the outside world that created it. Harry’s story of the Vale of Evesham should be a reminder that according to the Bible all humankind has been exiled from home. Who, then, is to judge who belongs and who does not?
Even more than when the play was first produced we live in a world of “homes” where people have been sequestered for various reasons. During the first part of the play most people will be reminded of the residents of old folk’s homes. In certain places even young people who need long-term care or supervision like Alfred can be found there. While Storey’s play may originally have been intended as a reflection of the decline of British society, Soulpepper’s new production shows that the play has gained resonance as a critique of modern society in general that would rather exclude citizens it deems a burden or a bother instead of finding ways to include them in a more fulfilling life. It is a touching production insightfully directed and beautifully acted.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Oliver Dennis and Michael Hanrahan. ©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.
2012-05-18
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