Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✩✩
by Daniel MacIvor, directed by Dean Gabourie
Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
July 12-September 16, 2012
Kyle: “Why do you humiliate me?”
Hamilton: “Because you make it so easy.”
It’s too bad that Daniel MacIvor, one of Canada’s finest playwrights should make his long overdue debut at the Stratford Festival with one of his lesser plays. With The Best Brothers, MacIvor, who has never previously bowed to popular tastes, seems to be trying to write a popular comedy. It is because he trying to appeal to the Stratford Festival audience? Let’s hope not and believe that this lapse into superficiality is simply a minor aberration. Unlike MacIvor’s other work, The Best Brothers is a mildly funny play that only half-heartedly reaches out for greater meaning.
The story concerns the straight, uptight Hamilton Best (Daniel MacIvor), who builds condos for a living, and his gay, scatterbrained younger brother Kyle (John Beale), who sells them. In the first scene the two learn of the sudden death of their aged mother, Ardith “Bunny” Best, in a bizarre accident. The rest of the 90-minute play concerns brothers’ conflicts over the preparation for the funeral, the service itself and its aftermath. Scenes between the brothers alternate with scenes in which MacIvor and Beale takes turns delivering monologues as Bunny. Through these monologues we discover that Bunny was a wealthy, cultured and thoroughly unconventional woman. Abandoned for a younger woman by her husband when her two sons were still little, she embarked on a series of affairs to satisfy her need for love. Ultimately, the only one she found who could fulfill that role was Enzo – an Italian greyhound.
Bunny’s death plunges neither brother into deep mourning because both felt abandoned in some way by their mother’s pursuit of love with other men. MacIvor plays Hamilton as rigid and impatient, a man who has a lifetime of anger bottled up inside. Beale plays Kyle as effeminate and highly emotional and so easily distracted that it’s hard to see how he could be an effective real estate agent. It’s odd you see MacIvor writing stereotypes instead of characters. By the end he does us that Hamilton does have a softer side and that Kyle does have a hidden inner strength, but even such revelations are clichés of middlebrow comedy.
Much of the humour of the play depends on the clash of the brothers’ personalities in a simplistic manner not unlike Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. MacIvor has deliberately turned away from writing the kind of one-person plays that made him famous. Nevertheless, it is the monologues he writes for Bunny that give the play whatever richness it has and more than once I thought the whole play would be much more successful if it were reconceived as a solo play with Bunny as the central speaker. The final monologue for her in praise of the unconditional love that dogs offer, how dogs on a leash in a park seem to her like people’s hearts on a string, is the most beautiful and moving episode in the play. It also explains in retrospect how the brothers’ quarrel over Enzo is symbolically a quarrel over their mother’s heart. Understanding in retrospect the possible symbolic heft of what has been an unusually lightweight show in not, however, an effective dramatic strategy.
Julie Fox has designed the minimalist set with the clean lines of other MacIvor’s plays. An opening in the black back wall that can iris in and out, has a word of green behind it which is Bunny’s realm and contrasts with the mostly black ad white world of the brothers. She makes witty comments on the two characters by giving Kyle a black lounge chair that is curvy and impractical and Hamilton a sofa that is hard and square. Itai Erdal’s lighting design perfectly complements Fox’s set with its precise rectangles of light.
Compared with the combination of horror and comedy in his monologues like Here Lies Henry (1995) and Monster (1998), or the uncomfortable topics of multicharacter plays like Marion Bridge (1998) or How It Works (2006), The Best Brothers seems like a major step backwards in dramaturgy and theme. An uncomplicated, unchallenging play by Daniel MacIvor may please a wider audience, but it certainly doesn’t show us the best he can do.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: John Beale and Daniel MacIvor. ©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2012-07-22
The Best Brothers