Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
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by Tim Luscombe, directed by Brendan Healy
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
September 18-October 6, 2013
“Pirandello Does BDSM”
The 2013/14 season has only just started and Buddies in Bad Times is presenting what is certain to be the most controversial play of the season. Buddies is staging the world premiere of PIG by British playwright Tim Luscombe because no theatre in Britain would touch the play. At a time when gay people are winning greater acceptance equal rights in western countries, Russia excepted, Luscombe’s PIG presents a view of part of the gay BDSM subculture that many people, gay and straight, will find extremely disturbing. The play presents explicit discussions, though not depictions, of corporal punishment to the point of bleeding and breaking bones, anal penetration with knives and baseball bats, “pig sex” where men are turned on by others they find physically disgusting, “bug chasing” where HIV- men deliberately seek infection along with fantasies of murder and dismemberment.
The subject matter is so troubling that PIG should be no one’s first gay play. Anyone seeking a gay play that shows gay men in a more positive light should rush to catch Soulpepper’s Angels in America before it closes on September 28. PIG is a play for those already secure in their sexuality who are willing not only to acknowledge that there is an extreme fringe among practitioners of BDSM but also to see that aspects of BDSM are present even in normal sexuality. Some of the earliest love poems speak of love as an exquisite pain or as a disease. We only have to think of songs like Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” (1972), Van Halen’s “Love is the Source of Infection” (1988) or Leona Lewis’s “Bleeding Love” (2007) among innumerable examples to realize how pain and disease are used as metaphors for love. Think also of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV that begins, “Batter my heart, three-personed God: and concludes, “I, Except you enthral me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” What makes PIG so unsettling is that for the characters these are not metaphors but the real means for experiencing what they call love.
If we can take a more general view of the subject matter, everyone knows that BDSM involves role-play. Luscombe makes role-play part of the very structure of his work since each of the three actors plays at least three roles. On one level, we meet three characters, all writers, all involved in a complex relationship. Joe (Paul Dunn) has already written a successful novel. Stevie (Blair Williams), 18 years Joe’s senior, is writing a play set to be produced. The two get married in the course of the action much to the dismay of Harry (Bruce Dow), who calls Joe the “love of his life”. We see Joe and Stevie meet and one of the 12-step programmes they follow after being apart for eight years. They both have sought help for addiction to sex, drugs and alcohol.
Depending on what you believe, Stevie’s play is based on his own past or on the past of a man called Taylor (Blair Williams). The first dialogue in the play is set in an online chatroom where Taylor meets a 16-year-old called Luc (Paul Dunn). Taylor is a professional sadist while Luc earns money as a masochist. Taylor thinks they are the perfect team and coins new names for them – “Knife” for himself and “Pig” for Luc. Among Pig’s regular clients is Larry (Bruce Dow), who pays to wrap Pig in cellophane and beat him until he’s black and blue.
The more unsettling aspect of Pig’s desires is that he wants Knife to infect him with HIV as proof of Knife’s love. Pig feels that thus knife will thus “impregnate” him with the disease and change his life creating an even stringer bond between them. Larry, who is also a voyeur, will pay to see this happen and Knife arranged a “conversion party” where HIV+ men, including Knife, will take turns having bareback sex with Pig. Larry thinks that to see a young healthy man infected will be a huge turn-on. Soon, however, he wants an even bigger turn-on – to see a young man killed. Knife is willing to do this and so is Pig. For Pig this will be the ultimate proof of Knife’s love for him and his for Knife. If this seems extreme, we only need to think of Romeo and Juliet’s final speeches or look at a novel like Yukio Mishima’s Kyoko’s House (1959) to find just two of numerous parallels in literature.
What makes the play potentially difficult to follow is that scenes are not always in chronological order and those featuring Joe and Stevie are interleaved with those of Knife and Pig and with scenes from Stevie’s play in which Knife and Pig are characters. Director Brendan Healy and the cast make following the parallel stories easier by having Stevie, Joe and Harry all speak in upper class British accents with having Knife, Pig and Larry speak in lower class East End accents. Indeed, without making this distinction the action would be almost impossible to follow.
While Act 1 is very powerful, Act 2 becomes repetitive and takes an unnecessary tack. It is clear that although Luscombe’s subject matter may be gay BDSM, his real topic is the ancient difficulty in distinguishing reality from illusion. The three layers of action in Act 1 already make this hard enough. In Act 2, however, he quite artificially sets up a scene where the low-class characters Knife and Larry meet the high-class character Joe. This contrivance pretty much ruins the who-is-who parallel between the lower-class and upper-class couples since the lower-class Knife meeting Joe for the first time cannot be the same as the upper-class Stevie.
The situation is made worse in the second last scene that Healy stages in an entirely different way from the rest of the play. Designed by James Lavoie, the play had begun in front of a red velvet curtain in a small proscenium. The curtain opened to reveal a completely minimalist set open to the back and side walls of the theatre. Only a couple chairs or a table would set the scene and the idea of a room would be conveyed by a door standing alone in a doorframe. The lack of a set has made us have to decide with each scene when and where it takes place and whether it is “really” happening only in Stevie’s play.
Until the second-last scene that doorframe had been parallel or perpendicular to the stage opening. In the second last scene, however, and only in that scene, the doorframe is on a diagonal. Only in that scene do the ironing board (stage left) and Stevie’s desk (stage right) switch places. The set thus presents a skewed reverse of Joe and Stevie’s flat.
Besides this, Healy directs the actors to take on a histrionic tone and broad gestures they use in no other scene. Here Luscombe uses the kind of melodramatic trick of one character overhearing important information that he otherwise avoids. Thus, we are meant to ask if this scene with the people we thought were “real” is real or not, while the final scene, which is staged in all too realistic a fashion, has a character complain that he feels like a characters written by an author. Obviously, Luscombe and Healy’s intent is for us not to know by the end what is or is not real. The result, however, is an extremely unsatisfying conclusion where we don’t know what happens in the main Stevie-Joe plot we have followed for two hours.
Neither Paul Dunn nor Bruce have been offered such rich roles at Stratford. Dunn dismays us with Pig’s complete disregard for self and total obsession with pain and disease. Dunn makes us feel that Pig needs to feel pain in order to feel alive. The horrible thing is that Dunn makes Pig’s veneration of harm and self-negation so believable. As Joe, Dunn shows us submissiveness on a different level. Joe gives Stevie loyalty and intelligence while Stevie gives Joe infidelity and abuse.
Bruce Dow plays two main characters who are polar opposites. As the nearly inarticulate lout Larry, who wants to watch Pig be infected and later wants to watch him killed, he radiates malevolence and is absolutely chilling. As Joe’s ex-lover Harry he uses old-school camp and delivers a long comic speech about how being gay was more fun when gays were regarded as criminals. Dow neatly distinguishes these two from his other two roles, both tricks of Pig – Barry, a timid sadist who is really a masochist, and Garry, a man with cerebral palsy who seems more turned on by his stereo system than by sex.
The presence of three extraordinary performances only makes one wish that Act 2 were not such a let-down. Since Luscombe doesn’t really have enough material to fill a second act, he should cut the repetition, the thematic underlining and above all the plot contrivances to create a one-act, 90-minute play. Pirandello’s plays pretty much covered all the questions in modern drama concerning “Is it real life or a play?” or “Is he actually mad or just acting mad?” Luscombe need not repeat these points. His focus on a subculture’s definitions of love, trust and self-worth is provocative enough.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (top) Blair Williams, Bruce Dow and Paul Dunn; (middle) Blair Williams and Paul Dunn. ©2013 Jeremy Mimnagh.
For tickets, visit http://buddiesinbadtimes.com.
2013-09-19
PIG