Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✩✩✩
by Daniel MacIvor, directed by Ross Manson
Volcano with BeMe Theatre (Munich), Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto
February 27-March 9, 2014;
Grand Theatre, Kingston
March 12-23, 2014
“Not Enough is Not Enough”
Daniel MacIvor’s play A Beautiful View was last seen in Toronto in 2009 in a remount of its first Canadian production from 2006 directed by the playwright. Many playgoers will still remember the exquisite performances that Caroline Gillis and the late Tracy Wright gave as the play’s only characters. The production now playing in Toronto was first mounted in 2012 by Volcano as the European premiere of the play at the BeMe Theatre, an English-language theatre in Munich. While it is good that a theatre company brought MacIvor’s play to Europe, the present production pales in all respects compared to MacIvor’s own production.
In 2006 the Caroline Gillis’s character was know only as “M” and Tracy Wright’s as “L.” In 2009 “M” became “Mitch” and “L” became “Liz”. In the current Volcano production the characters have no names. Since the two women’s names are never mentioned in the play, this is fair, but for the sake of clarity I will go back to MacIvor’s most recent version and call the two Mitch and Liz.
During the play’s 75 minutes on a bare alley stage we watch Mitch (Amy Rutherford) and Liz (Becky Johnson) re-enact and comment upon the key moments of their 10-year relationship. Why they are re-enacting the past and for whom is never clear. The answer to where this play, like so many of MacIvor’s, is actually taking place is the same as where Samuel Beckett’s plays take place – in the theatre.
Mitch and Liz first meet by chance at an outdoor outfitters store and both lie about what they do. Mitch says she is a bartender when in fact she is a waitress at an airport restaurant and Liz says she is in a band when in fact she works in a record store and just dreams of forming a band. They both agree that lying is just “wishful thinking.” Both women think of themselves as straight and worry that the other may be a lesbian. Yet, after several meetings and a night of drinking they drift into a one-night stand. Mitch drifts into and out of a marriage while Liz drifts into and out of employment. As years pass they meet intentionally and unintentionally until Liz notices that they have become “a couple.” One night at a Halloween party something happens that splits them apart. “Time passes” as the refrain in their narration goes until a chance encounter brings the opportunity for a reconciliation.
MacIvor’s story is not extraordinarily exciting and his dialogue is often trivial. It is not important whether Mitch and Liz do or do not form a ukulele band. What is important is the attitude the two women have toward each other, whether they feel they are or are not together. The central question the play poses is what is and is not a relationship and whether attempts at defining it do more harm than good. The view of the characters is that whatever is is and that people make definitions not for themselves but for others.
In bringing off a play with a slight plot and inconsequential dialogue, what is absolutely key is tone. And this is exactly what Manson and his cast miss completely. The tone of what is said and done is not slight or inconsequential at all. Rutherford and Johnson only give us the sense that they are enacting events, never that they are re-enacting events and thus are burdened with the consciousness of how these events will develop. Totally missing from the production is an atmosphere of doom. The play does begin, after all, with the sound of a bear roaring and the screams of women. In 2009 Gillis and Wright were able to convey a melancholy that underlay all the humour of the action so that the triviality of the language pointed to a larger fear that could not be clearly formulated rather than to the intellectual inadequacies of the characters.
Because Manson and his cast miss the tone that gives the play its depth, the play comes offs as a rather superficial romp not unlike the précis for a sitcom. Johnson seems intent on making Liz as wacky as possible with wild awkward gestures and a rapid speech pattern that causes her to glide over words that deserve more emphasis. She never approaches the underlying hopelessness that Wright easily conveyed in the same role. Rutherford plays Mitch as the more contemplative and mysterious of the two, but she comes close to but never quite captures the existential fear that Gillis no naturally evoked.
Where Manson does succeed is in picking up the bear motif that runs throughout the play. While he skips over other important phrases, he does make significant pauses when Mitch compares her fear of bears, that she shares with Liz, to her fear of emotions. By doing this, Manson helps lend ambiguity to MacIvor’s otherwise bizarre conclusion. He also is quite aware of the double-edged nature of Mitch’s motto “Nothing is enough” that gains in meaning with every repetition.
Anyone lucky enough to have seen Gillis and Wright in 2006 or in 2009 will certainly be disappointed and surprised that a play that had so much resonance under MacIvor can seem so superficial under such an otherwise insightful director like Manson. Fans of MacIvor who happened to miss the previous productions will likely want to see this to fill in their knowledge of one of the country’s more important playwrights, even if this production brings out so little of what makes the play powerful. It’s rather like seeing Pinter acted without the pauses that lend ordinary language such an unsettling atmosphere. Volcano has presented such exciting work in the past, we will just have to hope that it returns to form in the near future.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Amy Rutherford and Becky Johnson. ©2012 Hilda Lobinger.
For tickets, visit http://volcano.ca.
2014-02-28
A Beautiful View