Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✩✩
by Amy Herzog, directed by Jason Byrne
The Company Theatre with Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
April 10-May 4, 2014
“If Your Marriage is Shaky, Don’t Play with Knives”
The Company Theatre has had a history of selecting intellectually and emotionally challenging dramas. It made its debut with Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark in 2005 and has since presented such searing plays as David Eldridge’s Festen in 2008 and Andrew Bovell’s complex Speaking in Tongues in 2012. With Belleville, a play by American Amy Herzog, it has become a bit more populist in choosing what is simply an old-fashioned thriller in modern dress. In fact, when the play had its world premiere at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2012, the director Anne Kaufman had the cast watch such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) and George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) to prepare. Unlike those films, however, Belleville is not a very satisfying experience.
Recently wed Americans Zack (Allan Hawco) and Abby (Christine Horne) have moved to Paris because Zack has a grant to help eradicate AIDS in children by working with Doctors Without Borders. Abby, meanwhile, once an actor, has been leaving home to teach yoga classes although she no longer has any students.
One day she arrives home early, having no one to teach, only to find Zack there watching porn on his laptop. The fact that he is watching porn is not quite as disturbing to her as his not being at work. Abby is already in a delicate mental state. Shortly after she and Zack married, Abby had a breakdown and had been taking antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications ever since. She has decided to go off her meds and is now experiencing irritability and paranoia due to withdrawal. Though it had been her dream to visit Paris because her parents once went there, Abby is not enjoying her stay. She and Zack are renting an apartment in the culturally diverse Belleville area in the northeast of the city, but Abby still feels like an alien. She has stopped taking French classes and hates shopping. Zack, in contrast, has made friends with their Muslim landlord Alioune (Dalmar Abuzeid) and his wife Amina (Marsha Regis), whom Abby thinks hates her. Friendship extends only so far, and as the action begins, Alioune arrives to demand that Zack pay the last four months rent or he will have to evict him.
Every thriller has a certain unbelievability quotient, but for Belleville this quotient is unusually high. Médecins Sans Frontières may have begun in France, but its headquarters are now in Geneva. Paris is one of five operational centres where decisions are made. How can Zack, fresh out of medical school be working at one of these centres rather than in the field in Africa? Zack and Abby are in France on single-entry visas which causes Abby anxiety because if she leaves France she can’t return without applying for another visa. Her sister is about to have a baby and she is distraught that she can’t be there when the baby is born. Yet, since her sister was five months pregnant when she and Zack left, how did she not realize the implications of a single-entry visa before she left the US?
As usual in a thriller, the greatest revelations are left for last and in this case they are so unbelievable as to provoke laughter. Not to give anything away, it beggars belief that Abby could not have known about Zack before they even left the US. Herzog’s main excuse for Abby’s gullibility is the medications she is taking. But antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs are used to bring a patient back to a normal level of functioning not to make them stupid and incurious.
Even if Belleville feels more like a made-for-TV movie than a play, it is very well designed, directed and acted. The set Yannik Larivée has created suggests a modernized top-floor flat in an old French apartment building without being naturalistic. There is a separation between the left and right portions of the set that allow the cyclorama to show through, thus scenically depicting the division between Zack and Abby. He has the inside of a mansard roof decline inwards at a steep angle to reinforce the claustrophobia of the setting. Lighting designer Kevin Fraser has devised a brilliant method for the scenes changes. A light as if shining through a skylight shifts off the characters in the previous scene leaving them in darkness, careers about the set until it lands again on the characters who will begin the next scene.
Director Jason Byrne has drawn such nuanced performances from the entire cast one might think her were directing Chekhov or Tom Murphy. Publicity emphasizes that Belleville is a chance to see Allan Hawco, star of the television series The Republic of Doyle, live on stage, but then Hawco is the co-founder with Philip Riccio of The Company Theatre and has only been absent from the Toronto stage since Festen in 2009. Fortunately, his involvement in television has not impaired his effectiveness on stage. His Zack has a furtive look about him from the first and he shows us in detail how Zack crumbles inside as his trail of lies unravels.
Christine Horne has become an expert at playing troubled female characters. What is especially intriguing about her here is how she conveys Abby’s mercurial temperament as it is influenced through the unpleasant facts she encounters along with alcohol and her withdrawal from drugs. Her Abby is a woman who is painfully aware she is not fully in control of herself and takes her anger out both on herself and Zack. Her Abby is deeply unsettling since we never quite know what she will do next and Horne makes us feel that Abby herself does not know.
Dalmar Abuzeid and Marsha Regis are excellent as the Americans’ French landlords. Abuzeid makes us feel how painful it is for him to change his role from friendship to business with Zack. Regis shows that Anima has an instinctive distrust of these privileged newcomers who repeatedly show they can’t be trusted to abide by simple rules.
While Herzog shows a great sense for how twentysomethings today speak, including their general difficulty in expressing their concerns succinctly, she strangely doesn’t quite know how to end the play. The action concludes with a very short scene in French between Alioune and Amina which doesn’t tell French-speakers any more than non-French-speakers about what has finally happened to Abby and Zack. It is an unsatisfying conclusion to a play that may wish to pay homage to the great psychological thrillers of the past but is simply not in their league.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Allan Hawco and Christine Horne; Allan Hawco and Christine Horne. ©2014 Guntar Kravis.
For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.
2014-04-16
Belleville