✭✭✭✭✩

by Jez Butterworth, directed by Ted Dykstra

Coal Mine Theatre, Coal Mine Theatre, 982 Danforth Ave., Toronto

November 3-22, 2015

“The whole river

Listened to me, and blind,

Invisibly watched me. And held me deeper

With its blind invisible hands

‘We’ve got him,” it whispered, “We’ve got him’”

(Ted Hughes, “After Moonless Midnight” in Birthday Letters)

Coal Mine Theatre begins its second season with lyrical, enigmatic play The River from 2012.  For Torontonians who have only seen Butterworth’s early play Mojo about 1950s British gangsters, The River will seem to come out of nowhere.  But for those who saw Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2008) that immediately preceded The River, the new play will seem like a further exploration Jerusalem’s linking of the themes of myth, time and belief.  Whereas Jerusalem was epic in scale, The River is intimate and the Coal Mine Theatre gives the work a delicate, nuanced production that completely enthrals you with its mystery.

The play is located in what seems to be a naturalistic setting, an old cabin in the woods by a stream, well created in its semi-dilapidated state by designer Steve Lucas.  A character known only as The Woman (Jane Spence) tries to get The Man (David Ferry) to look at a remarkable sunset, but he is to busy getting ready to fish to notice.  It is a new moon and the perfect night to catch sea trout, his favourite fish.  Both have a literary bent.  She has brought Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927) to read.  He has a favourite poem in Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998) that he asks The Woman to read aloud.  This collection of Hughes’s was widely seen as his attempt finally to address the suicide of his wife and feminist icon Sylvia Plath.  Already the themes of loss, death and inexpressibility as linked to the image of water are established.

The second scene opens on The Man in a panic because he hasn’t been able to find The Woman.  Just when he is giving his description to the emergency line operator, he hears her returning – except that the actor who enters is Dani Kind who is playing a character known only as The Other Woman.  The Man treats The Other Woman exactly the same way he treated The Woman and the second scene seems to be a continuation of the first.  But how can it be?

Butterworth’s style easily moves between mundane exchanges and a heightened poetic prose.  In these poetic moments, whether spoken by either The Man or the women, the action of catching a fish when fly-fishing is compared to being struck by lightning, to having suddenly become one with a universal force of nature.  The Man sees fly-fishing as part of an ancient rite and cites Claudius Aelianus (c.175-235ad), who gave the first known account of the sport: “Then they throw their snare, and the fish, attracted and maddened by the colour, comes straight at it, thinking from the pretty sight to gain a dainty mouthful; when, however, it opens its jaws, it is caught by the hook, and enjoys a bitter repast, a captive”.   

As we watch we mentally search for an explanation for what we are seeing.  One solution, suggested by The Woman, is that The Man is a serial murderer.  But this view doesn’t account for all the metaphysical imagery.  Another links the women to the fishing imagery.  They are two women that The Man has caught through the illusion of love, but who get away.  This view would be borne out by The Man’s account of the first fish he ever caught which slipped away to freedom before he was aware of it. 

A third view would be that the women are two aspects of Womankind in general.  Director Ted Dykstra has made The Other Woman, who seems to have preceded The Woman much younger  than The Woman.  This gives the impression that The Man is encountering the same woman, or different women, at different ages.  The man does not change, but the woman he is with does change with time.  In this view, the play becomes almost an allegory about the relation of a human being to time. 

This notion would hardly be out of place since The Man’s citation of Claudius Aelianus immediately calls up one the best known references to a river in ancient Greek philosophy, namely the statement of Heraclitus (535-475bc) that “You could not step twice into the same river” («δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης»).  For Heraclitus the river is an emblem of constant universal change.  Yet, why does The Man return again and again to fish in the same stream, but to recapture the joy of his first catch, a joy which never afterward is wholly recoverable.  Why does he bring women to the cabin and confess a first and only love?  The reason would seem to be similar.  The wonder of this short play is that all these possible interpretations are available, plus the further notion that neither of the women may be there at all.

Director Ted Dykstra draws performances from the cast in which a superficial carefreeness hides an underlying anxiety.  David Ferry, on stage throughout, maintains this state the longest.  Ferry is such a fine actor that we somehow believe him both times when he tells each woman that she is the only woman he has ever loved.  Such sincerity is necessary to force us to reflect not on him but on the chronology of the story and the reality of the two women.  Ferry exalts us along with his character when The Man describes the ecstasy of fishing.

Jane Spidell and Dani Kind are well contrasted as the two women.  Spidell’s character is stronger, more experienced and more down to earth, while Kind’s is more fragile, more naive and more frivolous.  Both feel emotion but we sense that events affect Spidell’s character more profoundly.

Butterworth’s play is ultimately a meditation on the impossibility of recapturing or recreating in the present a prized moment from the past.  The feeling of uniting with a supreme force while catching a fish on the line is also the feeling of uniting with the power of mutability that makes nature and time what they are.  Yet, mutability is what causes the present to turn into the past and event into memory.  You enter Butterworth’s River not to find answers but to confront some of life’s most essential questions.

©Christopher Hoile

☛ Warning:  Those who sit closest to the kitchen table of the set will get a view of David Ferry gutting and preparing a real fish right under their noses.  Those who don’t wish to experience this with quite such immediacy might wish to sit elsewhere.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) David Ferry and Jane Spidell; Dani Kind and David Ferry. ©2015 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.coalminetheatre.com.