Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✭✩
by August Strindberg, adapted by David Grieg, directed by Rae Ellen Bodie
The Coal Mine, Coal Mine Theatre, Toronto
April 28-May 17, 2015
Gustav: “A husband can never really know his wife”
The Coal Mine concludes its exciting first season with a riveting production of August Strindberg’s Creditors. The play was first produced in 1889, the year after Strindberg’s best know work, Miss Julie, but Strindberg considered Creditors his best play, most likely because of the elegant simplicity of its structure. It is surprising that the Shaw Festival, the natural home for this play, has never staged it, and neither has the Stratford Festival nor Soulpepper. In fact, the play has not been staged in Toronto since 1999, so for those wishing to fill in their knowledge of drama or for anyone interested in a thought-provoking high-tension psychological thriller, this is not a play to miss.
The three-person drama consists of three scenes of about equal length each between only two characters. In this it is one of the more formally structured of all of Strindberg’s plays. In a technique pioneered by Strindberg in The Father (1887) and Miss Julie, stage time equals real time. This means that once the tension starts to mount there is no escape from it either for the characters or for the audience.
The action begins at the start of the last half hour of a six-hour-long conversation that the artist Adolph (Noah Reid) has been having with his visitor Gustav (Hardee T. Lineham). Adolph’s wife Tekla (Liisa Repo-Martell), a novelist, has been gone for a week during which Adolph’s spirits have declined as usual in her absence. Besides that, he has had an exhibition of his latest paintings which was not well received. Adolph is already in a physically weakened state and needs crutches to walk, so the onset of depression is even harder to bear. The dialogue begins with Adolph thanking Gustav, whom he met by accident, for encouraging him out of his depression. Following Gustav’s advice Adolph has given up painting for sculpture, but Gustav thinks Adolph should also give up Tekla as he paints her as a malign influence.
When Tekla arrives, we realize that our minds have been poisoned against her as much as Adolph’s and we have to separate how Gustav presented her from how we experience her in person. It soon becomes clear that Gustav has exaggerated Tekla’s bad points all out of proportion and that Tekla is much more of a healing influence on the weakened Adolph than Gustav claimed her to be.
When Adolph exits and Gustav enters, Gustav’s conversation with Tekla casts his earlier conversation with Adolph in an entirely new light, and the tension that had been steadily building becomes almost unbearable.
Seeing a play like Creditors makes us realize that Edward Albee’s depiction of game-playing between men and women, Pinter’s use of language as weapon in fighting for territory and Mamet’s use of language as a means to achieve dominance all derive from Strindberg’s realization that people use language as much to mislead and entrap as to communicate. The fact that the second two conversations in Creditors are being overheard lends them a theatricality that later playwrights like Beckett develop by showing that all verbal exchanges between people involve some degree of role playing and self-dramatization.
Director Rae Ellen Bodie stages the play with the audience seated on three sides of the playing area, thus only heightening the claustrophobic atmosphere the characters inhabit. All three actors give masterful performances. Hardee T. Lineham radiates menace as a man who enjoys manipulating other people and undermining their most cherished beliefs apparently for the sheer malice of doing so. In this he functions like an Iago who seeks to destroy both the Othello of Adolph and the Desdemona of Tekla by shattering their faith in each other and themselves, a practice that Strindberg called “Psychic Murder”. To this end Lineham adopts entirely different approaches – an increasingly bullying tone with Adolph, an initially meek and conciliatory tone with Tekla – that makes us aware of how premeditated the evil is that he does.
As Tekla, Liisa Repo-Martell is wonderful in exuding the enigmatic air that the men ascribe to her. Contrary to what Gustav says of her, we don’t see a malicious side to her at all. If she takes charge in her relationship with Adolph it is because he is weak, but her love for him is never in doubt even if her view of morals is less strict than his. Repo-Martell plays Tekla as a woman full of life and healing as opposed to Gustav as a man full of death and harm. Repo-Martell plays the moment when Tekla realizes how Gustav has manipulated her with such shock it galvanizes the whole audience.
If there is a difficulty with the production it is that the nature of the play is not firmly enough established in the scene between Gustav and Adolph that begins the play. Opening night audiences tend to be giddy with excitement and this led to its reacting to the first scene as if it were a comedy. A strange man with outrageous views versus a weak man who too willingly accepts them could be seen as comic except that in this play it is not. What should be much clearer is that Gustav is verbally and psychologically bullying Adolph. Viewed that way their interaction is not comic at all. It is possible that director Rae Ellen Bodie allows Lineham to be too forceful too soon and too often so that we don’t realize that his extreme views are not a sign of mere eccentricity but of sheer malice in trying to entice Adolph as far from his true beliefs as possible.
Otherwise, the production is powerful and disturbing. It would be nice to think that Strindberg’s incisive portrayal of “psychic murder” in the domestic sphere had died out in the 19th century, but as we known too well, the same techniques of manipulating people to divide and control them have only increased in both the private and public spheres. Creditors is thus far ahead of its time in so clearly envisioning language as a weapon of malice.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Liisa Repo-Martell and Noah Reid; Hardee T. Lineham and Noah Reid; Liisa Repo-Martell as Tekla. ©2015 Michael Cooper.
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2015-04-29
Creditors