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by Mark Ravenhill, directed by Jill Harper

Cue6, Toronto Fringe Festival, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

July 2-11, 2015;

Best of Fringe, Toronto Centre for the Arts

July 21, 22 & 24, 2015;

The Citadel, 304 Parliament Street, Toronto

September 29-October 15, 2017

“I’m glad the art’s over so we can start being human”

Gore Vidal once said, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies”.  This is the fundamental view of human nature at its worst that forms the basis of British playwright Mark Ravenhill ’s pool (no water).  Ravenhill exposes and probes all the fissures that form when one member of a group of friends gains wealth and fame and the others do not.  The hour-long play from 2006 is a scathing satire of modern art and artists and a portrait of envy, self-obsession and the objectification of others.  It is brilliantly performed by an anonymous four-member chorus (Sarah Illiatovitch-Goldman, Allison Price, Daniel Roberts and Chy Ryan Spain)* who move as one as they speak Ravenhill’s harsh, poetic lines.  The play is cringingly funny as the central situation goes from bad to unimaginably worse.

In this Cue6 production the show begins with the four friends sitting in white outdoor chairs facing us directly as they tell their collective story.  Clever rearrangement of the chairs along white table [a gurney in 2017] is all that is needed to evoke the many different locations.  The four speakers were all part of a group of artists in “the bohemian quarter” of a large city with a fifth who, as they complain, is now “absent”.  The fifth, whose art made use of real objects, is now absent from them because she has achieved fame and success and lives elsewhere in a grand house with a pool.  The fact that she has become so wealthy as to be able to afford a pool is particularly irksome to the four friends left behind, still doing art and hospice work. 

The growing resentment of the fifth’s success is tested when all four receive an invitation to visit her at her grand home and use her pool.  All four go and and Ravenhill gleefully analyses the mental gymnastics the four go through to justify pretending to be friends with the fifth while secretly despising her and her newly acquired grand way of behaving towards them. 

On the first night of their stay, their hostess is injured in a terrible accident.  From the moments after the accident through her two months in hospital, the feelings of the four friends turn quickly away from empathy to a desire to document what their “friend” now looks like – no longer elegant and beautiful, but a bruised, broken body, so swollen she is unrecognizable, so damaged she may not live.  Again Ravenhill’s analysis of the four’s methods of justifying this obvious invasion of privacy is shockingly hilarious. 

The story is impressively narrated by the four friends as an individuated chorus.  They speak one by one, seamlessly passing the tale from one to the other, sometimes intentionally interrupting each other, sometimes intentionally speaking at the same time.  At various points each takes on the role of the fifth artist suggesting that all four are implicated in her life whether they want to be or not. 

The play was Ravenhill’s first experiment in physical theatre with movement integral to its performance.  Patricia Allison has choreographed movement for the four that most of the time seems to grow naturally from the words they have just spoken.  Occasionally, though, it’s difficult to know how the movement is related to the four artists’ emotions.

The four actors execute the words and movement beautifully.  Now and then, however, individuals are allowed to speak lines as if their characters knew they were amusing.  This should not happen.  Even though the play is non-naturalistic and even though the characters speak directly to us, Ravenhill’s biting humour derives from the characters’ ignorance of the larger implications of what they say.  The more they try to justify their actions, the worse they look.

Ravenhill’s comedy is so smart, so acidic and so universal in its examination of the “tall poppies” syndrome – an affliction that looks down on success prevalent not just Britain but in Canada and Australia – that pool (no water), especially when so well performed as here, deserves to be remounted to reach a larger audience.

*In the chorus in 2017 Sarah Illiatovitch-Goldman has been replaced by Eva Barrie and Nickeshia Garrick raising the number from four to five.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photo: Cover photo; Chy Ryan Spain and Allison Price. ©2015 Samantha Hurley.

For tickets, visit www.cue6.ca.