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by Alistair McDowall, directed by Christopher Stanton

Actor Repertory Company, 360 Geary Avenue, Toronto

November 3-19, 2016

“I think I’d sleep a lot easier if I knew none of us would wake up tomorrow”

Actors Repertory Company is currently presenting the North American premiere of Pomona, a dystopian thriller from 2014 by the young British playwright Alistair McDowall.  It is a funny, disturbing, mind-bending play all at once that holds the pessimistic view that evil is a force we can’t bear to look at directly, and as a result we are complicit in its continuance.  Director Christopher Stanton has encouraged the cast to give performances of such fierce intensity it often knocks the wind out of you.

The title refers to a real island of abandoned docks in the centre of Manchester to which there is limited access.  Once home to botanical gardens and the Royal Pomona Palace, destroyed by a factory explosion in 1887, the island was named for the Roman goddess of fertility.  The irony is that now it is a concrete wasteland.    In the world of the play, McDowall imagines Pomona as the centre of evil in the universe of Manchester. 

The play begins with the young woman Ollie (Aviva Armour-Ostroff) being driven round the ring road  that encircles Manchester by Mr. Zeppo (Carlos González-Vío), a property magnate who owns most of the city and doesn’t question what goes on in his buildings.  To become “involved”, as his father did, is fatal.  He tells her the ending of the 1981 movie Raiders of the Lost Ark and is fascinated by how the three main Nazis die when they look at what is inside the Ark of the Covenant.  Ollie was told that Zeppo could tell her where she might find her sister who has suddenly gone missing.  Zeppo is evasive but suggests that Pomona might be the place to look.  With them in the car is a silent character wearing a mask of Cthulhu, an ancient evil deity created by H. P. Lovecraft. 

In the next scene two security guards, Moe (Andre Sills) and Charlie (Ryan Hollyman), injure themselves to make it look like they struggled during instead of merely botched a job assignment.  Next Fay (Deborah Drakeford), a woman clutching a laptop, phones in terror to try to get someone at her home to lock all the doors and windows.  Next Gale (Liza Balkan), a businesswoman who is in the process of trying to kill herself by mixing drugs and booze, phones her finance manager ordering him to withdraw all her money and burn it. 

In the course of the next fifteen of the nineteen scenes, the action moves backwards to various times in the past as we try to use the information to figure out how the characters we have met are related and what has led them to such dire circumstances.  What we discover is that Gale is a mobster of some sort whose business involves prostitution.  Fay is the madame of one of her houses and a woman who looks just like Ollie winds up working for Fay.  Much later we learn that this woman believes, but is not certain, that she has a twin sister. 

Meanwhile, we discover that Charlie’s hobby is role-playing games.  He has invented one of his own based on the 1928 short story “The Call of Cthulhu” by H. P. Lovecraft.  He has advertised for players but so far only a young woman named Keaton (Bahareh Yaraghi) has responded.  He gives her a background knowledge of the Cthulhu Mythos and introduces her to the game.  Choices are determined by the role of a twenty-sided die.  It turns out that Charlie’s game is about a young woman who is trying to rescue her sister from the clutches of evil men devoted to Cthulhu, whose mask Charlie dons.  Soon we don’t know whether Charlie’s game is mimicking events he observed as a security guard on Pomona or whether the game eerily anticipates what happens later.  

Many reviews of the play refer to it as “science fiction” which likely derives from the references to Lovecraft.  But this is quite misleading.  There is nothing sci-fi about women disappearing, forced into prostitution, porn or snuff movies.  There is also nothing sci-fi about a man like Moe, who struggles to control his violence, or with the wilful ignorance of Zeppo or the ruthlessness of Gale. 

What makes the play so disturbing is the notion that unspeakably evil deeds are occurring in the very heart of the city on the island of Pomona and any attempt to rescue anyone from that place seems doomed to failure.  The first sentences of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” suggest the source of McDowall’s imagery: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of

black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”  McDowall has inverted Lovecraft’s metaphor so that the island of Pomona becomes the realm of black infinity and the urban ring around it the placid sea of ignorance.  The play condemns this placidity for making it possible for evil to thrive.  Zeppo’s notion that there are no good people anymore is a malevolent excuse to do nothing.  Many of McDowall’s characters prove that there still are good people.  The problem is that by fearing to face evil directly, the quest of good people may be fated, like a ring road, simply to go in circles around its enemy without approaching it. 

Director Christopher Stanton’s pacing is tight and tense.  He draws uncompromising performances from the entire cast.  Aviva Armour-Ostroff strongly differentiates between the Ollie we first meet and the prostitute who may be her twin sister.  The one is innocent with a core of bravery beneath her seeming fearfulness.  The other is just the opposite – worldly with an outer façade of toughness concealing a core of innocence.   

Carlos González-Vío makes a chilling impression as Mr. Zeppo.  It may be ridiculous for Zeppo to be so enthusiastic about an old action film, but González-Vío exudes such an air of menace that, just like Ollie, we would be loth to contradict him.  Liza Balkan makes Gale quite a disturbing figure.  Balkan is fantastic in her initial scene where she lends Gale a barely controlled frenzy as she tries to destroy her wealth as well as her life to leave nothing behind.  In subsequent scenes, she makes Gale as threatening and dangerous as a coiled viper.  In contrast to these two denizens of the dark side of Manchester, is the Fay of Deborah Drakeford.  As a madame her Fay acts as a surrogate mother for the women who work for her and when the need arises she finds an unexpected fearlessness in herself.       

Andre Sills and Ryan Hollyman are well-cast as the double act of Moe and Charlie the security guards.  Sills’s Moe is physically and emotionally strong and mentally wary while Hollyman’s Charlie is physically and emotionally weak and gullible.  Charlie is really only in his element when playing games where he can give the childlike nature that Hollyman captures so well free rein.  Moe, however, has a brooding nature.  In the most moving scene of the play we learn that he is so prone to violence that he is afraid to touch anyone anymore.  Fay allows him to touch her, and the mingling of fear, desire and pain that Sills displays is extraordinarily poignant.

The most mysterious of all the characters is Keaton.  She has two extremely different sides to her nature but, unlike Ollie, there is no suggestion of her being a twin to explain the difference.  With Charlie she seems more than merely a very shy young woman.  Bahareh Yaraghi, with cat-like makeup and movements, easily makes us think she could be an alien curious about the ways of humans.  In another key scene, Yaraghi shows Keaton to be imperious and full of fury.  Yaraghi plays these two contrasting sides so well, it is hard to see how they can belong to the same character.  Indeed, if there is a flaw in the play it is Keaton’s inexplicable nature.  McDowall clearly wants to make Keaton a mystery, but in this case the mystery is frustratingly insoluble.  

For his part, Stanton does add ideas to the play that are not always helpful.  A minor example is his changing the Rubik’s cubes that Ollie gives the Cthulhu-masked figure in the original text into dice.  Rapidly solving a succession of cubes reveals the figure as a formidable puzzle-solver and introduces the theme of puzzles into the play.  Giving the figure dice suggests that Zeppo knows something about Charlie’s game, a view not supported by the text.

The play is metatheatrical in that the game-within-the play is a reflection of the plot of the play.  Stanton seeks to heighten this idea by having characters observe scenes that they are not involved in from the edges of the set.  In a story where who knows what when is crucial, this confusingly suggests that everyone is already aware of everything. 

The play contains violence including a fight between Moe and Charlie brilliantly staged by Simon Fon to look bone-crunchingly real.  If you sit in the front row, don’t be surprised if you are sprayed with a a shower of what looks like broken coal covering Nick Blais and Jackie Chau’s industrial set.  (Don’t worry – it’s not coal but shredded rubber and doesn’t hurt.)  Powerfully heightening the play’s threatening atmosphere is Joelysa Pamkanea’s unearthly music and Nick Blais’s eerie lighting.

It is no wonder that Pomona created a stir when it premiered in London.  It portrays a brutal, lawless world like that in Dennis Kelly’s The Pitchfork Disney (1991) or Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur (2005), but it goes beyond them by reflecting that disorder in the play’s very structure by presenting the scenes in non-chronological order.  This forces us to construct a picture of the world while simultaneously fearing what horrors that picture will reveal.  It is a powerful if deeply pessimistic play that anyone interesting in fine acting and new British writing should be sure to see.

Note: The play is staged, quite fittingly, in an abandoned warehouse at 360 Geary Avenue.  This is only a six-minute walk from the corner of Dufferin Street and Dupont Street, which is easily reached via TTC. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Carlos González-Vío and Aviva Armour-Ostroff; Ryan Hollyman and Bahareh Yaraghi; Bahareh Yaraghi in mask of Cthulhu; Deborah Drakeford, Andre Sills and Bahareh Yaraghi. ©2016 Mark Mullaly.

For tickets, visit https://arcstage.wordpress.com.