Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✭
by Matthew Gorman, music by Gordon Bolan, directed by Geoffrey Pounsett
The Harvey Dunn Campfire, Next Stage Theatre Festival, Factory Theatre, Toronto
January 5-15, 2017
Bolan: “Anything can happen around a campfire”
Matthew Gorman’s Western, a play with music is a thrilling work brilliantly brought to life. The unpretentious, low-key manner in which this 75-minute show begins doesn’t prepare you for the massive emotional impact it makes by the end. The live folk and country-western music by Gordon Bolan may lead you to believe you are a comfortably familiar world, but the action shows that the world of the play is anything but comfortable and its familiarity the familiarity of ancient myth. Under Geoffrey Pounsett’s insightful direction the entire cast gives strong, gripping performances.
As you enter the Factory Studio Theatre, Bolan on guitar and Jocelyn Adema on fiddle are playing and singing various western tunes. Mairi Babb as Nance is collecting and hanging up laundry to dry on a clothesline while Sam Khalileh as Reach is whiling away his time trying to light a campfire. Everything stops when Caroline Toal as Jenet enters from the audience to the stage. Babb regards her with disdain, Khalileh with discomfort, as Jenet tells us about the birth of her brother Rabbit, so named because she saw a rabbit when he was born and their mother died in childbirth leaving them alone in the world.
We learn there is a story to tell. Yet since each participant knows only a part of the story, all of them will have to tell it so that we hear everything that happened. The tale concerns Rabbit, whom Jenet sent out to catch some food. For unknown reasons, Rabbit shot a boy in the distance . The boy was Nance’s son. Rabbit goes into hiding and Nance pays the bounty-hunter Reach to find him and bring him to her unharmed. Gorman allows us to speculate that what Nance will do to Rabbit in revenge for her son’s death will be horrific. Meanwhile, a black-clad Brendan Murray appears. This is the sheriff Dirt, who feels that it is the law that should determine what happens to Rabbit not Nance’s private vendetta. At this point Rabbit’s whereabouts and well-being become the focus of all the characters – of Jenet’s fear, of Nance’s anger and of Reach’s and Dirt’s fulfilment of their differing duties.
In an ever varying sequence the four characters tell the story both narrating and enacting their part of the tale. The one character notably absent is Rabbit. The brilliant solution to this challenge is to have all four characters – sometimes alone, sometime together – play Rabbit as if he were a bunraku puppet only represented entirely by a sheet bunched together, two shoes and a cap. Just as Rabbit is the focus of all four tellers’ tales, so all four bring him theatrically to life. A hint at Pounsett’s choice for portraying Rabbit comes early on when Jenet saves a cat (who is just a cloth) who gives birth to a litter of kittens (a hatful of smaller folded cloths). Nance’s dead son is a larger piece of folded cloth.
The entire play is presented in a non-realistic mode. The story is punctuated with Bolan’s songs which astutely capture the mood of the action as it becomes increasingly darker. In Brecht’s theory of theatre, interpolated songs are meant to distance the audience from the action. In practice, they often heighten the tension since they delay the onset of a the next scene, and that is exactly what happens in Western. Warm and comforting as Bolan’s voice sounds, each song gives us pause to imagine how events could turn out badly only to be shocked when they turn out even worse than we imagined.
Pounsett has drawn intense, fully committed performances from the entire cast who switch into and out of character with ease and precision. Caroline Toal’s Jenet outwardly seems fragile but Toal shows that Jenet has inner strengths of which she is unaware. Mairi Babb’s Nance is filled with an all-consuming passion that is all the more frightening because its aim is unknown. The immense concentration Babb brings to the simple scene of Nance’s carefully folding and then burning her dead son’s clothes is both moving and chilling at once.
Reach is the only remotely comic character in the play, a reformed alcoholic (he thinks) who has found himself by helping to find others. When Khalileh’s character departs the story we feel as if a safety net has been pulled from under us. Brendan Murray gives one of his best ever performances as Dirt. Murray suggests that Dirt’s calm way of moving and expressing himself are the product of a personal discipline over which Dirt could lose his grip at any time.
Gorman’s language has a colloquial Western tone but its recurring symbolic images gives it the sound and feel of poetry. Indeed, what started out as merely a tale told around a campfire soon acquires a mythic dimension as if it were a parable to justify a deterministic view of human beings’ place in the world. In this, Western is very like the Four Plays for Dancers (1921) of Irish poet W.B. Yeats, which were in turn influenced by Japanese Noh drama, where events enacted by ordinary people are infused with symbolic meaning and characters’ actions take on the function of ritual. In Western, Gorman has simply substituted interludes of songs for the dance interludes in Yeats or in Noh.
With Western, Gorman has produced one of the most powerful Canadian plays this decade. And Pounsett's insight, imagination and clarity of direction has discovered what strength lies in the simplest actions. This is definitely one of the must-see shows of the Festival.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Caroline Toal as Jenet, Brendan Murray as Dirt; Sam Kalilieh as Reach, Jocelyn Adema as Fiddler, Gordon Bolan as Musician, Caroline Toal as Jenet, Brendan Murray as Dirt, Mairi Babb as Nance. ©2017 The Harvey Dunn Campfire.
For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com/next-stage-festival.
2017-01-06
Western, a play with music