Review - Orphans - Coal Mine Theatre, Toronto

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by Dennis Kelly, directed by Leora Morris

Coal Mine Theatre, 1454 Danforth Avenue, Toronto

April 12-30, 2017

Helen: “There’s the people we know and the people we don’t know”

The Coal Mine Theatre concludes its exciting 2016/17 season with Dennis Kelly’s comedy/drama Orphans from 2009. It’s a play about modern morality where characters tie themselves into knots to accept increasingly unpleasant facts until the ending knocks you sideways and leaves you gasping for breath. Leora Morris masterfully directs a tight trio of fine performances that gradually shift in mood from comedy to desolation.

The opening stage picture could be from either a horror movie or an absurdist comedy. Kelly clearly means it to to be both. Danny (David Patrick Flemming) and his wife Helen (Diana Bentley) are frozen mid-forkful into a celebratory dinner in their tidy flat while before them stands Liam (Tim Dowler-Coltman), Helen’s brother, drenched in fresh blood. Nearly incoherent from shock or fear, Liam tries to explain what happened. The blood is from a boy he found bleeding from stab wounds on the street. Liam held the unconscious boy out of sympathy, but suddenly the boy woke up and ran out of sight.

Danny’s first instinct is to call the police but Helen won’t let him. Liam has been very “unlucky” she says and has a criminal record. If the police find him covered with blood they will assume that he had sometime to do with the attack. Liam is the only family she has left and she has to put family ties first. With grim foreboding Danny gives up the idea of calling the police, watches Liam clean off the blood and Helen put the stained T-shirt in the wash while Liam dons an unwashed T-shirt of Danny’s.

The play’s structure follows that of an Ionesco-like absurdist comedy where a situation deteriorates through repetition, except that in Orphans we come to see that the content is not at all comic. The pattern is that Danny suggests a way of dealing with the situation, Liam repeats what happened but contradicts aspects of what he said before, Helen defends Liam, Liam praises Danny and Helen and Danny retreats into thought until he devises a new approach. The problem is that every time Liam retells his story he becomes less an innocent passer-by and more of an active agent. The more he becomes an active agent, the more Danny and Helen can be viewed as aiding and abetting a criminal.

While Liam seems merely to be an oaf who is also a very poor liar, his actions and Helen’s defence of them retain an air of black comedy. But as soon as we learn more specifics about Liam and the injured boy, we realize that Kelly’s play is exploring the nature of racism. Liam claims he saw the boy after leaving the flat of his “mate” Ian, a collector of Nazi memorabilia. Helen is denies that anyone like Ian could be a “mate” of Liam’s, but Liam insists that Ian is his mate and tells how Ian frequently goes on xenophobic rants.

Helen in trying to defend Liam for his possible injury of one of the criminal youths in the neighbourhood, dismisses Danny’s point that everyone is human. To Helen, “There’s the people we know and the people we don’t know”, implying that there is no reason to care about the people a person doesn’t know. This idea sums up the choices that the characters have to make. Helen wants to divide the world into Us and Them, except that Kelly shows that their is no simple way to calculate who is Us and who is Them. Is Us the two siblings Liam and Helen bound by blood against Danny who is not? Or is Us Danny and Helen bound by marriage against Liam who is not? Or is US Danny and Helen as bound by by law and blood through their son Shane, who childlike artworks cover the walls of their dining room? The dynamic of union by blood version union by law activates all the characters’ discussions. The question is how far Danny and Helen will go to defend Liam when Liam’s actions appear less and less accidental. Helen, in particular, is willing to go so far as to threaten to abort the child she is carrying if Danny won’t help cover up what Liam may have done.

Director Leora Morris has beautifully paced the action to maintain an inexorably mounting tension. She also is able carefully to manipulate the audience’s reaction so that our initial response of laughter at an extremely awkward situation eventually gives way to dread.

Tim Dowler-Coltman gives a fantastic performance as Liam, who seems artless and innocent because he has so little self-knowledge. Dowler-Coltman shows that the character is not the sharpest knife in the drawer and unknowingly has Liam overdo his efforts to please Danny and Helen. After his and Helen’s parents were

killed in a fire and the siblings were put into care, Liam has put family above all else and his over-effusive praise of Danny in accepting him is a way of ensuring that he won’t be rejected. Yet, while Danny praises Helen for marrying a man with a good job, he can’t hide that he and all the others “out there” feel “abandoned”. And he hates being lumped with society’s other undesirables like people of other races and religions. Dowler-Coltman brilliantly shows how Liam’s sentimentality about “family” can easily co-exist with a cruelty toward anyone who is not family.

Diana Bentley also gives a sizzling performance. When Helen turns against Danny and uses emotional blackmail to bring him to her way of thinking, Bentley shows us that Helen and Liam do share the family characteristic of manipulation. At the same time Bentley suggests that there is a tension between her and Liam that she is trying to compensate for by defending him so strongly. We know that Danny has doubted Liam’s story all along. What we watch for is what it will take for Helen to turn against her brother. It is fascinating to observe Bentley mentally calculate her response as Helen takes in each new revelation from Liam.

David Patrick Flemming, seen just month ago in A City, has quite a difficult role to play as Danny. The character is symbolically the moral centre of the play and personally a weakling. For the first half of the play Flemming tries to convey Danny’s nature by making him unnaturally calm to the point that his performance appears underpowered compared to those of his cast-mates. Yet, from the point of his entrance in a raincoat in the play’s long final scene until the play’s final moments, Flemming exudes all the underlying intensity that seemed to have been missing earlier, and the effect is chilling.

Orphans is a much more tightly knit play compared to Kelly’s Taking Care of Baby (2007) staged at the much-missed Storefront Theatre in January last year. It is as if Kelly has reduced the question of the persistence of racism and bigotry to its barest components to expose the fallacy of any Us versus Them, family versus non-family way of viewing the world. It is surprising how clearly Kelly saw the xenophobia inherent in ordinary Britons that has since come to the fore in its Brexit vote. Kelly’s analysis, of course, is not peculiar to Briton. Anyone who wants to see a powerful play about the tragedy that such divisiveness causes to victims, perpetrators and enablers should mark Orphans as a play not to miss.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit www.coalminetheatre.com.

2017-04-13

Orphans