DOC
Doc, with Diana Leblanc directing Sharon Pollock’s Canadian classic of 1984, opens like a frenzied Altman film of simultaneous or overlapping words inside a tormented skull. Is this the playwright’s mind to which we are witness? Her characters can’t escape their memories as they inhabit the memories of others and we immediately find ourselves in the emotional crossfire of R. H. Thomson’s Ev and Carmen Grant’s Catherine. We try to comprehend the distance and hostility between them, the extent of the damage each one feels, the conscious or subconscious motives of each one. “You were never home,” the daughter accuses her father. “You go through men like boxes of Kleenex,” he fires back at the daughter who, now moved away, does not keep in touch with him.
Another pairing is the guy relationship of Ev and Oscar and they share memories of hockey, whores and med school. Although Ev as Doc is passionately altruistic in the world, he is absent to wife and kids at home, absent when his wife, Bob, gives birth, absent when she descends into alcoholism. Ev is a man frozen in the conditions of his existence, unable for many years to open the suicide note his mother wrote, and as he saves the world his family dies. He’s a man who does harm as he does good.
Ev’s wife Bob, given a sensitively shaped and thoroughly stunning performance by Jane Spidell, sinks into a personal hell before our eyes. It is painful to watch this concisely depicted human suffering as it becomes an overwhelming reality of human futility that can end only in death. Indeed, the five characters are five pulsations of tormented existence, especially in a setting of visual metaphors that hit home the eternal barriers between people. Astrid Janson’s intensely confining and poetic set, with its reflecting surfaces and transparent walls that only partially conceal, intensifies the experience of memories that come forward on stage and then ebb. Kevin Lamotte’s brilliantly isolating and haunting lighting makes both characters and audience deal with persons from the past who now, partially concealed, inhabit shadows in the mind.
We have here a superbly made theatrical unity of an acutely effective play, with acting of implication as much as statement and evocative design, a production that achieves nothing less than the poetry of music. This is a deliberately paced and visually articulated account of what people are and what has made them so. The device of Catherine at two ages, both in tormented bond with her parents, is subtly devastating in this play about people who live in relationships that destroy, even as people crave them in order to survive.
WHAT THE BUTLER SAW
Geraldine applies for a secretarial job, ends up naked behind a curtain as the seducer-psychiatrist’s wife walks into the office with a pageboy in tow, one with whom she has had a go, and the shrink declares to wife, “You were born with your legs apart, they’ll send you to your grave in a Y-shaped coffin.” That’s the beginning of director Jim Warren’s very entertaining production of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, a play, which, at its premiere in London of 1969, so offended and appalled the audience that they shouted at the actors and ripped up their programs. Only in a 1975 Royal Court production directed by Lindsay Anderson did Orton’s anarchistic shots at the establishment get their due respect. Perhaps by then more people could admit that the system was crazy.
Orton repeatedly takes the pretense of the status quo to its logical but absurd conclusions and reveals a system that is based upon power and nothing else, especially reason. Doctors spout legally-sanctioned nonsense like “She may mean yes when she says no” or “I’m not interested in your explanation, I can provide one of my own” because every protestation of sanity is treated by psychiatrists as a symptom of mental imbalance. They call the shots and they jump to conclusions with logic that runs askew, always protecting themselves
Brenda Robins, as Mrs. Prentice, is nicely ambiguous, a walking icicle at times who, according to hubby the shrink, “is harder to get into than the reading room of the British Museum” but, as he has also noted, sexually ever-ready. Nicole Underhay’s Geraldine was, at one time, standard stuff in London’s West End, an unclothed bird tightly packed into her undergarments, all wide-eyed and clueless and built. Graham Harley aces the fanatical, resolute, melodramatic and self-serving efficiency of Rance, the official who understands little and pronounces much. Brandon McGibbon and Oliver Dennis delight with finely-tuned physical comedy in their cross-dressing frenzy while Blair Williams, as Dr. Prentice, is multi-layered in human vulnerability as he pays for all this fuss he began.
Yes, we have several doors for all the frantic coming and going, one liners fired all about, say at royalty or the police or the civil service, the running gag-line, “Undress and lie down on that couch,” straight-jackets too, lots of sex of many blends, and a very far-fetched resolution, involving, in part, Churchill’s missing part. The pace gradually picks up to an easy-going frenzy and it’s fun to observe the audience respond in mind-splitting glee to a play that could, mishandled, be simply a relic of another time. As it is, Orton does make unsettling points that all is not well in our world of officialdom and civility and one laughs, even long afterwards, at this farce that the audience forty years ago didn’t want to understand.