With an L-shaped sofa, a counter holding both sink and stove, and a large coffee table, it’s a neutral, modern setting, sterile and uncluttered. It is made of functional, meaningless elements and inherent corpse-like stillness and, no doubt, resembles many monotonous apartments in high rise Toronto. Such setting is appropriate since, in Act II, a corpse does indeed lie at centre stage, sometimes the focus of attention, sometimes not. The five characters of The Test -by German-Swiss dramatist Lukas Bärfuss, with compelling, often humorous, and accessible translation by Birgit Schreyer Duarte- as much sink inwardly into their respective confusion as speak to the seemingly indifferent ears of others.
They speak of lies lived and told, of affairs and illegitimate offspring, of wounds given and received, of motion in human lives without matter. They do not scream with the madness they imply, so maybe five or six times an explosion of sound shakes the theatre’s foundations. Otherwise, classical music or jazz linger almost inaudible in the background. All this sound which, when loud, can unsettle and disrupt one’s psyche also punctuates the play’s atmosphere. The sound is the creation of Richard Feren and, when it is loud, one feels pressured and hopeless and hears with one’s bones.
The Test is a horrifying play, actually, because it so accurately depicts humans unadorned in the landscape of modern life and does so in meticulously paced yet quite casual measure. Characters often speak with implied deep feeling, but at the same time show no signs of any feeling. The driving issue in the plot, at least on the surface, is this: who is the father of the child and who is the father of the father? It is resolved in many ways, one being scalding water poured upon Simon’s feet by his son. This resolution is countered by Simon resting his bandaged feet beside the corpse of this same son. Another resolution is the sound of a gun offstage. Is this a suicide? Why is the baby crying as Simon sits in a Beckett-like immobility?
Some, like Liisa Repo-Martell’s Agnes, swing, vocally and physically, between primal and cooly present, the latter usually being the turf of Sonia Smits’ Helle. Agnes speaks with hesitating, slightly staccato, punched out words and phrases. In two sentences she repeats the word “we” eight or nine times, as if speaking in search of realization. She seems pounded. Sonja Smits’ Helle is, like her husband, implicitly dismissive. She pronounces her judgments in a haughty remote manner as she determines the nature of her next battle ground. She seems elegant and graceful with indifference. She has just arrived from an ashram but here she seems numbed.
Eric Peterson’s Simon is a man of weathered folksiness and slightly pinched and ungiving delivery who, with his gradually revealed insight, also becomes more and more dismissive. Simon becomes the play’s center because, though sometimes in the dark, he conveys authority, deeper understanding, and a gradually building vileness, so much so that we expect him to spit at any moment. He seems to choreograph some painful effects of his lifetime on his being as he speaks. He voices the play’s guiding irony with “We no longer have to be considerate of others”. One never knows what to expect of him and one waits uneasily.
Gord Rand’s Peter opens the play with a tirade against “bitches” in a casual, quietly edged rage that is understated and contained. The language is unrelentingly violent. Already we have a feature of the play, a counterpoint of casual chat and self-urging ferocity underneath. He declares “my life is a lie” and, because Peter seems to be bleeding to death emotionally, it is a draining opening. He continues to bleed with feeling until he later actually dies and remains as the already mentioned corpse.
Philip Riccio’s Franzeck is a walking well of irony, an indifferent catalyst in the lives of others. He is so many things: casual, robotic in speech, aggressive with understatement, delicately meanspirited, infused with a touch of prissiness , much in his own world and thus unreachable, implicitly egotistical, and calm to the breaking point. Franzeck seems to have Teflon on both sides of his skin, so even his own feelings don’t stick to him. A modern Iago, he plants seeds of doubt, waters them, conjures menace and danger out of mere possibilities as he wills his own reality onto the world. He is most adept at finding ways to damage.
The play offers enough gaps in exchanges to compel the audience to fill in these gaps with their own histories. Dialogue is sometimes delivered from wing to wing and people speak with controlled ease but also suggest they are would-be savages who could easily chop each other up with axes. We in the audience are constantly trying to figure out the psychological facts of each character, each one who seems to say so much but remains unreachable. Each character seems clinically involved with others and with their own lives. Each one offhandedly sullies everything. Who are these people?
Director Jason Byrne of Dublin, as in Festen and the Shaw Festival’s The Cherry Orchard a few years ago and now in The Test, a co-production with Canadian Stage, grants his actors much leeway. Blocking and approach to dialogue may vary from performance to performance under his direction. His characters convey who they are by words, by manner of delivery, by physical movement or lack of it, and most of all by simple resonating presence that declares a potentially volatile center. Each performance is destined to be different since each actor, in delivery and movement, is not following a preconceived notion necessarily, but instead finding the truth of the present situation through the person of the character they inhabit.
In Byrne’s world, these splendid actors inhabit each evolved moment and push it into the next evolving moment. What comes next depends upon creation from the potential of the present moment. Each dialogue –this is no doubt much the playwright’s doing-is a musical statement of varying development, of arbitrary recapitulation, of brief compact intensity not yet quite within one’s emotional grasp as one remains moved without quite understanding why.
As such, this collaboration of playwright and director and actors is extremely potent theatre, often ineffably disturbing, a brilliant blend of given text and freedom to discover in reconfigured reality what the text can be. This approach results in theatre of process on the part of all involved. It is not theatre to be passively observed, but one that seduces complacency into troubled psychological waters where one is compelled to swim. The Test is a deeply haunting production and, as a result, one soon feels implicated and haunted by oneself.
