John Gielgud once recalled that, when offered the play Home by David Storey in 1970, he was “quite taken with it but didn’t understand it.” Yet, he added, “there was something very fascinating about it. It’s one of the most beautiful plays I’ve ever been in……it symbolized the modern world and its horrors and it was compassionate and touching.” Gielgud co-starred in Home with Ralph Richardson and the two appeared again five years later in No Man’s Land, by another “new writer” Harold Pinter, in which we heard, “All we have left is the English language…can it be salvaged?” The answer? “Its salvation must rest in you.”
With Beckett’s immense influence looking on, the use and value and meaning of language were up for grabs. Thus, the early seventies were certainly a fruitful time to be visiting London and taking in the new energy in theatrical offerings, anything from Pinter to Stoppard’s wit-bulging Jumpers and Travesties. I also saw David Storey’s Life Class and his The Contractor, always aware that the language was incisively current, that subtext prevailed, and that implications within the playwright’s text led ultimately to our needs, in the audience, for the world to somehow make sense.
Take this exchange between Jack and Harry in Home, now running until June 20 at Toronto’s Young Centre for the Performing Arts in a delicately heartbreaking production by Soulpepper Theatre: “He is disappointed… ……..Oh, yes….Heartbreak…..Oh, yes…..Same mistake, why make it twice?…..Oh, no…..Once over, never again.” The writing, like human lives, is full of non sequiturs, ambiguities, implications, and dead ends. People co-exist, perhaps have temporary effect on one another, their sentences begin and just stop, and then they fade back again into the solitude of their own worlds and their own words.
You might think that the experience of Home is perhaps like logging in nowadays to Facebook and its loads of arbitrary information -some of it profoundly disturbing and relevant, some of it self-serving drivel- as people hurl their endless offerings into indifferent space. But, in either situation, is anyone ever listening? Does anyone even care? Some maintain that the Home under scrutiny in Storey’s play is a mental institution, but the context here is much, much larger than that. Home stands for the world in which we are not articulate and we are not rational. We are existential fumblers who realize the futility of opening our mouths, but need to do so anyway.
Home is also an actor’s goldmine of potential for implied character and implied personal histories, but it does not allow for, and here does not make, one false step in realization. No wonder Oliver Dennis, who plays Jack, remarked after one recent performance: “It took us the whole six weeks of rehearsal to figure out all the beats in the play.” But under director Albert Schultz’s finely-tuned awareness, all the notes in this production ring restrained and true. Moreover, my sacred memories of the performances of Gielgud and Richardson as Harry and Jack can happily co-exist now with those of Michael Hanrahan and Oliver Dennis. The Soulpepper production is distinctly its own thing and certainly memorable in its immediacy, poetry, impact and beauty.
Schultz’s sensitive direction balances the quiet inner sparkle within Jack and Harry with the inner torment from which each man might explode or collapse and which each man contains through inane and evasive conversation. Harry is sad, wearied, ever so slightly hesitant in speech, with hopelessness in his eyes. Jack is made of eagerness, but when interrupted or intruded upon, collapses into his own hopelessness. He assumes a prominence that is not his and rules conversation with anecdotes. These are not mentally secure men, albeit their occasional gossipy, even catty, tones and their animated facial expressions. They weep a lot.
Of the ladies, Kathleen, played by Brenda Robbins, is louder, unbearably tight in facial expression, and constant in annoying laughter as she sits short-skirted with her private regions not so private. Marjorie, played by Maria Vacratsis, is suspicious, fussy, naturally aggressive, and obsessed with being right. The attitude and conversation of the ladies can be very bitchy. Alfred, played by Andre Sills, is abrupt, driven, given to blank stares and jerky expressions like, “Wanna fight?” No wonder Marjorie declares, “You go mad here if you don’t watch out.” Or this Harry and Jack exchange: “Another day…..Yes, in shadows.”
The Soulpepper production of Home is a compassionate and entertaining excursion into human hopelessness and we find here, in these outstanding performances by all, that there is much beauty in human endurance of emotional pain. Again we realize that one does what one must in order not to collapse, that illusions are not necessarily lies if they help one to endure. And always it’s small details –a scowl, a tear, a wounded glance, a nervous laugh- that suggest intense inner lives as their origin, although the production’s special strength is that so much of these lives, though unspoken, speaks very loud in silence throughout.