All posts by Alex | Co-Editor

Exit the King at Soulpepper

theatre

What: Ionesco’s Exit the King
When: runs until September 9th. Performance dates listed here
Where: Young Centre for the Performing Arts in the Distillery District
Discounted student tickets info: See BlogUT’s guide to summer theatre

Soulpepper Theatre’s production of Exit the King is perfectly satisfactory if you want to see a production in which all the parts are assigned, all the lines read, and all the stage directions followed. But it completely lacks vision, creativity, and for the most part, the ability to bring the comedy out. Exit the King is one of Ionesco’s absurdist plays, centering around a hoary king whose kingdom has been reduced to the size of his estate, and whose remaining life expectancy has been reduced to the length of the play: two hours. It’s a one-act play, which primarily consists of the king whining and screaming about how he cannot and does not want to die. Meanwhile his various wives and servants attempt to comfort him and help him come to terms with his mortality.

The Soulpepper cast is incredibly stilted and they often assume a v-shaped arrangement on stage so that they can say their lines and be assured the audience can see them all at once: highly unimaginative. As many of the lines were said, I had the sneaking suspicion that if I had read them in the text, I would have found them funny, but in this production, the most you can hope for is that they elicit a smile. Part of the problem is that the text itself doesn’t do much to help suggest movement and action, so bringing the dialogue to life is no small feat. The one worthwhile scene is the King’s first magnanimous entrance, which is downright well-earned comedy. Otherwise, if you’re only going to see one play at Soulpepper, check out Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, which is a very good production of a very good play.

The Shaw plays at the Shaw Festival are a real disappointment: Candida and Heartbreak House

theatre

A British accent does not a funny play make. I wish this concept were better understood, especially by the Shaw Festival, which insists on making its actors attempt authentic accents in all of its plays. For My Fair Lady, a musical that’s actually about accents, there’s no escaping this. But for Shaw’s comedy plays, Heartbreak House and Candida, there’s no reason to bother with them unless you can be certain that the accents will be perfect and even then…

Unfortunately, the British accents in these productions at this year’s Shaw Festival are painfully and distractingly bad: like fingernails on a chalkboard. I’m hardly an expert on British accents, but I have seen enough British film to be able to tell a good accent from a terrible one, and these accents are right up there with Dick Van Dyke’s chimney sweep in Mary Poppins.

For years, the Stratford Festival hasn’t bothered with English accents in its productions of Shakespeare’s plays. I crowned this year’s Richard III a triumph even though none of the actors spoke with British accents that the real characters no doubt would have had. But perhaps that’s partly why the production triumphed: more focus on acting, less energy wasted on attempting failed accents. Unfortunately, the Shaw Festival hasn’t quite gained the confidence to dispel with the useless accents.

Heartbreak House is one long dinner party with a cast of despicable characters, all in love with somebody else’s husband or fiancée. It should be funny but dark, but most laughs were forced out of a recognition of the witty dialogue in spite of the delivery. The set provides a horrible distraction: the action looks like it’s taking place on a boat, but it seems to have walls and staircases like a house. Is it a house or a boat? A house or a boat? By the third act, the walls are gone and the house/boat is rocking back and forth and back and forth. Why? Who knows? To make the actors as sea sick as the audience is sick of the show.

Candida is a slight improvement over Heartbreak House and benefits from the very charismatic Claire Jullien in the title role. Her delivery of almost all of Shaw’s dialogue does it justice and lends it the wit it deserves; her accent is also much better than that of her peers, which certainly helps. Unfortunately, the production is dragged down by the amusing, but ultimately over-the-top acting by Wade Bogart O’Brien as the clumsy lovesick Marchbanks. In fact, Marchbanks is so goofy that his crush on Candida poses no real threat to the domestic bliss between Candida and her husband Morrell (Nigel Shawn Williams). But Williams plays Morrell so straight that he somehow feels threatened, making the action seem unrealistically serious, and taking all the bite out of the comedy.

Ironically, when the Shaw Festival does Shaw, it fails spectacularly. It seems to take a Tennessee Williams play — Cat on a Hot Tin Roof this season — to show us that the Shaw Festival can compete with the best of them. Perhaps it’s a good thing that they’re toning down the dose of Shaw in next year’s festival.

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For information on cheap tickets to the Shaw Festival and transportation, see the post, BlogUT’s Top 5 Summer Theatre Festivals on a Student Budget.
…and if you want a show worth seeing at Shaw, check out the review of My Fair Lady

Come Fly Away enchants with phenomenal dancing

theatre

Where: Four Seasons Centre
When: Tuesday-Saturday @ 7:30PM; Wednesday, Saturday, & Sunday @ 2PM; Until August 28th
Tickets: DanCap Tickets & see blogUT’s summer theatre guide for tips on cheap tickets

Twyla Tharp’s Come Fly Away is an eighty-minute Broadway show of phenomenal dancing and choreography, set to standards sung by Frank Sinatra, with a live big band on stage. It’s the kind of show that can have the nerve to do “Pick Yourself Up” — a famous song-and-dance number from Swing Time with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers — and actually manage to compete with Astaire and Rogers. The choreography is more modern than the 1930s film, but it’s right up there, as are the dancers.

The show plays like a series of music videos for a long list of songs Sinatra popularized, from “Luck Be a Lady” to “Fly Me to the Moon” to “Learnin’ the Blues”, where Tharp’s choreography tells a short story within the song and brings the music to life. It’s great music from another time, and the choreography makes a nod to the past while giving the music a present relevance. The musical takes place during one long night at a night club where couples meet, court, and much more. But the story isn’t the point and barely exists. We get to dispense with what is usually the worst part of a musical: lame dialogue. This means the casting is based solely on dancing ability; Sinatra sings and there isn’t much acting to do. So the dancers aren’t just good Broadway dancers. They’re fantastic dancers even for Broadway.

And Tharp pulls it off like a dream. Every dance number is strong and every dancer is very strong. It’s not just that they are all impressively athletic — which they are — but they are able to do incredibly complicated dance moves, precisely in time, even when moving from one fast-paced complicated maneuver to another. The dancing is a celebration of the music and the dancers move to accentuate the rhythms in the pieces. The biggest rhythmic challenge is probably when the cast takes on dancing to Brubeck’s “Take Five”, famous for its 5/4 time signature. Almost all dances are based on 3/4 or 4/4 time, and 5/4 time is awkward for musicians; now imagine trying to keep time and dance to that with complex choreography that requires being constantly in time. It works.

My only real complaint is that the lack of the story means that the dancing is less meaningful. If you think back to great musicals like Swing Time, the singing and dancing are a culmination of all the emotions and action: they’re a triumphant climax. Without a story to propel it, the dancing is still highly entertaining to watch, but it doesn’t have the same emotional staying power. By the end of the show, I had trouble remembering what choreography went with what song; they all blurred together. The one exception was the couple, Marty and Betsy, whose courtship had a bit of an arc throughout: from the gracefully clumsy new lovers in “Let’s Fall in Love” to the self-assured powerhouse dancers in “The Way You Look Tonight/My Funny Valentine”. Of course, since the stories in musicals are usually just the MacGuffin, I’m glad that Come Fly Away was a show of non-stop entertainment, that didn’t get dragged down by a flimsy storyline.

Come Fly Away does have some provocative choreography, which is but one of several reasons for its seeming modernity. This sexy choreography is great and well-executed. But I can’t help complaining that sexy choreography has become a trend in the modern musical not just to prove its modernity but to provide gratuitous sexiness. It’s not exactly a new trend; it goes back as far as Cabaret, if not earlier. But in Cabaret, the provocative choreography, as in Sam Mendes’s 1990s West End production, was all about the characters’ attempts to hide from the dark themes happening around them. In shows like Chicago and even Come Fly Away, it just seems like an excuse to get men and women down to their knickers. Of course, even the provocative choreography in Come Fly Away is expert, fresh, and downright fabulously executed. So how can I complain really? I can’t.

Come Fly Away is a brilliantly choreographed and brilliantly executed show. So whatever it lacks in story or substance, it makes up for tenfold with style, grace, and a talented cast.

Review of My Fair Lady at the Shaw Festival

theatre

Deborah Hay and Benedict Campbell in The Shaw Festival’s production of My Fair Lady

One of the biggest crowd-pleasers at this year’s Shaw Festival is surely My Fair Lady, a good but still disappointing production of the brilliant musical about a cockney flower girl who goes from rags to riches simply by learning to speak proper English. The flower girl is Eliza Doolittle (Deborah Hay) and she has a chance encounter with a coarse phonetics expert,  Henry Higgins (Benedict Campbell). Higgins claims that in six months, he can teach her to speak like a lady, and in so doing, completely change her prospects in life. The play unfolds in two parts: the time and lessons leading up to Eliza’s perfection of the English language and the aftermath of how changing how she talks has profound effects on her situation in life.

My Fair Lady is one of the best, and also one of my favourite, musicals of the twentieth century. It combines an excellent story and a witty script – an abridged but verbatim adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion – with catchy, enduring tunes and great lyrics. In short, it has it all. That’s why it’s so incredibly difficult to get right. West Side Story is similar, requiring its cast to not only act but sing very difficult songs and dance, to boot, with most productions failing at one of these.

My Fair Lady has the added complication that it’s a story about transformations in character and life brought about by transformations in speech, which requires that all of its characters speak with very specific English accents. Eliza Doolittle is especially challenge to play: she starts the play with a rough cockney accent and finishes it a new woman with a refined upper-class accent,. There are many things to get right, and when a production does, it soars. But it’s also very easy to get them wrong.

This production of My Fair Lady gets things about half right, which is enough to keep the show fairly entertaining. This is the most ambitious choreography in a production of My Fair Lady that I’ve ever seen: the choreography for “I’m Getting Married in the Morning”, in particular, was inspired. It’s also the only time I’ve ever heard the vocals for Henry Higgins songs done completely in tune and in song – the film version with Rex Harrison involved mostly speak-singing and almost no actual singing – and Benedict Campbell as Henry can really sing.

There are two major problems with the production. The first is that the accents are generally uneven. Hay’s early accent is certainly vulgar but not quite cockney and her later accent isn’t quite right either. Campbell’s accent is certainly refined but it slips now and then. I’m not convinced it’s the actors’ fault because the accents seem to be wrong, across the board, in the exact same ways. When they all go to the Ascot, the brilliant and hilarious “Ascot Gavotte” number is mispronounced by the whole cast, with a very grating “ehscot”, which suggests they were all very badly coached on how precisely to speak.

The stars, Deborah Hay and Benedict Campbell, give solid performances with uneven accents. Hay’s physicalization is commendable: in the beginning her loose manner is boorish and crass and by the second half, become noticeably refined and delicate. Campbell mostly keeps up. I should warn that I recently saw a production of Pygmalion in the London West End starring Rupert Everett as Higgins. Everett’s portrayal was so rich, so complex, offbeat yet charismatic, that Campbell can’t possibly compete. The accents in the London production were also pitch perfect and incredibly detailed: as Eliza developed the ability to speak more properly, you could still hear minor slips into a cockney accent, every tenth word or so, which became increasingly less prevalent as the play went on. The trouble with Hay and Campbell – and the rest of the cast’s mediocre accents – is that they were distracting. I ended up focusing on how they sounded off instead of on the story. In the case of Pickering (Patrick Galligan), it was horribly grating.

The real star of the show proved to be Mark Uhre as Freddy Eynsford-Hill, Eliza’s silly upper-class lover, who sings the silly but romantic love song, “On the Street Where You Live”. Freddy can so easily be an overlooked character: he is supposed to be daft yet sympathetic but can easily be banal. But Uhre has great stage presence. His Freddy is appealing and charming and completely steals the scene whenever he appears, even when the centre of attention is meant to be Eliza, like in the number “Show Me”. He’s also got a fantastic voice and a real affinity for the physicalizing Freddy’s proper manners and reckless romanticism. Mark Uhre is the real thing and he’s sure to be a star. Special mention should also be made of Sharry Flett as Henry’s mother, Mrs Higgins, who nailed her part, balancing her maternal instincts, her disapproval of her son, and her pride in Eliza for Eliza’s transformation.

The second main problem was the set design, which though elaborate, was mostly ill conceived, leading to awkward movement on the stage. The set for Henry’s house provided two main spaces on the set: his desk and office on one side of the stage and a sitting room completely on the other end. These spaces were so disparate that when characters interacted between them – and they often did – the action was always stilted. It often seemed as though the characters were yelling at each other from opposite ends of the stage. Even worse, the characters would often move between the two sets, pacing back and forth, with absolutely no motivation, just looking for an excuse to use the stage. This, too, was distracting.

The set for covent garden at the beginning of the play was not quite as problematic. It impressively created distorted pillars to use perspective to make the stage look bigger. The problem was that most of the elements that broke up the stage – the pillars, the elevated platform – were so far upstage that it was awkward to have actors realistically move from downstage to upstage often, just to make use of the set pieces. The pillars need to serve as a hiding place for Higgins to observe Eliza and as barriers between the two when they spar. Instead, they serve as decoration which the director desperately attempts to use without elegance.

There was one clear exception to the poor set design: the set at the ascot was brilliant. I particularly liked how when the group of spectators prepares to watch the race, a fence rolls out in front of them, far downstage, and shadows of the horses racing flicker across the stage. It looks just right and feels just right and you get the real sense that they really are at the ascot. The ‘Ascott Gavotte’, which is perhaps the funniest of all the songs, because of its irony, is also done just right. Few things are funnier than watching the very composed, expressionless faces of the men and women at the ascot as they sing about how they “have never been so keyed up”.

Even with bad accents and bad staging, My Fair Lady is so well crafted that the production is still entertaining. It might lose a few genuine laughs and some of the complexity and believability of character development, but it can still fall back on a long list of fabulous songs. And so if all My Fair Lady can boast is some great song and dance numbers that will keep you tapping your feet, smiling, and humming the songs as you leave, it’s still well worth the ticket price. I was disappointed that the production wasn’t better and didn’t fully do justice to the musical, but I thoroughly enjoyed it nonetheless.

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My Fair Lady runs until October 31.

For information on getting cheap tickets and trave,l see the post on BlogUT’s top 5 summer theatre festivals on a student budget.

Richard III at the Stratford Festival is a triumph

theatre

Seanna McKenna as Richard III in the Stratford Festival production

Seanna McKenna does a fabulous turn as Shakespeare’s most interesting and deliciously charismatic villain, in the title role of Stratford’s must-see of the summer, Richard III. It seems to be a popular play this year, with Sam Mendes’s rendition currently playing at the Old Vic in the London West End, starring Kevin Spacey. But Torontonians need not feel too envious, as Stratford’s Richard III is a triumph, and proof positive that the history plays can be incredibly entertaining.

Richard III is a conniving and scheming little devil, who systematically kills – or has killed – everyone in his way to the throne of England while maintaining the appearance of humility amongst his peers and congratulating himself in intimate exchanges with the audience. It is a play that is as much about performance as it is about politics, which prove less important than building a fascinating character. Shakespeare’s rendering of Richard III is better remembered in history than the real Richard III, who was likely not quite so evil nor quite so charming.

Seanna McKenna plays Richard III straight, and aside from her small frame, is indistinguishable from a man. Richard III is a cripple, an outward manifestation of his inner evil, and McKenna has perfected the hunchback, the limp, and the deformed arm: it all seems so incredibly natural, that it’s a surprise to see McKenna spryly skip offstage in the curtain call. She also does a wonderful job of layering the many different facets of Richard’s character: he’s playful, witty, cunning, remorseless, pernicious, malicious, corrupt, and unbelievably likeable. It’s an incredibly rich character in text, and McKenna does it full justice.

The production plays it straight, too, which Stratford almost never does, and yet the best productions there are almost always the straight ones. This is not modernized. This is not updated. Its lack of pretension puts the text at centre stage, and here that’s a triumph.

The production is in the Tom Patterson Theatre, where the oddly shaped stage – long and narrow – is put to wonderfully good use while maintaining economy. This stage has many stages within it.

There’s a small elevated platform, downstage, that serves as a stage for Richard to speak his soliloquies to us, marveling at and congratulating himself on his deviousness: this is Richard’s spectacle to the audience. It is also used to great effect when he successfully woos Lady Anne at her husband’s deathbed where Richard killed him, perhaps Richard’s greatest triumph of performance as Director Miles Potter cleverly and subtly draws attention to with this staging.

In the middle of the stage, there is red tile on the floor, which is where most of the scenes at court are held, subtly drawing attention to how manners at court are just another form of performance. And finally, the whole stage is elevated from the ground by one step which surrounds the entire stage. Watch where Richard lingers and when. When there is action occurring, but Richard has minimal dialogue, he stalks the outer step around the stage – he is, in a way, backstage, observing, not yet performing, but calculating and scheming and always having a hand at driving the action, however surreptitiously. Watch how when he puts on airs of humility, Potter has him step onto one of the many stages within the stage. Watch also how in the first half, he only steps onto the edges of the stage within the stage, and he steps there with some trepidation. Compare this to how, once crowned, Richard finally walks confidently to the middle of the red tile: finally feeling he belongs in a different kind of spotlight.

This very, very clever blocking is executed perfectly: it is subtle, motivated, and incredibly effective. It makes you constantly question who is performing, who is the audience, and how is the audience complicit in the performance. As Richard draws us into his plan, intimately speaking directly to the audience with his clever wordplay, we can’t help but root for him. We become complicit in supporting his wicked plan. We also can understand how all the members at court would be so taken in by Richard. McKenna shows us Richard’s pretensions but so subtly that we can believe they could go unnoticed by those at court.

Much like in Hamlet, where we can’t help but like Hamlet for his clever wordplay, and despise Claudius for his inadequacies in this department, Shakespeare equips Richard with incredible wit. He can artfully twist other people’s words, with a talent for verbal sparring unmatched by any of the other characters. This gives us both a feeling of how alone Richard is and a surprising amount of sympathy for him. And it also brings up the question of how someone so cogent in thought can be so deformed in motives.

The main failure of this production is a common one for this play, which is that the supporting characters get muddled and the many characters Richard deceives are hard to track. This may be, in part, due to a directorial indifference to these banal characters, compared to the seductive Richard, and in part due to solid but uninspiring acting. Bethany Jillard as Lady Anne is one striking exception, with real stage presence, and a complex performance, making this easily overlooked character actually equally rich as her partner on stage, Richard. Luckily, most of the specifics don’t matter too much, and the programme provides a nice family tree to help you keep track of the many people Richard needs to knock off.

Nevertheless, it is still a solid production, with an inspired use of stages within stages, and Seanna McKenna in a stunning performance, which, I am convinced, could not have been equalled by anyone else in the company at the moment. This is also the best Shakespeare production and the strongest lead performance I’ve seen at the Stratford Festival since Ben Carlson played Hamlet and Colm Feore did Macbeth. And along with the Shaw Festival’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Stratford’s Richard III is the must-see play of the year and it’s within driving distance of the GTA.

For information on cheap student tickets and travel, see the post on the Top 5 Summer Theatre Festivals on a Student Budget.

Billy Elliot: The Musical

Music, theatre

Where: The Canon Theatre
When: Tuesdays @ 7PM, Wednesday-Saturday @ 7:30PM, and Wednesday and Sunday @ 1:30PM
More info: See the Billy Elliot in Toronto website

Billy Elliot: the Musical is a musical adapted from the film, about a young boy in a small mining town in Nothern England, who dares to don ballet shoes while all the other boys are decked out in boxing gloves. The film was a moving story of how a boy’s all-consuming love for ballet, allowed him to overcome incredible obstacles – the stigma against men in ballet, his small town upbringings, his mother’s death, and the brutal 1984 British National Union Worker’s strike which was devastating the town – to do what he loves and escape. This particular production downplays the struggles greatly, and in so doing loses our emotional investment, but puts together a wonderful spectacle of lights, dancing, and music, punctuated by slapstick comedy.

The production was directed by Stephen Daldry and choreographed by Peter Darling, who also did the film, the London West End production, as well as the Tony-award winning Broadway rendition. The directing and choreography – if we consider only the blocking, the flow, and the dances – are a triumph. The directing is well crafted enough to cleverly weave together the two interlocking stories: Billy’s discovery of ballet and his town’s destruction during the strike. I particularly liked how the montage of Billy’s initial ballet education happens in the middle of the stage, while the miners and the riot police face off on either side of them: Billy and the other innocent kids are quite literally caught between this conflict and ballet is an escape. It’s a brilliant idea and perhaps with a better cast and better acting, it would have been properly executed in Toronto. But the themes never fully come to fruition in the hands of the Toronto cast.

When it comes to singing and dancing, this cast has talent. Billy Elliot is alternately played by four different boys – Julian Elia, Myles, Erlick, Ty Forhan, and Marcus Pei – and I saw Pei’s performance, which was an amazing feat of singing and dancing. The rest of the cast is equally talented in these areas, even Jake Epstein of Degrassi: the Next Generation holds his own next to the seriously trained dancers. The dance numbers were immensely entertaining, well choreographed, and smooth, smooth, smooth. Continue reading Billy Elliot: The Musical →

This summer at Soulpepper: The Glass Menagerie and The Kreutzer Sonata

Review, theatre, TOBlender


Where: Young Centre in the Distillery District
When: See the season calendar. Glass Menagerie plays until September 6th. Kreutzer Sonata ends August 11th.
How to get cheap tickets: See the Top 5 Summer Theatre Festivals blog post.

Ted Dykstra directs two plays for the Soulpepper Theatre company this summer: the Tennessee Williams play, The Glass Menagerie, and the one-act, one man show, The Kreutzer Sonata. The first has a great cast and very solid direction, while the second is reasonably well acted by Dykstra but is terribly directed.

The Glass Menagerie is the story of the Wingfield family in the South, struggling to make ends meet after being abandoned by the patriarch: the father to Tom and Laura, husband to Amanda. The children are grown now and so the role of breadwinner falls to Tom, who feels shackled by his family responsibilities, stuck in a low-paying job he hates, wanting desperately to escape, to have adventures, and to write. Laura is a shy cripple, who spends her days wandering the city and caring for her glass menagerie – a collection of small glass animal figurines – rather than learning a trade so that she can support herself. All of this worries their mother, Amanda, who lives in constant fear that Tom will abandon them just like his father, and that, left to fend for herself, Laura will fail, and remain always hopelessly dependent on others. The characters all speak in a Southern drawl, flawless enough that it helps give the language the right sound adding to the performances.

Dysktra’s rendition of The Glass Menagerie is done with a surprising amount of levity for a Tennessee Williams play, which is not to say it lacks Williams’s trademark bleakness. Amanda (Nancy Palk) is the real star of the play, delivering her nostalgic dialogue and complaints in a light and over-the-top fashion which is incontrovertibly funny. Palk often talks about the gentleman callers of her youth with such vanity that the tone is humourous rather than full of loss. And it works.

In the beginning of the play, Tom speaks to the audience to explain that “The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic.'” And yet Dykstra’s production feels very immediate. The dialogue flows impeccably to the point that I remained so utterly engaged that I would forget that this was a memory play, Tom’s memory. The only reminder that the events were supposed to be memories was the fact that the actor playing Tom, Stuart Hughes, is too old to be the Tom in the unfolding action. Part of the realism comes from the fantastic set which gives us both the interior and exterior of the apartment the family inhabits. The interior is especially good and the characters move comfortably in it, which kept me completely convinced that this was a real home. But the fact that the play feels so realistic – despite its being a memory play – is hardly something I can complain about in the production, though I worry that some of the nuance of the text may be lost because of it.

What most impressed me about the production was how radically and masterfully the tone and pacing changed through the three parts of the play. It begins with despair and little hope. The characters talk slowly and keep their distance from each other in the physical space; the action moves slowly, too. As soon as a gentleman caller for Laura becomes a real possibility – Tom asks a friend from work to dinner – the characters light up, the energy on-stage increases, the lines delivered more quickly and excitedly, and the physical distance between these unhappy characters decreases. The pacing of the action and the hopefulness in the tone wonderfully tells us just what an important symbol of hope the gentleman caller really is. And when everything blows up as it must – this is a Tennessee Williams play – the tension and the bleakness of the situation seem audible and can be physically felt: everything slows down and becomes pregnant with pauses.

While Dykstra’s direction was a triumph in The Glass Menagerie, it is a trainwreck in his one-act show, The Kreutzer Sonata. The Kreutzer Sonata is a play adapted from the short story of the same name by Leo Tolstoy, which, itself, is inspired by the Beethoven duet for piano and violin, the “Kreutzer Sonata”. It tells the story of a husband who becomes consumed with jealousy and rage when his wife plays Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata” with another man that he murders her. The wife and other man play with whom she plays Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata”. Ted Dykstra plays the enraged husband, who tells us the story of the events leading up to and including the murder of his wife, of which he is ultimately acquitted, since it was provoked, supposedly, by adultery.

It’s a one-hour show during which Dykstra sits in a red armchair, sipping a glass of water throughout the entire performance. Dykstra is convincing as the husband and successfully takes us on his journey of emotional turmoil, engaging throughout. The trouble with the play is that it lacks context. In fact, it’s staged in such a way that he looks just like the host of Masterpiece Theatre. To whom is he talking to? Is this a monologue to himself, as he works through his issues? It can’t be since he seems to be talking to someone? Does he think he is in front of an audience, addressing us directly, like Richard III would do? Is he confiding in a friend from the comfort of his armchair at home? This seems unlikely given the frequency of private intimate moments that he experiences throughout the telling. The reason why he is telling his story and to whom are completely unclear, which means the production ultimately fails. And the fact that it’s full of misogyny – an insane and enraged husband gets away with murder because he is right to think that women should be assumed adulterous and evil and deserve to be beaten and die for it – only fuels my distaste for the play.