Theatre Review by Christina Manolescu</MARQUEE>
Speaking of which, special mention goes to Stephanie McNamara who plays Miss Hopkins, the intrepid legal advocate, and not merely for the exceptional quality of her stage voice.
Mikel Mroué portrays Miss Hopkins’ client, a suspected terrorist detainee (and potentially everyman) Mohammed El Rafi, otherwise known as ‘Mo’. He rises to the challenge of portraying an ordinary little guy with an extraordinary destiny. Christine Aubin Khalifah, as ‘Mo’s wife, gives an affecting and convincing performance, while the final moments of the tale are exceptionally dramatic and raw.
Hampered from helping her client, Miss Hopkins opts to resign from her job in favour of pursuing a maverick act of humanity. Professional empathy, she discovers, is an unwelcome commodity in the post 9/11 world. It’s the dawn of the Millennium, and the body politic is turning in upon itself, searching for cancers. Witness the awesome power of the ‘petit bureaucrat’ behind a big big desk.
Career consul, Don Anderson, who’s a hair’s breadth from receiving his golden retirement handshake, stonewalls Hopkins’ efforts from day one. If the drama threatens to get rather heavy at times, comic relief comes in the form of Anderson’s hybrid persona, smoothly embracing both male and female roles, one of whom proves as intransigent as the other is intimidating.
Marcel Jeannin gives an energetic performance as Jenkins, a government interrogator, who is ‘tasked’ with solving the problem of ‘Mo.’ He requires a signed confession of terrorist guilt, but it turns out to be a delicate and treacherous operation, resisting even his determined problem-solving skills. This is no mathematical calculus and the elements don’t quite fit. Jenkins’ job is to make them fit, any which way he can: whether by persuasion, cajoling, coercion, threats, lies, or worse – making sure always to cover one’s official rear, while justice is publicly ‘seen’ to be served.
Unless we are aware that RELATIVE GOOD was first written and staged soon after September 11, 2001, we’d be justified in assuming that the plot had been plucked from some contemporary news report; in fact, it bears an eerie resemblance to the notorious miscarriage of justice that occurred recently on Canadian/US soil. Seven years on, the play survives as a grimly accurate prophecy, a demonstration of life imitating art.
In essence, it’s the human story that emerges: stage lights trained on the precarious fate of one individual, unwittingly swept into the maelstrom of public security paranoia and robotic regulation which, despite its outward sophistication, proves to be just a whisper away from the era of the lynch mob.
Over an intense couple of hours, a powerful dichotomy is set in motion then, more or less, resolved on stage. The audience is left to contemplate the amoral, lopsided lesson that passes for conventional wisdom: acts of humanity and due process of law (a.k.a. bleeding-heart Liberal concern for individual rights) may be foolhardy, even potentially dangerous; in matters of State security, far better—for the relative good—to err on the side of caution.
Theatre Review by Christina Manolescu © 2008 Invisible Cities Network
Mohammed El Rafi (Mikel Mroué), a Syrian born Canadian is not the political type. He is a hard-working engineer in the field of hydrogen technology and a father of two, who suddenly finds himself at the wrong place at the wrong time. Branded by his cultural and religious heritage, he is detained while transferring between flights at JFK airport in New York and subject to a blood-chilling investigation that eventually sends him to Syria. The Canadian consular officials cannot (or will not) facilitate his release or even gain due process for their fellow countryman, and El Rafi’s fate is increasingly caught up in a Kafkaesque morass of security law semantics and a convoluted Department of External affairs. Humour and irony weave into the bureaucratic web…
Seemingly ripped from the headlines of a recent newspaper, Montreal playwright David Gow’s, newest play puts a very real and personal face on the political issue of detention certificates and portrays the fears, agonies and lack of humanity experienced by the family of a man branded by his name and racial profile. Relative Good explores questions being asked by citizens on both sides of the border. How do we strike a balance between national security and the rights of the individual? What is the human cost of racial profiling? Does the "relative good" of society justify government encroachment upon basic human rights?…