Theatre Review by Christina Manolescu</MARQUEE>
The tangible symbolism of which is ‘in your face,’ should you happen not to notice. All the actors take their turn stomping or wallowing in the REAL earth coating the Mainline Theatre stage, which has been made-over into a sort of ploughed-up graveyard or Sheol, bordered by a derelict refugee shanty.
The site calls to mind stark visions of the kind of ‘hell’ that people fabricate for themselves, and others.
It’s here that real and imagined graveyard ghosts—AND a cohort of mind-demons, caged in live human bodies—haunt, march, conflict, co-habit and co-mingle. Whether single, coupling or de-coupling, there are those who just can’t stop themselves from ferociously blaming and cross-examining others. That’s when they’re not clawing at the core of their own psyche or conducting post-mortems on defunct lives.
It makes for a ‘scene’ as far removed as can be from the plush comfort-zones that many of us strive to achieve in our ‘ordinary’ day-to-day surface lives.
In this twisted guide-tour through the shared human underground, unnameable forces succeed in transforming victims into murderers and murderers into victims. Thompson’s play is a dark, penetrating gaze at the fluid shifting ‘symmetry’ of the familiar Biblical allusion to ‘the Lion’ and ‘the Lamb.’
And in case you thought no humour could flourish in these murky depths, you would be surprised. Often quirky, ribald, startling and incongruous, sometimes it’s scarcely more than a disjoint and wayward response to events: the bare bones of what the spirit can offer up in frail defiance of doom.
And as far as humour goes, there are plenty of ‘set piece’ jewels scripted into this surreal and darkly fascinating play.
When Tamara Brown, for instance, in her sparkling live-wire performance as Rhonda, delivers about three dozen rapid-fire reasons why her dying young friend’s final request (to be allowed to drift downriver to her death like some modern-day Ophelia) is so utterly-beyond-the-pale selfish, logistically un-do-able and wrong.
Imagine a sedate cocktail party in which instead of conversational sound-bytes, the mingling guests boldly and casually voice what they’re truly thinking. This play is all about digging through the many many layers below the surface, exhuming and examining whatever there is to be found in the human experience and laying it bare: sex, love, innocence, betrayal, sickness, death, religious faith, perversion and murder, the list goes on and on.
Several actors in this 19-strong cast, by the way, take on 2 or 3 roles apiece, which contributes to its decidedly sombre and profound epic scope. Kudos to Tableau d’Hôte Theatre Company and all 30 of its collaborative theatre artists for coming to grips with and staging this super-challenging production.