March 2013 - Page 3 of 4 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Absurd Person Singular: Fast Paced, Well Acted and Viciously Funny. A Winner

By Alvina Ruprecht | March 8, 2013

Photo: Andrew Alexander

From top to bottom:

The Brewster-Wrights

The Jacksons

The Hopcrofts

Alan Ayckbourn, the master of British Farce, has certainly inherited the gifts of playwright Georges Feydeau who dominated the French theatre of the middle and upper classes at the turn of the century with his particular form of farce. As the doors slam, the dialogue bristles, split-second timing reigns and the characters enter and exit with the impeccable speed of a well-oiled machine, there is always a social commentary hidden somewhere in this mass of wound up humanity. However, contrary to Feydeau’s farces, this one cares less about who is sleeping with whom, although that does enter into the picture in a most class conscious moment where the “bit on the side” becomes a sign of upper class mobility that excludes the tradesman and his “vulgar” ways.

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Princess Ivona : A Perfect Portrayal of our Inner Torment.

By Rajka Stefanovska | March 7, 2013

Photo. Marianne Duval

Ivona is probably the most unlikely bride-to-be for a prince. She is a commoner, ugly, slouchy, highly unsociable, and has no manners at all. Still, the young prince, bored with the every-day palace life, chooses her for her fiancé. At first she serves as an object of practical jokes for courtiers and the reason for despair for his royal parents. As time goes by, it seems that this insignificant creature gets in everybody’s way. It is not the inconvenience of her presence or her sloppy ways that bother the courtiers. Day after day, gradually, Ivona manages to bring out their worst in her peers, and even worse, she begins to remind them of their own carefully hidden faults. By the end, she is too much for everybody’s comfort, and the decision is unanimous: Ivona must die.

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Ivona, Princess of Burgundy: Gombrowicz Glitters on the Catwalk

By Alvina Ruprecht | March 7, 2013

Prince(Tony Adam), Isobel (Ashley Rissler), Margaret (Jaclyn Martinez)

Photo. Marianne Duval

Written in Poland in 1938 but first published in 1958, Ivona (Princess of Burgundy) is Wiltold Gombrowicz’s first play. The author left Poland in 1939 and spent the rest of his life in Argentina, Germany and France, where he died in 1969. His plays would therefore seem to represent an amalgamation of European theatrical forms and experiments, filtered through possible contact with the very vibrant, expressionist oriented and politically conscious theatre milieu of post-war Argentina. It has been said that Gombrowicz never went to the theatre, but do we really know how he spent his days? In any case, telling about the hours spent with his Porteño friends in dark little cafés is much more romantic and adds to the mystery of this exceptionally brilliant playwright, about whom we really know very little.

Ekaterina Shestakova is a second year student in the M.F.A. directing programme at the University of Ottawa working under the supervision of Peter Bataklyev from Montreal. This play is her final directing project. She has produced a most exceptional staging of a highly complex play with a cast of twelve. At some points, one even forgets this is a student production, so meticulous is her directing, so clear is her artistic vision, that it is only the odd slip by the odd student, as well as the unexpected loss of energy at the end of the first part of the evening, due no doubt to the fragmented nature of the text, that one realizes where we are. But even then, such “slippage” would certainly not escape a local professional company (the NAC included) trying to perform this kind of theatre which is not normally the kind of challenge theatre groups undertake on Ottawa stages.

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Absurd Person Singular: An Exploration of the Dark Depths of Human Nature

By Patrick Langston | March 7, 2013

Photo: Andrew Alexander

OTTAWA — In 2008, John P. Kelly directed Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves at The Gladstone. It was hilarious.
This time, Kelly directs Ayckbourn’s later play Absurd Person Singular. It too is a hoot. Except when it turns dark. Then something truly ugly about human nature and one of its spinoffs, the class system, emerges.
Last year, the play celebrated its 40th anniversary – Anna Lewis’ costume design for this production includes bell bottom trousers and a head band – but the show’s snarling social satire remains vital.
The story finds three married couples gathering in one of their kitchens on three successive Christmas Eves. Two of the couples, Geoffrey and Eva Jackson and Ronald and Marion Brewster-Wright, are upper middle class, but as the seasons roll by their fortunes, both financial and marital, erode. Sidney and Jane Hopcroft, on the other hand, scramble out of the working class but never lose the stigma of their origin, both in their own eyes and in those of the others.
These are not couples anyone in their right mind would want to spend time with. As the play’s title suggests, each person is singular and absurd, unconnected in any meaningful way to his or her partner or to the rest of the world…….

Until March 23. Tickets: 613-233-4523, thegladstone.ca

Innocence Lost. A play about Steven Truscott : an opportunity missed

By Iris Winston | March 6, 2013

Photo: Allen McInnis

Playwright Beverly Cooper.

NAC English Theatre/Centaur Theatre, Montreal co-production

Two lives were destroyed when 12-year-old Lynne Harper was raped and murdered in Clinton in 1959. Numerous others were tainted. Life would never be the same for anyone even peripherally involved in the railroading of 14-year-old Steven Truscott and the miscarriage of justice that initially sentenced him to hang for the crime.

The dramatic potential of the sad story and the fact that the guilty verdict was not overturned until 2007 (almost 50 years after the event and without the killer being found) is clear.

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Innocence Lost: A Play About Steven Truscott

By Jamie Portman | March 6, 2013

Photo by Luce Tremblay-Gaudette

The title of the play currently at the National Arts Centre is Innocence Lost.But the evening might more appropriately be called Promise Squandered.

The very subject matter is guaranteed to seize our attention, dealing as it does with one of the most shameful episodes in the history of Canadian criminal jurisprudence — the 1959 wrongful conviction of 14-year-old Southern Ontario schoolboy Steven Truscott for the rape and murder of a 12-year-old classmate, and his sentence to death by hanging.

More the pity then that this account of a shocking miscarriage of justice and of the 48-year battle to win acquittal for Truscott proves so hollow in execution. This co-production from NAC’s English theatre and Montreal’s Centaur Theatre is generally inert and bloodless in performance save for a few equally unfortunate moments of melodramatic excess.

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Innocence Lost: When Truth is More Interesting Than Fiction

By Alvina Ruprecht | March 6, 2013

Photo:Erik Berg

The tragic story of Steven Truscott which played out in 1959, in the tiny town of Clinton Ontario, created all sorts of great theatrical expectations, especially with the media hype that accompanied the arrival of the play. Yes, it is a horrific story of a travesty of injustice! Yes, it involved the destruction of two young lives: the twelve year old girl whose murder was the most heartbreaking event, and the accused fourteen year old boy sentenced to be hanged but who had his sentence commuted to life in prison, before he was released in 2007. This is a true story that will haunt the annals of Canadian history forever.

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Innocence Lost. A Factual Re-imagining

By Capital Critics Circle | March 6, 2013

Allan Morgan & Fiona Reid Photo: Lucy Tremblay Gaudette

Innocence Lost, a Play About Steven Truscott by Beverly Cooper, tells the story of a 1959 murder and subsequent trial whose outcome eventually changed the entire Canadian judicial system. Fourteen-year-old Steven Truscott was tried and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of his twelve-year-old classmate Lynn Harper. Continuously maintaining his innocence through many appeals, his conviction was finally overturned in 2007. Playwright Cooper explores the case using trial transcripts and interviews to help understand its effects on both the country and Steven’s friends and family.

Although this is a fascinating story, the structure of INNOCENCE LOST feels much more like a documentary than a play. The majority of the story, especially in Act I, is told either in narration or statements of facts delivered as direct address to the audience. Even in Act II, which contains more short dramatic scenes, we just begin to become involved when the scene is broken off for more narration.

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Rock of Ages: Broadway Across Canada Comes to the NAC

By Patrick Langston | March 5, 2013

Photo. Ottawa Citizen

OTTAWA — When a guy pretends to play guitar using a toilet plunger, you suspect a send-up of rock ‘n’ roll is be about to engulf you. Which – in addition to spoofing musicals generally and not taking itself particularly seriously – is the order of the day for Rock of Ages, the comic rock musical set in the 1980s when big hair, glam metal bands and bombast ruled the rock record charts.

Although the second act gets sluggish (mostly because of Chris D’Arienzo’s overly long script), the touring production of this silly, unsubtle and totally entertaining show is as undeniably winning as a smile from Ronald Reagan.

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Innocence Lost: Really a play about us

By Rajka Stefanovska | March 4, 2013

Photo. Barb Gray

Although it appears to be a play About Steven Truscott, Innocence lost is really a play about us, our place in the community and our responsibility to act upon our knowledge, analytical abilities and consciousness. Beverley Cooper’s story about the miscarriage of justice in the well-known case of Steven Truscott’s trial sets a few unsettling questions deep into our mind:

When, why and how does an intelligent human being turn into a particle mashed up into the invisible, thoughtless grey mass? What makes the majority into blind followers of so-called “betters” rather than independent thinkers capable of making their own decisions? And, above all, where does a community end up if individuals allow themselves to be manipulated into thinking the way that socially imposed authorities want or need them to?

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