April 2014 - Page 3 of 3 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Dancing with rage: Chutzpah mingles with rage as Mary Walsh bares her soul on the stage.

By Iris Winston | April 2, 2014

Photos Barb Gray.

It takes a particular kind of chutzpah to ambush political figures and conduct mock interviews. It takes nerve for a woman of a certain age (actually 61) to sport a ridiculous warrior princess outfit, complete with plastic sword. But both are as nothing compared to stripping down to unflattering, expansive and expanded spandex, black underwear and making fun of the aging body squeezed in and flowing out.

As Newfoundland comedienne Mary Walsh a.k.a. Marg Delahunty says, even the nuns who despaired of her through her schooldays never thought she would sink this low. But that is part of her charm for audiences. Her self-deprecating humour in general and this moment in particular (further enhanced by attacking the flesh flow with electrician’s tape) is one of the funniest and most endearing aspects of her one-woman show, Dancing with Rage.

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Drama at Inish: Good Performances Rescue this Drama at the OLT.

By Jamie Portman | April 2, 2014

Drama At Inish is a trifle of a play which seeks to wrest a full evening’s entertainment out of a trifle of a situation. As such, it poses a challenge to anyone attempting it.

Lennox Robinson’s 81-year-old comedy has to do with an Irish seaside town and the impact on it of a travelling theatre troupe which has no intention of providing the kind of light summer entertainment to which it has become accustomed. Instead the townsfolk get a diet of gloom and doom — Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg — and their reaction to what they see on stage casts a pall over the community even as people continue flocking to the performances.

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Death of a Salesman: A resonant tribute to Miller’s masterpiece

By Patrick Langston | April 2, 2014

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman – about the delusional, beaten-down anti-hero Willy Loman, a travelling salesman you’d not look twice at were you to pass him on the street – is a play at once timeless and specific, a story one instinctively relates to at the same time it’s a snapshot of the American dream embodied in one man and his family circa the mid-20^th century.

So Chamber Theatre Hintonburg’s decision to enact the play on a tiny stage at the Carleton Tavern, while creating staging problems, seems appropriate: a story writ large and small at the same time.

The centre of that story is Willy, and Donnie Laflamme gives us a richly realized characterization of this man whose disintegration you watch with the same slightly voyeuristic guilt you’d bring to watching a train wreck. Hope, anger, love, confusion: Willy’s mind is a tornado of emotion, and Laflamme captures it all in the passionate, loose-cannon style that is his acting trademark.

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