Courtesy of Orpheus Musical Theatre

At the heart of Chorus Line is the huge contrast between the opening and closing scenes. The intentionally ragged beginning features some two dozen dancers, a few practising exercises, others meandering around, all anxiously waiting to strut their stuff so that the director will choose them from among their rivals for a place on the line. The closing number shows the dancers as a unit, the perfect backup for the star of the next Broadway show.

And the paradox of the creation of the well-oiled dancing machine, peopled by anonymous dancers moving in unison, is that, along the way, Chorus Line morphs into often tragic tales about the individuals and the life-and-death importance of this audition, the next and the many beyond that.

…

Read More Read More

Photo: Andrew Alexander

An old man, clearly drugged, shows up at a police station wearing a Santa hat and military uniform. A meat hook skewering a lawyer’s business card hangs around his neck. This is the jumping off point for The Butcher by Nicolas Billon, playing now at the Great Canadian Theatre Company. It’s a pretty enticing teaser to begin with, but the real success of the play is the fact that it found its way into the hands of an impressive artistic team. From direction to design to acting – there are a lot of reasons that The Butcher just works but at the heart of it is a shared vision.

To reveal too much of the script is a disservice to future audiences, so suffice it to say: This is a play that is not what it appears to be at its inception. Playwright Billon weaves an unexpected and affecting story that weighs in on some heavy ideas, while rooting them in well-crafted characters. It’s the characters that drive the play, and here the cast rises to the occasion.

…

Read More Read More

What is it in us that turns a seemingly normal human being into a monster, capable of unspeakable acts? What triggers a terrifying, unstoppable evil in us? Furthermore, is a perpetrator any more a monster than his victim in search of revenge? What Nicolas Billonn tries to explore in his play Butcher is the violent side of human nature, and its thirst for revenge at any cost. The instinct, as old as humanity (“eye for eye, tooth for tooth”) is forbidden by societies, but in reality still embraced by humans, shows how little it takes to reach the realm of hatred – the kingdom of insane distraction, the dark place in us that leads to perdition, a road with no open ends and no chance of coming back. What is the strength of that horrific path that makes us confuse justice with ravage intentionally? Nicolas Billonn’s play promises exploration of all these.

It is 25 years after a civil war in an imagined Eastern-European country. A former officer who worked in a prisoner’s camp at that time is tracked down and caught by a group of his former enemies, including a woman who was his victim. They bring him in a staged police station where the drama unfolds, and revenge takes place.  Unfortunately, though promising a lot, the play does not deliver.   …

Read More Read More

Photo:  Andrew Alexander

Slumped in a police station chair at the beginning of Nicolas Billon’s Butcher, Josef Džibrilovo seems like the furthest thing imaginable from a man with a frightening past. Whatever potential danger his unidentifiable military uniform may signal is negated by the sagging Santa Claus hat on his head and the occasional twitch of his aging hands. But then much of Billon’s charged political thriller is about the shattering conflict between appearance and reality, and about how we can be suddenly caught up in the latter while blithely existing in the former.Butcher is also a difficult play to talk about without talking too much. Littered with enough twists and turns to induce terminal whiplash, it works by drawing you steadily deeper into a narrative web that can’t be revealed in much detail without spoiling the show for those haven’t seen it.

…

Read More Read More

Photo: Cube Gallery. Gerald Trottier “Dead Person”. Last night at the Cube Art Gallery, down the street from the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre where I was planning on seeing the first preview of Butcher, there was a Vernissage of an exhibition by Canadian artist Gerald Trottier, entitled “Wounded Creatures of the Earth”.  It is a series of watercolour and mixed media drawings, showing cruel images of human beings going through ritualized behaviour often related to Christian sacrifice, to revolution, to individual and collective suffering in the world, to poetic symbols of human figures torn apart, embedded in trees that evoke the crucifixion or human beings huddled together in distress or seeking warmth and comfort.

Photo John Koensgen.   Down the street, Nicolas Billon’s play Butcher was opening an hour later the same evening, and it occurred to me that the Trottier exhibition was an excellent preparation for anyone intending to see Billon’s play.  Trottier’s work,  strongly influenced by images of Catholic based  sacrifice, martyrdom and uplifting redemption played out by unidentifiable human figures, is very near  the spirit of Billon’s play, which is  more deeply  anchored in the horrors of current history.  Billon’s work identifies the monsters of our time and rapidly fits them into recent events which bombard us every day on television and radio. In other words, Trottier the visual artist is the unquestionable visionary whereas  Billon, the playwright  makes the links  between  ancient and contemporary political culture producing  visual signs that are all recognizable.

…

Read More Read More