Third Wall Theatre re-opens after a two year hiatus with renewed energy, bringing audience’s an atmospheric, deeply psychological portrayal of one of theatre’s most intriguing tragic-heroes. Director James Richardson picked a work that is close to his heart, choosing to create a production that is a personal reflection on some aspects of Georg Büchner’s masterwork, Woyzeck. This post-modern approach to what is considered the first modern drama brings audiences a living hallucination, bolstered by multi-media and casting the audience into the role of clinical observer.

Critic Lyn Gardner summarizes the appeal of Büchner’s Woyzeck—the source piece for this performance—beautifully in her 2003 review of a production by Cardboard Citizens in London, “Büchner never even finished his play; nobody knows in what order the scenes were intended to be played. It is its plasticity that has made this 200-year-old work one of the most influential plays in contemporary drama – that, and its concentrated depiction of alienation and disassociation.” This is certainly true of Richardson’s “elastic” interpretation of the text, playing as part of the TACTICS Theatre Series at Arts Court.

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Yana Meerzon, who is covering the Festival for the Capital critics circle,  has seen Reikiavik at the  Europe Theatre Festival in Craiova, Romania. It was  performed in Spanish with English sub-titles.

Beckett’s Fin de partie/ Endgame is his masterpiece about the cruelty of time, the ticking clock that measures our minutes, days and years. Reikiavik by Juan Mayorga, a recipient of the 13th Europe Prize Theatrical Realities, XV Europe Theatre Festival, is about a very similar game: the game of chess in which the players are in an impossible combat with death. Dressed up as the story about the 1972 famous match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spasski, when the Soviet Union lost its 24 year chess crown to the USA, this play uses the metaphor of chess and the metaphor of playing (or of the game) to talk about love, death, and hope.

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The world is shifting underneath her feet and yet, Janet Wilson tries very hard not to notice. The world premiere of Janet Wilson Meets the Queen by Beverley Cooper, playing now at the GCTC, turns a family’s home into a microcosm for the rise of political activism and shifting gender roles that mark the 1970s.

The epitome of 1960’s housewife, Janet prepares for Vancouver’s centennial anniversary and a celebratory visit from the Queen of England. Roger Schultz’s set is a perfectly 1960s kitchen with its colourful, floral print wallpaper that blends into a perfectly matching floor. Two additional risers flank the main stage, which become additional rooms inside the Wilson’s home. A large screen hovers over the kitchen, where the opening moments of the play depict Neil Armstrong’s iconic first steps on the moon. As the play progresses, the moon-walking man materializes on stage, visible only to Janet. He becomes a symbol of the impossibility of stagnation; progress is literally invading her home.

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James Richardson takes Georg Büchner’s unfinished textual fragments  (he died at the age of 24) and “plays”with them as much as all other directors have done in the past. More recent scholarship has organized the narrative into a reasonable sequence of events. Sill, directors such as Thomas Ostermeier, Denis Marleau , Bob Wilson and Brigitte Haentjens among others have imposed their own stage esthetics to produce meanings of different sorts, often nourished by a particular formalistic departure point. For example, Brigitte Haentjens who was influenced by the physical work of French masters like Lecoq transformed the soldiers into tribal dancers, stamping their feet and creating a collective will behind the seductive routines of the Drum Major. In such an atmosphere, Marie, woyzeck’s wife could not refuse his advances. Scenes with the captain are transformed into torture, humiliation or even into sexually ambiguous and highly grotesque comedy especially when Woyzeck has to crawl between the Captain’s legs to shave his hidden parts. Ostermeier’s rendering of that was hilarious and unforgettable, a sign of the misery of naturalism approaching a more sinister form of critical expressionism that was to erupt onto the German stage and into film in later years. In fact Fritz Lang already seems to be muttering in the wings? . Much has been done with this very disturbing metaphor of oppression, brewing fascism and the rise of power-hungry individuals in an era when the rational thinking of science clashed with the irrationality of  romanticism and the debate becomes heated in this play.

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The World Premiere of Beverly Cooper’s play  currently playing at GCTC never quite gets off the ground and never quite lands. It’s partly due to Director Andrea Donaldson, partly the cast, but most of all the script. Artistic Director Eric Coates mentions playwright Cooper’s “. . . idea that our sense of self constantly evolves.” In Janet Wilson Miss Cooper has created a character that refuses to evolve as the world around her changes.

Set in 1969-1971, housewife Wilson is stuck in a white-glove life. She’s unable to deal with an errant husband who we never see, a rebellious teen-age daughter, Katie Ryerson in a strong and believable performance, her mother, played by an overly cantankerous and at times unintelligible Beverly Wolfe, and her American draft-dodger nephew, in a two-dimensional performance verging on caricature by Tony Adams.

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