Agatha Christie has created two of the most colourful crime solving individuals in her career as a writer of mystery novels, short stories, plays and film scenarios:  Miss Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot. Both have risen to worldwide fame through films, published works and the British television series featuring each of these fictional characters.

The play is interesting in as much it already contains all the ingredients that will define Christie’s brand of detective mystery  theatre. A murder is discovered, the suspects all find themselves within a closed space (an elegant drawing room, a huge country house in Britain or a similar setting) as guests of the deceased; everyone becomes a suspect as soon as the detective arrives to unravel the mystery and find the guilty party.

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This production of Henry V is a first for the Company of Fools, trying their hand at one of Shakespeare’s most accurate historical dramas with long monologues, multiple sites, many characters and epic war scenes.

In the first moments, the play is put into perspective for all to see.   “Chorus” presents Shakespeare’s own words as he invites us to imagine the scene, and “gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play”. Thus it clearly presents the characters as  actors who are going to perform an event where our imagination must fill in the gaps.   The  show revolves around actors,  a perfectly functional collection of objects including an empty chest that serves as a walled city, some wooden volumes and royal red curtains set up under the trees, as well as a group of puppets.  It’s all  about creating a play  and since that is the case,  men can play women’s roles as they did in Shakespeare’s time, or women can play men’s roles as they do now in our time. It all fits.

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Written and performed by Melanie Karin and David Benedict BrownThese two writers, performers are also excellent actors and they have produced a most unusual show that translates portions of Shakespeare’s best known plays, into moments of real theatre as reinterpreted through Hip Hop language and culture.

Hip Hop steps have now entered the world of contemporary dance and I have seen so many choreographers adapt these forms to classical music and historical narratives, the results are always exciting performances that bring all culture into the contemporary urban setting.  Most often it works. In this case, it did as well!

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In three seconds, long lanky Mark Shyzer  removes a shirt, flips on a wig, switches genders as easily as a snake sheds its skin and   transforms himself into four disturbingly sinister but grotesquely funny creatures. 

Nerdy Esther Goody, working on a physics experiment with “dark matter”, analyses the universe as she chats with Frank, the goldfish in his little bowl, floating in space. But she isn’t the only creature who emerges from the dark and creepy  world of Shyzer whose four creatures are impeccably performed. Raymond is the young rebel who tells us he hates his parents as he stands there clutching his arm, the  defensive gesture of a deeply disturbed young man;  there is the ambivalent  divorcee- male or female – it isn’t clear but that’s the point,  draped over a chair telling s us how she  hates her former partner . There is the elderly male and former teacher, near death, who hates his students and just wants to be left alone. They all seem to belong to the same family of monstrous slickly urban almost Gothic humans who all  breathe as though their lungs were rattling in their bodies, who stare with deeply enraged eyes. They are furious with the world and with all humans around them and they create the impression they all belong in that great fishbowl where the strongest eat the weakest.

Monstrously funny but intriguing as theatre, and  impeccably performed by an actor who draws your gaze and keeps you fixed on his body as well as on his excellent text.  A surprisingly original performance that perhaps went on a bit too long. They might consider cutting a few minutes. There were several moments before the final longer scene with Esther  that could easily disappear.

FISHBOWL is an  evening of hideous fun in the dark in  at Academic  Hall   

A spoof by a group of 11 students from the University of  Ottawa whose faces I recognize from other productions on that stage but whose names I don’t know.  Gangland movie style killing, TV police investigation show, all done  with  a playfully contemporary vision of  a reversed biblical adventure where   God, better known here as Papa,  is the arch gangster  who has set up his  believers as a criminal organization-The Brotherhood  – to get rid of intruders and those who don’t obey. Something of this reminds me of M the Maudit. – the arch-criminal,  that  Fritz Lang film that took us all back to the pre second world war days warning us of the coming of the Nazis.  I’ll bet the author is a real film buff and this staging makes a bit of an attempt to get into the "film noir" atmosphere.

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