As Ken Godmere breathlessly thanked all his  team that created the soundscape of his new show -  where he only utters one single word -  he could scarcely contain his excitement, his  immense gratitude and the thrill of this first performance of his Ottawa Fringe appearance. It was  greeted with a  spontaneous  explosion of emotion and  pleasure  by an audience that hung on every movement, every facial twitch, every  recorded shuffle,  ring, knock, tick, rustle snap,  scrape and vocal sound  that filled the space of the capacity crowd in the  Leonard Beaulne studio. Standing ovations have become so commonplace on the Ottawa stage that they no longer mean anything, but in this case, it meant everything. It was real!  And Godmere deserved it.

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Fresh from their April performance at the Ottawa Theatre School, Pierre Brault and his merry band of student actors have done a truly great job of tightening the rhythm, introducing explosive energy and a lot of flowing physicality that brings us into the well oiled mechanics of this ferocious satire of socialism under Stalin where a whole society  wants to benefit from the dilemma of  poor Semyon who is out of a  job and sees no other solution but to kill himself.  Some very good performances but this is an ensemble piece that gets all its momentum from group action…and they got it!!

Bravo!   The Suicide plays at Café Alt and it lasts 90 minutes. It’s a full length play but time slips by quickly.

The Suicide  plays at CAFÉ  ALT

The Suicide

by Nikolai Erdman

directed by Pierre Brault

  Adapted and translated by Eilen Thalenberg & Alan Richardson

Cast

Drew Moore   as Semyon Semionovitch Podsekalnikov

Victoria Luloff    as  Masha

Dyna Ibrahm as Sarafima

Mitchel Rose  as Alexander

James Smith as Aristarkh

Nicholas  Fournier  as Victor

Jonah Alingham  as Yegor

Hannah Gibson   as Margarita

CaitlinCorbett as Cleo

Home/Accueil

Katherine Glover is a writer, an actress and an excellent story teller and it was all of these qualities that came together in her solo performance, Dead Wrong, telling of the incident involving her rape, the way that event left its marks on her mind, and how she testified against her rapist at his trial.

The play moves in three directions at once but all the threads connect beautifully because the writing is so clear, the dialogue is pared down to the essential, and the performance presents  each line as though it were of vital importance. Nothing is superfluous in  this finely  written and beautifully acted piece.

What struck me for the most part were the various movements of this performance.

First she shows us the way trauma works as it affects the rape victim: nightmares, loss of appetite, fears of all sorts that well up in her mind and prevent her from living a normal peaceful life. The text breaks down all the symptoms of trauma, how they keep returning to her mind, how they transform her behaviour and mainly, how they are always there lurking somewhere in the very depth of her subconscious, already ready to leap out at the slightest moment of weakness. Her "clinical" sense of observation was very precise.

Then there is the  trial involving the testimony, the questions by the prosecutor, and the whole experience lived by the victim again.

In a third portion of the play, which becomes more scientifically oriented, the author/performer explains the question of the reliability of of witness testimony and how under stress, the witness can often be misled in  identification of a criminal if the right questions are not asked by the  police or the lawyers. That was also fascinating.

The consequences of these three situations, build up a narrative that had the audience electrified on the spot, and kept me spellbound for the whole hour.

Nothing is resolved, but that was to be expected. The play  in fact reveals a profoundly disturbing human experience as well as a serious weakness in the judicial system.

This is excellent theatre with a pedagogical side that succeeds in making its point.  Everyone should see this. It plays at Academic Hall at Ottawa University.

Figuren Theatre from Germany, featuring puppet master Mathais Kuchta has constructed a little village of cuddly almost life size puppets to tell the story of maman goat, her little goats and the big bad wolf. That Grimm fairy tale we have all heard is told in a very kindly grand fatherly way so as not to alarm the small ones, after all it’s not a nice story. This smooth talking seductive wolf weedles his way into the household while Maman goat is absent and swallows all her babies…all seven of them. We even hear his stomach gurgling as he digests his meal. It all works out but not until some terrible things happen to the wolf  and the billy goats run into the audience and hide among the children, much to their delight.

The performance at times did seem to be a bit too wordy but the round cuddly puppets came to life. the children had a great time and no one seemed frightened by that strange wolf with the huge stomach.

Lots of fun for the very young..around 3 years and up.

 

A production of Insite Arts from Australia, written, conceived, created and performed by Fleur Nobel.

This show is in a category of its own. Much too sophisticated to be billed as a children’s show it is essentially an experiment in intermedial performance techniques where film, puppetry, sculpture, drawing, choreography, photography, lighting effects, sound experiments all collide to create an inbetween space where all these techniques and technologies aquire new meanings. The children obviously enjoyed  it because it creates images that they have certainly never seen before and as for the rest of us, we came out wondering what had hit us.

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A prehistoric, prelinguistic fantasy where Moitié la francophone (Emmanuelle Zeesman) and  Please the Anglophone (Sharmila Dey) , wander around  in a world of brightly coloured chaos. They  grunt, and growl  snarl,  grab and roar. They have no inkling of civilised behaviour. Most of all they do not possess langauge, at least at first they don’t appear to,  and they don’t even know what it is to communicate. They express their basic instincts…like cave people.  They are hungry -  they grab food and stuff it in their mouth;  they are frightened – they protect themselves. They feel threatened – they draw territorial limits. they attack. They freeze they find what they can to cover themselves.   They have something they like, they  keep it. They have no concept of sharing of helping.

Then the situation evolves.   When it gets cold they need to exchange clothes. They are attracted to the other’s toys so they feel the desire to exchange toys.  The need for reciprocal comforts makes them try to communicate and eventually to share: Moitié in French, Please in English.  Little by little it works.

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