Photo. Maria Vartanova.

The cast of Ottawa Little Theatre’s production of Goodbye Piccadilly faces the daunting challenge of finding and maintaining a convincing dramatic line for a play that springs from a preposterous situation and seeks to blend honest pathos with moments of potentially destructive comedy.

Douglas Bowie’s play doesn’t make it easy with sequences that, in less experienced hands, could disintegrate into farce. But under the guiding hand of director Sarah Hearn, the production finds balance and nuance as the play explores the strange circumstances surrounding a beloved local citizen’s death and the upheavals it causes among his survivors.And when it comes to survivors, there are more than we first expected. We initially meet Bess Brickley, sympathetically portrayed by Janet Uren, in a state of bustling excitement over the news that husband Brick has been awarded the Order of Canada. It’s November, and Brick is supposed to be off on his annual late autumn canoe trip in Algonquin Park — but he isn’t. The euphoria Bess has been experiencing is suddenly crushed by an overseas telephone call to the Brickley family’s rural Ontario inn. It comes from London, where Brick has been found dead on a park bench in Leicester Square.

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Photo. Maria Vartanova

The problem with Samuel Taylor’s 1953 comedy, Sabrina Fair, is the film version released by Paramount a year later.

The play begins with Sabrina, a chauffeur’s daughter, returning to the only real home she has known — a wealthy Long Island estate — after five years in Paris. Now an attractive young woman, she radiates poise and sophistication, but an infectious buoyancy also surfaces. The romantic yearnings of her adolescence also re-emerge — yearnings for the unattainable that suggest she doesn’t know her place in the social strata and is therefore destined to send the plot spinning into merry overdrive.

In the film, writer-director Billy Wilder bolstered this material with a solid back story so that we first see Sabrina as the dreamy, dangerously impressionable child she was before going to Paris. Playwright Samuel Taylor was so upset by this that he dissociated himself from the screen version — but the truth is that Wilder had improved on the original, giving it more substance and more social bite. Wilder also was playing an ace card in casting Audrey Hepburn — who, after her triumph in Roman Holiday, was the hottest new actress in Hollywood — in the title role.

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It’a difficult to understand the esteem in which Daniel MacIvor’s Marion Bridge is held in some quarters. Even with as solid a production as the one given it by Ottawa’s new Three Sisters Theatre Company, it remains a cliche-ridden excursion into the dreary world of family angst.

That’s not to say that this world isn’t worth exploring dramatically, The stark insights of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night or Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming testify to its continuing validity. But MacIvor’s play has nothing new to say in its portrait pf three sisters in a moment of crisis. And it certainly suffers from overload — as though weighting these siblings down with a catalogue of terrible events in their lives is sufficient to give the whole piece “significance.”

Well, not really. Not when the play’s psychology is pretty shallow, not when the pile-up of revelations starts veering into contrived soap opera. Not with a script afraid to acknowledge that the processes of reconciliation aren’t something that can be neatly brought off in two patently artificial hours of stage time.

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There’s a moment in the National Arts Centre’s worthy production of David Hare’s controversial docudrama, Stuff Happens, when the Bush administration’s determination to launch war against Iraq shows its true, frightening colours.

It comes in a confrontation between U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney and Hans Blix, the Swedish diplomat whose UN team has found no evidence in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq of the weapons of mass destruction that are purported to threaten world peace.

Blix, in David Warburton’s excellent portrayal, is the courtly Scandinavian, whose own integrity will never provide the Bush regime with the false pretext it needs for going to war. But in Cheney, he’s confronting a smug thug who — in Paul Rainville’s entirely believable characterization — is pursuing his own bully agenda. So we have Cheney, secure in his faith in American exceptionalism, warning Blix that the U.S. will not hesitate to discredit the UN weapons inspectors if they don’t support Washington’s own dubious intelligence regarding weaponry that ultimately proves to be non-existent. …

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