Jamie Portman, Author at Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Speed the Plow : the cast produces a probing performance of this corrosive demolition jon on the pretensions of industry movers and shakers.

By Jamie Portman | October 10, 2011

Hollywood power brokers can be so entrenched in their own self-regarding culture that they often have a skewed awareness, not only of the world outside but of what they themselves are really like.

So the set designed by Ivo Valentik for this new Ottawa production of Speed The Plow, David Mamet’s corrosive demolition job on the pretensions of industry movers and shakers, seems entirely appropriate to the occasion. It is, in its own way, a thing of bizarre beauty — a marvel of rampaging black and white lines dislocated by odd angles, distorted doorways and a cunningly raked floor — which keeps wreaking havoc with perspective.

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Stratford 2011: What have you done with the scissors? The Homecomings’opening speach gives the audience “frissons”.

By Jamie Portman | August 17, 2011

Harold Pinter’s unspoken menace: Stratford’s The Homecoming the only hit among August openings

Postmedia News August 17, 2011

STRATFORD, Ont. – “What have you done with the scissors?”

Why should this opening speech from Nobel laureate Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming set off a frisson of unease in an Avon Theatre audience?

Consider it an early signal that the Stratford Festival is firmly on course with its splendid revival of a landmark play.

Indeed, The Homecoming is the one triumph among a trio of August openings that also include a decorative but dull revival of Moliere’s The Misanthrope, and a bungled reading of Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna.

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The Player’s Advice To Shakespeare. A One-Man Play of Epic Proportions

By Jamie Portman | March 13, 2011

Greg Kramer as The Player. Photo: Barbara Gray.

The Player’s Advice To Shakespeare constitutes an anti-Establishment rant — Elizabethan style. Ottawa playwright Brian K. Stewart has a provocative agenda in taking real-life historical events — James I’s ruthless suppression of the peasantry during the latter’s 1607 revolt against encroachments on their liberty and economic survival — in order to mount an attack on none other than William Shakespeare. In this rousing script, which also seems to be asking us to seek contemporary parallels, the Bard is fingered as an acquiescent tool of the system, an Establishment lackey who failed to employ his formidable dramatic powers on behalf of justice for his society’s underprivileged and in support of revolutionary action.

The vessel for this outpouring of wrath — and yes, this is a one-man play — is a cranky and garrulous Tower of London prisoner known only as The Player. We meet this ragged rebel in his dungeon along with a table and bench, a plain wooden bowl, a flask containing some unspeakable beverage — and a carrot. The carrot becomes a particularly useful prop — even being employed for a bit of swordplay as The Player rambles on about the events and issues which led to his confinement and possible death. The primitive furniture is put to good use too — witness how, under John Koensgen’s nimble direction, that table suddenly becomes a lurching cart as The Player embarks on a journey to Leicester and into the reality of civil unrest.

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