Butcher at the Great Canadian Theatre Company

Photo:  Andrew Alexander

Slumped in a police station chair at the beginning of Nicolas Billon’s Butcher, Josef Džibrilovo seems like the furthest thing imaginable from a man with a frightening past. Whatever potential danger his unidentifiable military uniform may signal is negated by the sagging Santa Claus hat on his head and the occasional twitch of his aging hands. But then much of Billon’s charged political thriller is about the shattering conflict between appearance and reality, and about how we can be suddenly caught up in the latter while blithely existing in the former.Butcher is also a difficult play to talk about without talking too much. Littered with enough twists and turns to induce terminal whiplash, it works by drawing you steadily deeper into a narrative web that can’t be revealed in much detail without spoiling the show for those haven’t seen it.

What can be said is that Džibrilovo (played by John Koensgen in GCTC’s absorbing production) has been dumped in the middle of the night at the police station by a couple of men, much to the consternation of Detective Lamb (Sean Devine). It’s Christmas, and Lamb, an antsy man with a penchant for bad jokes, wants to be at home with his young family. Instead, he’s stuck with this morose guy who speaks only Lavinian, a fictional, vaguely Slavic-sounding language created for the show by University of Toronto professors Christina Kramer and Dragana Obradovic.

Worse, Josef has shown up with a butcher’s hook around his neck. Impaled on the card is the business card of lawyer Hamilton Barnes, which explains the appearance at the station of Barnes, an emotionally distant Brit played by Koensgen’s son, Jonathan.

Also on hand: Elena, a nurse who speaks Lavinian and has been called in to translate Džibrilovo’s unintelligible words. Not much more can be said about her other than that she’s played, in frequently wooden fashion, by Samantha Madely.

Initially funny, even relaxed, the play soon darkens as the tension ratchets up, sometimes to hold-your-breath proportions, as Billon’s clever plot explores issues of justice and vengeance, the aftermath of violence, and the always thorny matter of communication (not for nothing does Džibrilovo speak an unknown language and Lamb make jokes about Greek and Latin).

With allusions to Greek tragedy’s Furies of vengeance and the character of Lavinia in Shakespeare’s violent Titus Andronicus, not to mention the TV crime show-inspired plotting and pacing, Billon’s play is also making the point that the conundrums of justice, punishment and violence echo through the ages. Indeed, violence, depicted in the play either through words or in slightly darkened slow motion, is seen to scoop out our humanity even as it sometimes seems an inevitable part of what it means to be human.

Directed by Eric Coates, all this takes place within designer Roger Schultz’s naturalistic set complete with depressing institutional green walls and standard-issue wood desks. The reality of the set contrasts smartly with the plot where things are so often not what they seem, helping to leave us in a place of sustained imbalance.

Billon wraps up the strands of his story in an ah-ha! reveal that’s a little too pat and rushed, as though he had one eye on an impending television commercial. There’s also a brief appearance at the end of a fifth person played by Maggie Mojsej that’s entirely unnecessary.

That said, Butcher is a heck of a ride through the back room of the human meat department.

Continues until March 20. Tickets: GCTC box office, 613-236-5196, gctc.ca

first published in the Ottawa Citizen  Thursday, March 3.