Photo: Barb Gray. Scott Florence and Margo Macdonald

What can I say about a play that within the first five minutes showers the audience with balloons and ends with the actors passing around trays of very tasty cupcakes? The world premiere of “Pomme and ‘Restes: Shipwrecked! On the Tempestuous Lost Island of Never” by A Company of Fools is partly a wacked-out version of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” combined with The Three Stooges and Pythonesque word-play. It begins with a shipwrecked cruise ship dumping the five characters on an appropriately cartoonish desert island, designed by John Doucet.

The two clown characters are Pomme Frites, a lugubrious philosopher who wants to do “stand-up tragedy,” and ‘Restes, his none-too-bright rubber-faced sidekick. They’re wonderfully played by, respectively, Scott Florence and Margo MacDonald, co-authors of the script along with Director Al Connors. As for the script, I can easily imagine something happening in rehearsal that got the response, “Hey – that’s fun. Leave it in!”

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Photo. Barb Gray .

Like its title, the latest, slightly unhinged show by A Company of Fools contains everything but the kitchen sink.

There’s Prospero and Miranda from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest as well as that play’s shipwreck and island, that island being the setting for most of this play. Spunky, red-haired Anne magically appears from Green Gables. Ditto Captain Hook from Peter Pan. Puns, visual gags, slapstick humour, and a talking potato and carrot pepper the story. There’s a reference to the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and lines plucked from Shakespeare’s King Lear.

And, as the title promises, at the centre of it all are those red-nosed, trouble-courting clowns Pomme Frites and ‘Restes, the former as imperious as he was when he first appeared in the Fools’ The Danish Play years ago and the latter still as gullible but sweet as when he first clumped into view in the same show. They, together with Prospero and Miranda, were on a cruise ship (don’t ask) when it was swamped in a storm and all four were cast up on the island.

Chaotic? Yes, but also tightly ordered, smartly executed and one of the best things the Fools have done.

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Photo: Barbara Gray

Pomme (Scott Florence ) and  Restes (Margo Macdonald)

This latest adventure of those intrepid clowns Pomme and Restes , is an outrageously clever collage of reworked material taken from The Tempest , Peter Pan, Treasure Island , Robinson Crusoe and dare I even suggest The Love Boat, Dr. Who, Ann of Green Gables, Gilbert and Sullivan, Gilligan’s Island, Emile Zola, contemporary political theories , 18^th century philosophy, comments on theatre of all sorts, and a whole lot more than what their programme dares to tell you. It is clear that the Fool’s archives are filled to the brim with ideas, the likes of which you would never suspect.

Thus, It becomes a whirlwind adventure that unravels at such a breakneck pace, you don’t even dare blink, for fear of losing a reference, missing a slick remark, or not noticing a clever gesture that carries many connotations! Well written by the Florence, Connors and MacDonald team, (all fine actors as well as writers), it is also beautifully directed by Al Connors who has come into his own as an excellent choreographer of meaningful stage shenanigans.

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Photo. Maria Vartanova

Transposing from one medium to another is always challenging. Yet, The Railway Children has been made into a movie — several times — has been a radio play and, since 2008, a stage play by Mike Kenny. Adapting the Edith Nesbit’s children’s classic to the stage carries particular challenges. First, the storyline is episodic in nature, which can hamper the flow. Then, Nesbit, a committed socialist and one of the founders of the Fabian Society, uses the children’s adventures as a political platform. In addition, because The Railway Children is the youngsters’ view of the events that led to their family’s drastic change of fortunes, it requires a dusting of wonder in its delivery.

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Photo.  Courtesy of  Bear & Co.  Cory Thibert  and Sarah Waisvisz

he 1930s were an era that quaked in the wake of the Great Depression. Americans had barely emerged from the horror that was the First World War before plummeting into financial ruin. Tennessee Williams, in his contemporary masterpiece The Glass Menagerie, captures in minute detail the heart of one working-class family who symbolize the convergence of history, family, and place—a trifecta that barres them from exacting any agency of their own.

Director Eleanor Crowder offers the audience a production that captures the listless, hopeless, and desperate spirit of Williams’ play, and emphasizes Tom Wingfield as the driving agent of this drama.

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Rachel Eugster and Sarah W aisvisz.  Photo:

This production of The Glass Menagerie , one of Tennessee Williams most important works for the stage, is not a “striking revival” , nor is it “stunning”, “elusive” or even “heart-breaking” but it is certainly surprising. Tim Oberholzer’s performance as Tom the brother/ narrator, and figure closest to Williams own character, was so powerful and so charged with authentic feeling that it shifted the focus away from the women who are at the very heart of this memory play and set it squarely on the near tragic struggle raging within the young narrator. I have never seen such a thing happen with this play and yet it is true. Oberholzer gives  Tom a depth that is very unusual.

The production generally had moments that were quite good especially in the second part when the gentleman caller ( Cory Thibert) comes to visit the timid and terrified Laura (Sarah Waisvisz) but there are also many details that kept interfering with the smooth-running of the show. Why was the little table with all the glass figures hidden off to one side where we could barely see the glass figures or that little unicorn that becomes a powerful symbol in the play? Laura is supposed to have hurt her foot  so that she normally limps. Here the director has chosen to show us Laura the way her mother sees her, with no limp. That removes a certain degree of pathos that is necessary to make us feel that Laura is someone special. Strange choices by the director.

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If you’re looking for an entertaining evening, “Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata” currently running in the NAC Studio certainly fills the bill. Written by Bill Richardson and Amiel Gladstone with music by Veda Hille, the 80 minute chamber musical is quirky, tuneful, wistful and funny. Entirely sung, the lyrics are taken from or inspired by ads on Craigslist – some bizarre, some outrageous and some surprisingly touching. Not everyone needs a potato cannon or headless dolls, but we can understand the longing to make some kind of connection.

Robin Fisher’s simple set of a light-colored wood floor with a grand piano up left and percussion equipment up right is backed by a flat jungle gym of black piping. Her costumes are good, allowing for just enough minimal changes of costume pieces. Kimberly Purtell’s lighting is excellent, often providing a soft pervasive glow. I especially liked the hanging work lights.

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An impressive set by Patrice-Ann Forbes immediately arouses our curiosity; it exposes levels of an old house in Berlin with  a photo lab, dark room, sleeping areas and a rooftop space where one can watch the world go by.  The place is “haunted” by a living negative, a young girl, played by a perky, passionate and strong Catriona Leger, whose picture was taken by an anonymous photographer in 1932 at a resort on the Baltic Sea.  The subject of the picture returned to England but her photo was never developed…and so the living negative wanders through the house like a ghost, visible only to the audience. Thus begins her story which she performs  with her  white hair and  black dress,  waiting for someone to come along, reverse her negative appearance,  develop her , bring her back to her paper reality, so she can become herself in that  beautiful white dress she was wearing when the photo was taken. The enigma of the photographer, the quest for a developer, the memories of that girl who sees the world passing, from 1932 to the present, create layer  upon layer of narrative levels that  build up this monologue.   Catriona Leger  is a strong presence, shifting her tone, her rhythms, moving about the stage with much ease, capturing all the nuances entrenched in that text .  Yes it is a captivating performance because of the difficulty of the monologue and the complexity with relation to her gaze on history.  Projected images move across the back to illustrate what she captures through her seeing eye window as she peers into the street. watching history roll by.

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Who are we? What is the purpose of our existence? These are questions many of us constantly ask ourselves. As such, they rank high above others on the priority list, whether they address pressing world issues, catastrophes of any proportion, or the very survival of anything that is not connected to us. That is exactly the story of the Young Lady in White. Photographed in the summer of 1932, and never developed due to the events that followed (the Nazis coming to power in 1933 and the

political changes they introduced), our protagonist is destined to live her life as a negative for 28,000 nights. The only company in her solitude and everlasting wait for her artist (who, she hopes, will come back to developed her) is the charming Chada – a cat that has never gotten further than sketch level. The negative girl and the sketch cat spend decades (from 1932 to 2009) in looking through the bathroom window at the world as it develops: atrocities during WWII, the total destruction brought on by the use of the atomic bomb, and victimized civilians in the post-war era. The girl doesn’t have much appreciation of the history that unfolds before eyes (except for the occasional ejaculation of surprise), but she listens to Chada, develops a strong companionship with him, and, at the end, destroys him for telling her an unwanted truth – that she is no more than an unknown negative, and that she will never be more than that. Finally, 10 years after the Berlin Wall fell, his prediction proved to be wrong: during the final clean-up of the area, a municipal engineer finds her in the darkroom and takes her with him. To be developed? Well, that is not the point of the story, which makes this ending of the play an artificial and rushed edition rather than a necessary ending statement.  …

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The conflict between good and evil is the focal point of almost any drama. The difference in Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale is that he places the never-ending struggle within an individual.

In his fascinating new take on Stevenson’s 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, acclaimed U.S. playwright/screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher expands the facets of evil to show Hyde as aspects of four characters, who also play other roles in Dr. Jekyll’s life.

Neither does he allow Jekyll to be a white knight, as the ‘good’ doctor continues his laboratory experiments, all the time denying responsibility for the murder and mayhem around him — evil that may be the result of the release of his underlying desires after he swallows one of his potions. And Hyde, as he tries to save the one person he has learned to care for, is not completely evil, for he tries to send her away to stop himself from harming her. …

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