Photo. Marianne Duval

Ivona is probably the most unlikely bride-to-be for a prince. She is a commoner, ugly, slouchy, highly unsociable, and has no manners at all. Still, the young prince, bored with the every-day palace life, chooses her for her fiancé. At first she serves as an object of practical jokes for courtiers and the reason for despair for his royal parents. As time goes by, it seems that this insignificant creature gets in everybody’s way. It is not the inconvenience of her presence or her sloppy ways that bother the courtiers. Day after day, gradually, Ivona manages to bring out their worst in her peers, and even worse, she begins to remind them of their own carefully hidden faults. By the end, she is too much for everybody’s comfort, and the decision is unanimous: Ivona must die.

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Photo: Andrew Alexander

OTTAWA — In 2008, John P. Kelly directed Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves at The Gladstone. It was hilarious.
This time, Kelly directs Ayckbourn’s later play Absurd Person Singular. It too is a hoot. Except when it turns dark. Then something truly ugly about human nature and one of its spinoffs, the class system, emerges.
Last year, the play celebrated its 40th anniversary – Anna Lewis’ costume design for this production includes bell bottom trousers and a head band – but the show’s snarling social satire remains vital.
The story finds three married couples gathering in one of their kitchens on three successive Christmas Eves. Two of the couples, Geoffrey and Eva Jackson and Ronald and Marion Brewster-Wright, are upper middle class, but as the seasons roll by their fortunes, both financial and marital, erode. Sidney and Jane Hopcroft, on the other hand, scramble out of the working class but never lose the stigma of their origin, both in their own eyes and in those of the others.
These are not couples anyone in their right mind would want to spend time with. As the play’s title suggests, each person is singular and absurd, unconnected in any meaningful way to his or her partner or to the rest of the world…….

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Theatre+review+Despite+hilarity+Absurd+Person+Singular+explores+dark+depths+human+nature/8060121/story.html#ixzz2MspvNi5R

Until March 23. Tickets: 613-233-4523, thegladstone.ca

Allan Morgan & Fiona Reid  Photo: Lucy Tremblay Gaudette

Innocence Lost, a Play About Steven Truscott by Beverly Cooper, tells the story of a 1959 murder and subsequent trial whose outcome eventually changed the entire Canadian judicial system. Fourteen-year-old Steven Truscott was tried and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of his twelve-year-old classmate Lynn Harper. Continuously maintaining his innocence through many appeals, his conviction was finally overturned in 2007. Playwright Cooper explores the case using trial transcripts and interviews to help understand its effects on both the country and Steven’s friends and family.

Although this is a fascinating story, the structure of INNOCENCE LOST feels much more like a documentary than a play. The majority of the story, especially in Act I, is told either in narration or statements of facts delivered as direct address to the audience. Even in Act II, which contains more short dramatic scenes, we just begin to become involved when the scene is broken off for more narration.

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Photo. Ottawa Citizen

OTTAWA —  When a guy pretends to play guitar using a toilet plunger, you suspect a send-up of rock ‘n’ roll is be about to engulf you. Which – in addition to spoofing musicals generally and not taking itself particularly seriously – is the order of the day for Rock of Ages, the comic rock musical set in the 1980s when big hair, glam metal bands and bombast ruled the rock record charts.

Although the second act gets sluggish (mostly because of Chris D’Arienzo’s overly long script), the touring production of this silly, unsubtle and totally entertaining show is as undeniably winning as a smile from Ronald Reagan.

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Photo from The Ottawa Citizen. Diana Krall at the NAC

A fine jazz pianist and singer with terrific timing and a great backup quintet. Isn’t that enough for a first-class concert?

Apparently, Diana Krall’s handlers do not think so. Rather than trusting their star, they clutter the show with a constant backdrop of irrelevant, distracting and often ugly visuals. Old movies are fine in their place, but when the sense of relief at the sight of a plain red curtain during the gaps between them is overwhelming, the clear indication is that this is not their place.

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Photo: Compagnie de la Pire Espèce

Denis Marleau a déjà interprété des textes d’Alfred Jarry à sa manière . Ses productions extrêmement recherchées et étroitement chorégraphiées de tout Jarry ( Ubu Cyle ) présentés au Centre national des arts d’Ottawa  dans les années 1980-90 lorsqu’il était directeur artistique du Théâtre français, ont surement laissé leur marque sur ce théâtre d’avant-garde. Maintenant, une nouvelle génération de comédiens québécois frénétiques, bourrés d’énergie et très doués, tentent leur chance avec le même auteur. L’esprit ubuesque est presque le même:  le grotesque, le cruel, le vulgaire, et la stupidité destructrice y sont mais l’esthétique théâtrale a radicalement changé.

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Set by Brian Smith. Photo: David Pasho

If you can believe James Richardson, artistic director of the happily resuscitated Third Wall theatre company, God Of Carnage is destined to become a classic.
Oh really? Worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as The Bacchae, King Lear, Tartuffe, The Importance Of Being Earnest, The Cherry Orchard? Let’s keep things in proportion — especially when it’s a script from a playwright like Yasmina Reza.

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Although we tend to make fun of ourselves and our attempts to behave in a civilized manner, deep down, we’d all much rather believe that politeness and civilization can and do prevail. To prove our civility, we take comfort in knowing that, while mere children and less fortunate countries struggle with the concept, the adults of the west have mastered the art of decorum. Then along comes a play like Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage and undermines the hypocrisy inherent in this self-congratulation. As director Ross Manson’s production for Third Wall so wonderfully points out, all it takes for total social unraveling is one glitch in the well-oiled machine.

The scene is modern day Paris. Two 11-year old boys have been in a fight. The son of Alain and Annette has broken two teeth of the son of Michel and Véronique, their hosts. The parents, all bourgeois courtesy and genteel grace, meet to discuss the matter and figure out a plan of action. Gradually, tensions emerge between and among the couples and the courteous visit descends into a hysterical, crying, projectile-vomiting mess.

At one point, Michel says, “Children consume and fracture our lives. Children drag us towards disaster, it’s unavoidable.” Indeed, they do reduce their parents to chaos, but what Yasmina Reza’s script, as translated by Christopher Hampton, does so well through its ingenious dialogue is point out just how thin the veneer of manners separating us from our true, “Neanderthal” selves is. …

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OTTAWA — “Fess up. Aren’t you, beneath your comfortable middle-class trappings, a Neanderthal at heart?” The four folks in French playwright Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage, executed in savagely funny style by Third Wall Theatre, sure are.

Oh, they try to be genteel: two couples meeting to discuss a schoolyard dust-up between their sons. They drink coffee, eat pastry, chat about art. Soon, though, cracks appear in the civil discourse. By the time the evening staggers to a close, it’s not just the living room where they meet but, at least metaphorically, all of western civilization of which they believe they represent the peak — in a bourgeois sort of way — that lies in tatters.

Michel (John Koensgen), the conciliatory owner of a household goods company, and his book-writing, passive-aggressive wife Veronique (Mary Ellis) are the hosts and parents of the boy who has lost a couple of teeth in the fight. …

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A playground fight between two 11-year-old boys is the reason for a meeting between their supposedly civilized parents. But the veneer of civility and socially acceptable behaviour is paper thin and the two sets of parents are soon brawling with gloves off.

Christopher Hampton’s translation of French playwright Yasmina Reza’s social satire lays bare the insincerity and ugliness in the married couples’ relationships with each other and with their opposite numbers. Little wonder that their children are monsters with the example of their parents to guide them — or not.

In the Third Wall Theatre production of God of Carnage, director Ross Manson has chosen to retain the Paris setting, but other productions in the U.S. and UK have placed God of Carnage in their home countries — a recognition of the universality of the theme of savagery just below the surface. …

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