Preview
MYSTERY AT GREENFINGERS
Vertigo Mystery Theatre
Starring Sharon Pollock, Jim Leyden, Lindsay Burns and Laura Parken
Written by J.B. Priestley
Directed by Gail Hanrahan
Runs until April 25
Vertigo Playhouse (Tower Centre)
Before she became one of Canada’s best-known playwrights, Sharon Pollock was an actor. And a good one, too. In 1966, she won the best actress award at the national Dominion Drama Festival for her performance in Ann Jellicoe’s The Knack, performing opposite then-partner (and future Shaw Festival star) Michael Ball in a production directed by Joyce Doolittle.
Over the following decades, however, she put acting aside for writing, creating such powerful, provocative works as Walsh, Blood Relations and Doc, and collecting a slew of playwriting prizes (including two Governor General’s Awards and the Canada Australia Literary Award) that crowded out the acting trophy on her mantel.
But Pollock never lost her acting chops, as she proved back when she was running the Garry Theatre in the 1990s, where she occasionally took on a major role and always turned in a strong performance. Now she’s flexing those thespian muscles again, with a lighthearted part as an overbearing amateur detective in Vertigo Mystery Theatre’s production of J.B. Priestley’s Mystery at Greenfingers.
For the relentlessly inquisitive and critical Pollock, it’s a welcome change of pace, a chance to give over to someone else’s script and direction and just have fun. Her voice over the phone on a weekday morning, as she tries to speak over the yowling of her aging Cornish Rex cat, sounds unusually buoyant.
"I like to act, I enjoy it – it’s a social activity," she says. "There’s this collective creative effort happening, and that’s usually a very inspiring thing. It’s a good feeling – there’s a lot of celebration and joy in it. And along with that, I find that you’re an equal. The director and playwright are always a little removed (in a production), but when you’re an actor, you’re in with the herd, and it’s very supportive."
The herd she’s in with this time includes such local stalwarts as Lindsay Burns, Jim Leyden, Doug McKeag and Laura Parken. "And we’ve got several really talented young people as well," she notes. "I’ve really been impressed by the work they’ve been doing."
Although written by Priestley, author of such clever, thought-provoking dramas as An Inspector Calls and Dangerous Corner, this play is a humorous trifle. Published in 1937, it belongs to the heyday of the English whodunit, when Agatha Christie was all the rage, and Pollock suspects Priestley was doing a playful pastiche of her work. "He pokes a little bit of fun at those successful, perhaps somewhat pedestrian murder mysteries," she says.
The classic setting is a remote, snowbound resort, where a mysterious guest vanishes overnight, causing tensions among the other denizens of the hotel. Pollock plays the meddlesome Miss Tracey, who she describes as "a rather pushy, bombastic older woman – of course – who tries to rule the roost. She loves detective stories and immediately tries to take over (the) deduction herself, in conflict with the house detective, played by Jim Leyden. There’s this clash of personalities, with people either attempting to solve the crime or else prevent anyone else from solving it."
Pollock wasn’t actually looking to tread the boards again, but director Gail Hanrahan approached her to appear in Greenfingers and she jumped at the chance. And she’ll be doing more acting this fall when she guest stars in a University of Alberta production of Moving Pictures, her play about pioneering woman filmmaker Nell Shipman. That show, like the Vertigo one, will have her mixing with young, apprentice actors, which the 67-year-old Pollock finds invigorating.
"You encounter these young people who are at the beginning of their careers, and very optimistic and committed, and see theatre in a very fresh way," she says. "Whenever I think, as a playwright, ‘Oh, what’s the point?’ I find that interaction with them reinforces those ideas I had about theatre when I began."
Not that Pollock is anywhere close to giving up playwriting. The much-feted dramatist, who recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of Calgary, currently has two projects on the go. One is a commissioned work based on the murder of two Catholic missionaries in northern Canada in the early 1900s, being written for a theatre company in Yellowknife.
The other is, at this point, a more nebulous piece, likely dealing with the gap between the West and the rest of the world, loosely inspired by a visit last year to war-ravaged Sierra Leone, as well as by the treatment of Muslims in North America in the wake of 9-11.
"For me, there is some kind of connection," she says, adding, "I don’t know what the play is yet. I’m just collecting information and stories right now. I’m not going to be able to write the ‘he said, she said’ part of it for a little while." |
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