Review
BEING AT HOME WITH CLAUDE
Blacklist Theatre Project
Starring Christian Goutsis and Trevor Leigh
Written by René-Daniel Dubois
Directed by Sean Bowie
Runs until April 10
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Review
THE UGLY MAN
Mob Hit Productions
Starring Sarah Corrigall, Phil Fulton and Len Harvey
Written by Brad Fraser
Directed by Larissa Innes
Runs until April 10
Pumphouse Theatres
Like the fragmented narratives of recent films such as 21 Grams, René-Daniel Dubois’s Being at Home with Claude starts out by being enticingly enigmatic.
Dubois’s intense 1986 play opens in the waning hours of a long and gruelling interrogation, as a frustrated Montreal police inspector (Trevor Leigh) continues to grill a male hustler (Christian Goutsis) who has voluntarily confessed to a murder but is now being cagily unco-operative. To make it worse, the hustler has the authorities by the balls. He’s gotten into a judge’s office, alerted the media and seems intent on blackmail – and this is Confederation Day weekend in 1967, the year of Expo, the anniversary of Canada’s centennial, when the eyes of the world are watching. The inspector is acutely aware that he’s got a potentially explosive scandal on his hands, but he just can’t get this punk to explain his motive for brutally slaying a young university student who was apparently in love with him.
All this and more is slowly, cunningly disclosed by Dubois in a style at once taut and circuitous. As cop and hustler repeatedly lock horns over the latter’s seemingly evasive digressions, these tangents actually end up revealing much about him and his victim. And if, in the end, the final pieced-together puzzle is a bit dubious, the pieces themselves provide a convincing and vivid impression of ’60s-era Montreal and its secret underworld of gay prostitution.
Blacklist Theatre Project’s welcome revival, directed by Sean Bowie, holds your attention in a vise grip for 90 minutes thanks to some fine acting. Goutsis’s hustler continually shifts between a pretty-boy insouciance and a restless need to tell his story – it’s a well-calculated performance that only falls short at the end, when he fails to deliver the character’s expected emotional breakdown. Leigh, meanwhile, alternates weary exasperation with dogged persistence as the veteran policeman with no appetite for bullshit. And John Schuett, in one of two minor roles, provides a pinch of comedy and plenty of period flavour as an imperturbable stenographer who could’ve stepped straight out of a ’60s hardboiled crime flick.
Blacklist has cleverly reconfigured the Big Secret Theatre so that the seating now occupies the two-storey playing area and the stage is under the balcony, creating a tightly confined space for Terry Middleton’s film-noir-ish lighting and set – a cramped office replete with congested ashtrays and empty Styrofoam coffee cups. The production reeks with atmosphere as much as it crackles with tension. Just one small oversight: the program fails to credit the invaluable Linda Gaboriau, who translated Dubois’s French script.
THE UGLY MAN
Brad Fraser’s The Ugly Man is both campy and creepy – an ostensible spoof update of a lurid Jacobean revenge tragedy (Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling) that should give you some authentic chills between the laughs.
That’s how it worked in the 1992 première production at Alberta Theatre Projects. But Mob Hit’s current revival tries too hard to play it straight, so that the humour seems unintentional (even in spite of Fraser’s wittily terse dialogue) and the characters’ sick, sadomasochistic behaviour just looks like melodrama.
It’s too bad, because there are good things in Larissa Innes’s production, not the least of them being Len Harvey’s quietly menacing performance as the disfigured title character, a mysterious ex-soldier who shows up on a wealthy widow’s ranch looking for a job as a hired hand. Sarah Corrigall plays the widow’s beautiful daughter, who bribes him into killing her unwanted fiancé (Matt Woodward) in return for sexual favours, while Phil Fulton co-stars as the fiancé’s masochistic, harelipped gay brother, who finds both bondage and a bond with the ugly man.
A high-strung Fulton, an amiably befuddled Woodward and a saucy Laura Larocque, as the sex-hungry maid, all show a sense of how this broad material should be played. But Corrigall and Moni Janssen, as her mother, give dull performances, while Sean Montgomery is merely acceptable as the vacuous stud who unwittingly inspires the play’s murder and machinations.
Designers Naomi Herback and Janna-Marynn Brunnen reflect the show’s uneven approach. Brunnen’s set and lighting go for detailed realism, while Herback’s crazy costumes tap into the play’s campiness, dressing Janssen as a flapper, Fulton in the lace and frills of a 19th-century dandy and Harvey in a rough-trade outfit of peaked cap and black leather chaps. There is an interestingly textured sound design by Mike Johnson, but on opening night the levels were too low, notably spoiling the infamous neck-breaking scene, which was so sickeningly effective in the original staging. This Ugly Man just isn’t ugly – or funny – enough. |
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