Review
SEE BOB RUN
Mob Hit Productions
Starring Tamara Hamilton
Written by Daniel MacIvor
Directed by Geoff Woods
Runs until June 12
Pumphouse Theatres
Pity the poor actors who’ve had to perform during the city’s recent hockey monomania. Not that anyone’s to blame – when theatres were planning their spring programming last year, who could have foreseen that the Calgary Flames would end up in the Stanley Cup final? But it must have been dispiriting to face all those empty chairs on the night of a playoff game.
My partner and I were among the four people who showed up to watch Mob Hit’s season-ending revival of Daniel MacIvor’s See Bob Run on the night of Game 5. Now the general rule is, if there are more people onstage than there are in the audience, you cancel the show. But this play was a solo, so….
Such an overly intimate experience can be as uncomfortable for the audience as it is for the actor, but young performer Tamara Hamilton is clearly a professional – in spirit if not Equity card – and she threw herself into her role as if she was playing to a packed house. If anything, she was a little too frenetic in her first few scenes, maybe by way of compensation.
Eventually, however, she settled into the play and the power of MacIvor’s writing took over.
Hamilton portrays Roberta, the Bob of the title, a young woman from a lower-middle-class background hitchhiking down the Trans-Canada, on the run from a broken home, a pedophilic father, a stifling boyfriend and, most urgently, some terrible unspoken crime that she appears to have committed. Bob is a psychological mess and her past is horrifying, but the artful MacIvor only reveals that gradually. The Bob we initially meet is a spunky, chatty extrovert who jumps into cars and prattles humorously to the drivers about music and her best friend and boy troubles.
In between rides, she also shares with us snippets of her life – the most disturbing ones hidden in the guise of fairy tales, the incest with her father becoming a kind of Beauty and the Beast scenario that’s all the more appalling because Bob is so clearly the victim of an adult’s psychological manipulation of a trusting child. In her fantasy, her father is a pathetic but lovable monster, her mother a vengeful witch and she herself a princess who equates love with physical pain.
See Bob Run, which dates from the mid-1980s, is less complex than MacIvor’s more recent solo works, with their multiple layers and characters, but already shows signs of his recurring themes – dysfunctional relationships, dark family secrets, shocking crimes – as well as evidence of his gifts as a playwright. He puts us convincingly inside Bob’s head and achieves a greater impact by telling the story entirely from her naïve, confused perspective. You come away feeling that the most horrendous thing about pedophilia and incest may not be the physical rape itself, but the abuse of the parent-child bond – the rape of the child’s mind.
Hamilton, looking and sounding like a trailer park girl, is at her best when delivering Bob’s monologues, regressing from a young woman’s cheerful, confiding style to a tone of little-girl innocence when narrating her fairy-tale nightmares. She is less assured in her one-way scenes with the various drivers who pick her up – including a lesbian trucker and a priest – which MacIvor uses as comic leavening for this otherwise sombre tale.
Director Geoff Woods’s production is simpler than Mob Hit’s last two shows, Godzilla and The Ugly Man, but quite effective. He and set designer Anton DeGroot have given the Joyce Doolittle Theatre an alley stage to suggest a highway, with a road sign at one end and a car seat at the other to represent the various vehicles Bob rides in.
Ian Martens’s lighting design illumines a dark night with passing headlights and interior car lights, while Gina Marin’s sound design evokes the play’s period with some smart musical choices. The most striking is "Mercy Street," Peter Gabriel’s Anne Sexton-inspired song, whose line about "looking for mercy in your daddy’s arms" gains an eerie new meaning when heard in this context. |
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