Preview
OF THE FIELDS, LATELY
Theatre Calgary
Starring Wayne Best, Brooke Johnson, Jesse Dwyre and Stephen Hair
Written by David French
Directed by R.H. Thomson
Runs until October 3
Max Bell Theatre (Epcor Centre)
On the opening night of Theatre Calgary’s Of the Fields, Lately, artistic director Ian Prinsloo dedicated the performance to the late Bill Glassco, who died September 13 at the age of 69. Glassco, who directed David French’s play in its original 1973 production, was a major force in Canadian theatre in the 1970s and ’80s. The founder of Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, Glassco spent much of his career developing and directing significant new Canadian plays, including French’s Mercer family cycle, and played a key role in bringing the work of Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay to English Canada.
Of course, not every Canadian play that Glassco nurtured had staying power but, as Theatre Calgary’s revival proves, Of the Fields, Lately remains, three decades later, a quietly effective family drama. It is, certainly, a play of its time, or even of an earlier time, with superficial resemblances to those American classics Death of a Salesman and The Glass Menagerie. But French’s play seems somehow to be quintessentially English-Canadian – there are none of Miller’s great, ringing speeches and only a few Williams-style lyrical touches, but in its modest, low-key way, every line, every word rings true.
It’s the winter of 1961 and 20-year-old Ben Mercer (Jesse Dwyre) has returned home from Regina to Toronto to visit his parents, Jacob (Wayne Best) and Mary (Brooke Johnson), a working-class couple originally from Newfoundland. Ben is back to attend the funeral of his aunt Dot, but also to make an attempt at rapprochement with his father, from whom he parted in anger two years previously. It’s no easy task. Jacob is, as Mary puts it, "as contrary as the day is long" and the two men can’t be in the same room two minutes without nearly coming to blows.
But there is soon an added urgency to Ben’s efforts. Jacob, he learns, is recovering from a recent heart attack. Now the old man is putting up a fight against his failing health by insisting that he go back to his construction job, while the worried Mary is making every attempt to keep him at home and wants Ben to help her.
Director R.H. Thomson and his cast provide a note-perfect rendition. Best’s Jacob is a feisty old bantam rooster, quick to quarrel but also quick to show unalloyed joy. Anyone familiar with French’s more famous prequel to this play, Salt-Water Moon, will recognize in Best’s performance glimmers of lively young Jacob, the Newfie charmer. Dwyre’s sympathetic Ben makes his frustration with his father palpable. Mary comes from that long line of long-suffering wives, but Johnson de-emphasizes that in favour of showing us a woman whose every action seems motivated by love, loyalty and concern for someone else.
Then there’s a superb Stephen Hair as Uncle Wiff, Dot’s husband and Jacob’s best pal, whose over-fondness for the whisky makes him comic relief early on, but whose grappling with grief comes to foreshadow what the Mercers themselves will soon have to face. Hair, once again free from the shackles of Scrooge, gives the kind of highly coloured performance that lights up a scene, while at the same time capturing Wiff’s more subtle shades when, between the boozing, he paints a frank picture of his marriage to Dot and its sexual dynamics.
This is one of those rare (but, thankfully, increasingly less rare) Theatre Calgary shows in which the set doesn’t compete for attention with the actors. Thomson emphasizes that what we are seeing comes from Ben’s recollections and Kim Nielsen’s design quietly suggests the fragmentation and exaggeration of memory, with a house dominated by an elongated staircase and giant black and white photos of Jacob appearing and disappearing. Paul Mathiesen’s lighting, meanwhile, frames the action in deep shadows but also deftly mimics the dim sunlight of a Canadian winter.
This is a production Bill Glassco himself would be proud of. And this is a play that we might not be watching today if it wasn’t for him. Thanks, Bill. |
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