Reviews
THE 2005 HIGH PERFORMANCE RODEO
Presented by One Yellow Rabbit
Runs until January 30
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre) and various other venues
Yes, Virginia, even critics get sick – and not just when we accidentally swallow our own venom. A wicked cold kept me from partaking of two of the likely highlights of Week 2 of the High Performance Rodeo: Ground Zero’s ever-popular 10-Minute Play Festival and the return of The Suicide Girls. (You had to miss The Suicide Girls? Man, you must have been ill.)
Happily, I was able to rise from my sickbed to catch the other three mainstage acts last week, and my impressions are below:
· Say Nothing (Ridiculusmus) – If Samuel Beckett had tried his hand at socio-political theatre, it might have come off something like this. Say Nothing, by Belfast’s Ridiculusmus, is a hilarious, fractured vision of Northern Ireland, post-Troubles, seen through the eyes of a visiting Brit.
Kevin (David Woods) has come back to his native Ulster in the wake of the 1997 IRA ceasefire to conduct peace and reconciliation workshops, but instead of knitting together a divided community, he becomes unravelled himself in the face of the charming, exasperating Irish character. The latter is represented with brilliant finesse by a slight, thin-lipped Jon Hough, whose men and women, whether bluff and gruff or soft-spoken and gentle, come to embody the repressed violence and feigned civility of the peace. Woods’s big, garrulous Kevin, meanwhile, begins to visibly crumble and collapse, like an imploding building.
The staging is ultra-simple and Magritte-style surreal – the two actors, in suits, stand in a suitcase filled with turf – but the dazzling, dizzying dialogue is as beautifully absurd as a Flann O’Brien story. In the end, Kevin’s final crackup comes as he tries to facilitate a group discussion, only to be stymied by a self-described "touchy-feely" colleague who just wants everyone to feel good. This incisive jab at the current trend to start the healing process before the injured have even examined their wounds is certainly not exclusive to Northern Ireland.
· The Suicide (Boca del Lupo and San Banquito Teatro) – Here was some less successful (not to say dated) absurdity. Vancouver’s Boca del Lupo physical theatre troupe teamed with San Banquito Teatro from Guanajuato, Mexico to revive this little-known satire from Stalinist Russia, about an unemployed man whose trip to the kitchen for a late-night snack is somehow mistaken for a suicide attempt.
Nikolai Erdman’s play has an amusing Gogolian flavour and a bit of a subversive, Soviet-era message – after various people try to hijack his forthcoming suicide for their own ends, the hero finally asserts his individuality – but its modest qualities don’t justify this overblown production. Sherry J. Yoon directs using shadowplay, tableaux, physical comedy, film segments, music… everything but what is most necessary: a pair of scissors.
The Suicide is simply too long and the show’s inventiveness outstays its welcome. And its funniest scenes are mere gilding to the main plot – an attempt by the hero, Semyon, to play the tuba, or his opening nightmare, in which he contrives a Rube Goldberg-style means of suicide involving an iron and a fridge. The standouts in the seven-member cast are Lucas Myers, who has his moments as a sad-eyed Semyon, and Marco Soriano, who brings some real Slavic flair to the role of a dashing intellectual.
· King O’ Fun (Andy Jones) – Hmmm… absurdity seems to have been the theme this week. And no one dwells more fully in the realm of pure silliness than Andy Jones. The Newfoundland comedian is adept at satire (remember his work with Codco?) and likes to dress up his solo shows in pseudo-philosophical ruminations, but when it comes right down to it, this is a man who can have you in stitches just by putting on a baby bonnet (guaranteed to make women in the audience start lactating, he assures us) or imitating a frightened cod.
King O’ Fun contains a crazy sci-fi plot about a parallel dimension called Whisgiggin (from the Newfie word for whispering and giggling), which you can only enter when you fully realize the absurdity of human existence, as well as some thoughts on the nature of humour and the role of the clown. But it’s basically an excuse for Jones to tickle us silly with his "funny notions," such as dancing bowels and a voice-activated prosthetic leg, or his daft skits, including the tale of a rooster who becomes a Catholic bishop or a routine that boils down the complete works of Chekhov into one sidesplittingly ridiculous drawing-room scene.
This was Jones’s third visit to the Rodeo and clearly his reputation preceded him – his opening performance Sunday night played to a jam-packed house. He guaranteed 250 laughs or your money back and, while the counting may have been less than precise, he was well over the mark by the time we were wiping our eyes and heading for the exit. I haven’t whisgigged like that in a long time. |
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