>>PREVIEW
STAGE STRUCK
Vertigo Mystery Theatre
Starring Stephen Hair
Written by Simon Gray
Runs September 17 to October 9
Vertigo Playhouse (Tower Centre)
The Vertigo Playhouse is a far cry from Calgary’s science centre and former planetarium, where Stephen Hair served as artistic director of Vertigo Mystery Theatre – then called Pleiades – from 1990 to 1995. Returning to Vertigo for the first time since its 2002 production of Deathtrap in its final science-centre season, Hair has come back to find the company that once occupied a refurbished lecture hall now ensconced in a multimillion-dollar theatre complex with bathrooms, if the veteran Calgary actor is to be believed, deserving of their own Betty Mitchell nomination.
"At the planetarium, we did what we could, but it was a squish to get 17 people into a place that actually had room for eight actors, maybe," says Hair, now taking the lead in the season-opening Stage Struck. "My office always became an extra dressing room."
Although its space may have changed, Vertigo continues to return to the essentials that drive its mystery mandate. A revenge drama revolving around the theatrical scheming of Robert Simon (Hair), Simon Gray’s Stage Struck sees theatre used as a weapon against the waning attentions of Robert’s actress wife, Anne O’Neil (Heather Lee MacCallum). With its poster featuring Hair reclining, martini in hand and noose at his fingertips, the play promises to deliver plenty of red herrings and theatrical vitriol.
"(Robert is) very Noël Coward, very witty, very fey," says Hair, adding, "totally straight, of course, but he’s one of those theatre people. We’re all theatre people in this show, so we all know these people, whipping off witty one-liners but underneath you know there’s something really nasty, vicious and ugly going on. And when it comes out, it’s right between the eyes. It’s always fun to do that."
As effortless as it may seem, a production like this wears a fragile façade, as actors move about onstage with concealed blood packs, hoping against a premature puncture. And you never know when the unexpected will crop up. The recent appendectomy that forced actor Christopher Hunt to miss his final week of performances in Oleanna at the University of Calgary, means he’ll also be absent indefinitely from Stage Struck, in which he was supposed to co-star with Hair. Terry Lawrence is replacing him in the interim.
Thankfully, second-guessing and artfully veiled machinations are familiar ground for both Hair and Vertigo. The actor and the company have been doing witty, acid whodunits like Stage Struck (1979), Deathtrap (1978) and Sleuth (1970) for decades. What continues to draw audiences to this canonical set of labyrinthine thrillers?
"They’re not writing them now," says Hair simply. "There’s no style, there’s no class, there’s no wit. It’s either trying to be so avant garde that it’s pretentious and boring, or it’s trying to redo what was done before, just badly. There’s a whole genre of writers that are gone now or who aren’t writing any more, where language is important as you’re telling the story. Everyone’s trying to (write like) film now, but film ain’t stage, so why are we doing that?"
When he takes the stage again at Sage Theatre later in the season, co-starring with young actor Joel Smith in David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre, Hair hopes to shed a more positive light on the experience of moving audiences and wrestling with fictional characters – work he feels has an important, even redemptive effect. While he admits that Stage Struck’s nasty backstage world bears a certain resemblance to the kind of catty environment sometimes found among local actors in the Auburn Saloon, he is convinced that theatre is more than improvised attacks and subtle innuendo.
"It means something," he says. "When you really get down to it, we’re supposed to be delving inside ourselves to find these emotions and bring those audiences in. I sit in a movie and maybe have a little tear. But in theatre, where something actually happens onstage in real time, you get sucked into it. There’s nothing like it." |
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