>>REVIEWS
THE SYRINGA TREE
Alberta Theatre Projects
Runs until November 5
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
SAILOR BOY
Ghost River Theatre and
the Old Trout Puppet Workshop
Runs until October 30
Vertigo Studio (Tower Centre)
The ever-popular solo show is more popular than ever at the moment, with Theatre Calgary, Alberta Theatre Projects and Ghost River Theatre all running one-actor plays. I skipped TC’s Wingfield’s Inferno – I don’t think I have anything new to say about the Wingfield Farm series or Rod Beattie’s tours de force – but I caught ATP’s The Syringa Tree and Ghost River’s Sailor Boy.
THE SYRINGA TREE
I can’t remember the last time I was reduced to tears by a play, but The Syringa Tree, Pamela Gien’s moving memoir of apartheid-era South Africa, did me in.
Put it down to Gien’s heartfelt and richly evocative writing, and to Meg Roe’s wonderful performance. Together, abetted by director Vanessa Porteous’s deft production, they brilliantly re-create a time and place at once beautiful and terrible – that "beloved country" (to use Alan Paton’s famous phrase) which suffered for four decades under an odious and tragic policy of racial segregation.
Gien tells most of her story through the eyes of a little girl, Elizabeth Grace, whose vivid childhood sensations and impressions mix with a hazy sense of the complex, troubling society that exists beyond the fence of her liberal white English family’s protective home. In Lizzie’s childhood idyll, peopled by loving parents and indulgent black servants, lushly furnished with syringa, jacaranda and almond trees, the only real fear is that someone will be caught without "papers" and taken away by the authorities – most specifically, her little playmate, the daughter of their Xhosa housekeeper, who is not supposed to be living in a whites-only neighbourhood.
Then, having depicted Lizzie’s innocent little universe in delightful detail, Gien artfully allows grim experience to come slowly seeping in, from the girl’s dangerous trip with her mother into the Soweto township in the dead of night, to her northern grandparents’ horrific encounter with a Rhodesian freedom fighter, and finally, climactically, to the 1976 massacre by police of protesting Soweto schoolchildren – South Africa’s Tiananmen Square.
Although The Syringa Tree has won a slew of awards and enjoyed a long run in New York, I initially had my qualms about a play, set in South Africa, written from a white perspective and performed by a white actor. But Gien’s story rings with the authenticity of personal experience and is so eloquent and involving that it belongs alongside the powerful anti-apartheid plays of Athol Fugard – in particular, it reminded me of his own dramas about South African youth, "Master Harold" and the Boys and My Children! My Africa!
Roe, already a fine young actor, rises to new heights here, with a multiple-role performance that’s warm, funny and totally captivating. There isn’t a false gesture or a slip of the accent in her fluid impersonations of lively little Lizzie, her hard-working Jewish doctor father, her genteel ex-Catholic mother and their maternal housekeeper Salamina, as well as the bevy of minor characters, from the priggish Afrikaner clergyman next door to the phlegmatic old Zulu servant without any fingers.
Roe’s acting and Gien’s words get a subtle assist from Porteous’s graceful minimal staging – with well-placed lighting and sound effects by David Fraser and Peter Moller, respectively, supplying added touches of atmosphere. The result is an engrossing, emotional experience that will leave you in what Othello called "the melting mood." Don’t miss it.
SAILOR BOY
Old Trout Peter Balkwill’s new play is also autobiographical, and he performs it himself, sans puppets but with plenty of theatrical bells and whistles. However, they can’t disguise the fact that this comedy about life in the U.S. Navy is still finding its sea legs.
Balkwill enlisted in 1984, in the waning days of the Cold War, as a naïve Canadian kid with visions of Top Gun and An Officer and a Gentleman marching through his head. He was, no surprise, quickly disabused of his Hollywood illusions. Here, we follow him from the typical lunacy of boot camp to his assignment as a signalman aboard a ship bound for the South Pacific. Once at sea, he learns the dirty facts about such things as nautical plumbing and America’s racial divide, weathers a tropical storm and the weirdness of the Navy SEALS, and goes on shore leave in the Philippines, where he and his fellow sailors are ordered, in no uncertain terms, to "fuck their brains out." (No wonder they call them "seamen.")
Balkwill brings his salty tale across with numerous amusing bits of business. He cavorts with a rag mop to the Village People’s "In the Navy," then later tap dances across the battleship-grey set like Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh. He does push-ups and chin-ups, and immerses himself several times in a bucket of water. He does impressions of his crewmates and superiors, most memorably a grizzled chief petty officer who fought in ’Nam. What he doesn’t do, though, is give a clear arc to his story or enough insights into why Americans have that bizarre patriotic willingness to die for their country – a question he poses at the outset. Certainly, a strong reason to revisit his experiences now is the light they might shed on the current U.S. military ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, but, apart from one oblique reference, Balkwill draws no parallels.
Still, he’s a likable and energetic performer, and he’s brought some experienced hands on deck for this project, including director Jillian Keiley of Newfoundland’s Artistic Fraud, who rigs an imaginative staging with the help of resourceful lighting designer Cimmeron Meyer and Edmonton’s admiral of the sound board, Dave Clarke. But for Sailor Boy to really set sail, it needs to figure out what port it’s headed for. |
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