>>REVIEW
THE BEAR
Runs until March 17
Lunchbox Theatre
Bow Valley Square
This isn’t your father’s Chekhov – but only if he’s prone to taking in the odd production of The Cherry Orchard or Three Sisters. Honestly though, the chances are pretty high that your dad either was, or is, a man with precious little time on his hands – children are ravenous, money-sucking creatures and there are only eight hours in a day to make a living. It would be more accurate to say that Lunchbox Theatre’s production of The Bear actually is your father’s Chekhov – served up light and 35 minutes long.
As a matter of fact, with theatre this manic, you might consider taking in a show with the old man.
Adapted from Chekhov’s short farce of the same name, Jason Sherman’s The Bear uses modern vernacular and a classic battle of the sexes to spin a brief, whirling yarn. Still playing the cloistered widow after her cheating, wastrel husband has been dead for nearly a year, Elena Popova (Kate Newby) opens the play attended by her obsequious servant, Luka (David LeReany). Trying in vain to remove Elena from her self-imposed exile from the world, Luka is interrupted by an unexpected visitor named Grigory Smirnoff (Haysam Kadri) – a creditor of the widow Popova’s late husband and a man whose intensity is nearly a match for Elena’s.
Finding themselves at a détente, with Elena refusing or unable to pay and Grigory refusing to leave, the two begin a verbal war of attrition that eventually steers into broader derisions of their respective genders, an abortive pistol duel and, finally, love.
With leaps over the sofa, violent confrontations and old-fashioned pratfalls, Lunchbox artistic director Rona Waddington’s staging lends her hilarious cast a wonderfully energetic space for their performances. Set designer Terry Middleton’s drawing room is open and genteel, and the gradual opening of its large windows serves as a fine metaphor for the increasing passion of the exchange between Elena and Grigory.
As Grigory, Kadri brings a fevered intensity that fires with excellent comic timing before melting into his sudden infatuation with his ostensible rival. Playing the ice queen to Kadri’s swarthy romantic-turned-cynic, Newby offers a whirling pantomime of melodramatic gestures and defences. Every inch the overly suffering widow, she displays a steely determination to have this uninvited interruption in her carefully mapped suffering removed. Finally, LeReany’s performance is sheer ridiculous weakness, a wonderfully over-the-top series of pratfalls, cringes and wide, terrified eyes. In a drawing room comedy written by a playwright often known sardonically as a man who considered some of his bleaker works comedies, Lunchbox has found a palpably brief comedy that succeeds entirely.
The play doesn’t quite carry the frantic comic melodrama of LeReany’s initial attempts to improve Newby’s mood – a frenzied addition that sees him bringing in flowers, spitting on a picture of her departed husband and offering the widow a gigantic cooked turkey – but between Kadri’s bombast and Newby’s cold indignation, The Bear is an exercise in comic economy. Short, hilarious and utterly mad, this production is liable to make even the most reluctant audience member take another look at Anton Chekhov.
If this isn’t your father’s Chekhov yet, it may soon be. |
Copyright ©2007 FFWD. All rights reserved.