BLACKBIRD
Theatre Aquarius production will hold you in its grip until the painful end of this excoriating drama
If your limits for theatre-going reach beyond Walt Disney and Andrew Lloyd Webber, you ought to see David Harrower’s drama “Blackbird.”
Director Marcia Kash’s seductive vision of a “love” that’s not meant to be, will send you out of the theatre assaulted by tension so palpable you’ll have trouble getting your hat and coat on.
“Blackbird” is an excoriating drama that leads you down frightening paths. You’ll be confronted by a truth you didn’t expect to understand. This isn’t a play that offers solace and understanding. In fact, you’ll have trouble separating right and wrong.
Like playwright Briony Lavery’s brilliant drama “Frozen” — and no I’m not talking Disney here — or better yet Paula Vogel’s heartbreaking “How I Learned to Drive,” this drama will pierce your heart.
There’s no way out. This is a confrontation with human wreckage that will grip you tightly in the play’s final, disturbing moments.
For one thing, you’ll be stunned that your preconceived beliefs of right and wrong will be challenged. Ascribing blame won’t be as easy as you first thought. You’ll be forced to consider who the victim is here.
Ray and Una are characters with a past. Years after their initial confrontation, she seeks him out. What does she want? Revenge? Retribution? Or maybe it’s a need to see him again, because their business isn’t really finished.
What we’re meant to think from the get-go isn’t necessarily so. It’s far more complicated .
Each of these characters is scarred by a relationship that ought never to have happened.
You see, at 12, Una had sex with her neighbour, Ray. Of course, he’s the predator right, a somewhat shy 40-year-old bachelor turned on by a kid at a backyard barbecue. Now, 15 years later after six years in prison where he’s been vilified and attacked, Ray is a sort of unimportant caretaker in an impersonal, ugly office block.
When the play begins he’s confronted by a 27-year-old woman who hugs her coat tightly round her, and holds her outsized purse as if it might provide protection. She seems to want him to pay for what he did to her and thinks he robbed her of her youth.
There’s a dark night of the soul here, and as the pieces of this sexual puzzle are pieced together, Harrower’s play asks some disturbing questions.
The play is a 90-minute wall of fire. Awful things are said. Memories are shunted back and forth. Who wins and loses may possibly leave you hostile to playwright Harrower’s point of view. Is there in fact a winner here? Aren’t these characters both bound by pain that can never be put right?
You’ll come out of “Blackbird” less sure of who is right than when you went in. In the #MeToo world we live in, where folks are tried in the media, not in the courts, “Blackbird” topples a few towers.
Ivan Brozic’s filthy industriallooking lunchroom set is a metaphor for the bleakness of small lives lived without colour and romance.
Kash has directed with a firm hand, finding in the playwright’s sometimes awful moments, fear and sadness that make these pathetic characters worth caring about.
Randy Hughson is an embattled Ray, a man torn by guilt and loneliness and living in pain. His performance is deeply etched and always human.
Caroline Toal matches him brilliantly as Una, finding in this tortured, angry firebrand a now grown woman who still seems a child.
A couple of things fail to work as they should. Near the play’s shocking conclusion, a casting error robs things of requisite horror. And what appeared to be a mistimed blackout at the play’s final moment of truth prevented the full force of a vital stab of pain that ought to have lingered in our consciousness as the stage swallowed to black.
Some people will hate “Blackbird” for its stark look at victims and perpetrators, vicious language and cruel memories. Fair enough, I never said everyone would like it.
But I am saying this powerful production deserves to be seen by theatregoers who seek the sort of frisson of tension you could never feel on television, or in a film.
“Blackbird” is the sort of risky play Theatre Aquarius should be doing every season, sandwiched somewhere between those feelgood musicals and rambunctious comedies.
And I’ll tell you something else. You wouldn’t see a better production of Harrower’s play for twice the money on Broadway. Gary Smith has written on theatre and dance for The Hamilton Spectator for more than 35 years.