Hidden turbulence a fitting theme for Soulpepper’s return
A Delicate Balance
K (out of 4) Written by Edward Albee. Directed by Diana Leblanc. Until Feb. 10 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 50 Tank House Lane. Soulpepper.ca or 416-866-8666. And the show must go on.
After weeks of reacting to the sexual harassment and assault lawsuits filed by four women against former Soulpepper Theatre artistic director Albert Schultz, accepting the resignations of both Schultz and his wife, executive director Leslie Lester, and igniting a major moment of reckoning in the Canadian arts industry, Soulpepper began its 2018 season Thursday with Edward Albee’s 1966 family drama A Delicate Balance.
And though all attention was back on the art for at least one night, thoughts of the monumental shift that impacted Canada’s largest non-profit theatre were inescapable on opening night.
“I’m Alan Dilworth. Thank you for coming to the theatre tonight,” said the company’s new acting artistic director before the play began, to prolonged applause. Instead of the usual post-show speech Schultz would deliver from the theatre staircase, the entire cast and crew descended the same staircase silently as the crowd cheered.
Such subtle changes to what were honoured traditions within the Soulpepper community helped mark a new era for the company and a brief moment of celebration in a time of crisis — particularly for the cast and crew of Amadeus, the cancelled Schultz-directed production that would have had its own opening the previous evening.
But A Delicate Balance itself reflects a mood of upheaval, of simmering unpleasantness beneath the veneer of a wealthy, happy American family.
Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama is set in the living room of Agnes (Nancy Palk) and Tobias (Oliver Dennis), currently also home to Agnes’s alcoholic sister Claire (Brenda Robins).
The dynamic among the three of them is Shakespearean in Albee’s capable prose.
Agnes has a cutting ability to observe, diagnose and unemotionally but carefully cut to her family’s weak spots, whereas Tobias reveals his emotions through what’s left unsaid, in how softly or violently he avoids expressing what he means.
Meanwhile Claire is the archetype of a fool, accepting her outsider status and using it to provoke and challenge the pretence of her sister’s happy marriage, with a drink in hand, a cigarette in the other and an accordion strapped to her chest.
If cracks were already forming in Agnes’s and Tobias’s marriage, they deepen with the arrival of their best friends Harry (Derek Boyes) and Edna (Kyra Harper), who decide to stay at their friends’ home after an inexplicable fear takes hold of them. At the same time, Tobias’s and Agnes’s daughter Julia (Laura Condlln) retreats home after she leaves her fourth husband. The antagonism that grows between child and friends, each feeling entitled to this domestic territory, exposes further questions around loyalty, devotion and intimacy between members of blood families as well as chosen ones.
Despite it being written in the ’60s, the situation calls to mind the modern phenomenon of boomerang children, economic anxieties and the anti-outsider protectionism of the Trump era — even the mention of a bomb, or as Albee calls it a “fatal mushroom,” recalls the false alarm in Hawaii last week.
Albee’s turns of phrase are well worth seeing his plays performed live, and Palk and Robins in particular shine here as the sisters grim, though Diana Leblanc’s direction gives the family a subdued tone, and the tension under the surface doesn’t earn its explosion. Likewise, Astrid Janson’s burgundy-and-beige set is thematically interesting: glass and transparent plastic furniture and accessories, along with the fine crystal that increasingly covers the set’s surface throughout the three acts, symbolize the refracted, fragile nature of the family’s relationships. At the same time, the room’s ornate rug is off-kilter enough to reflect how Agnes describes the unease “underneath” and Tobias articulates it as “bunched up.” But the overall effect is underwhelming in its sparseness.
The benefit of a subdued approach is that the audience must lean hard into Albee’s text and his infamous portrayal of unhappy families, also seen in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? and The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? The latter was also produced by Soulpepper late last year, the last acting role Schultz performed before resigning from the company. This pairing of Albee familial dramas proved much more evocative than one could have predicted.