Creative duo’s lightning strikes twice
(out of 4) Written by Jonathon Young. Choreographed and directed by Crystal Pite. Until March 16 at the Bluma Appel Theatre, 27 Front St. E. canadianstage.com or 416-3683110
With 2015’s Betroffenheit, choreographer Crystal Pite and actor Jonathon Young turned personal tragedy into breathtaking art.
Ask anyone lucky enough to snag a ticket: They’ll likely say the Dora and Olivier Awardwinning production is still seared into their minds.
The question before Revisor, Pite’s and Young ’s new collaboration, opened this week, was if the same electricity could be captured without a back story as impactful as the death of Young’s daughter in a fire.
Pite and Young have proven that Betroffenheit wasn’t lightning in a bottle: It will surely strike as many times as they choose to combine forces.
Though Revisor dives into the horror of a much larger, abstract and seemingly impenetrable force — political corruption, social injustice and violence — it hits with the same immediate, visceral discomfort as if it were tapping into a recent personal trauma.
Revisor reimagines Nikolai Gogol’s mid-19th-century play
The Government Inspector. In their program notes, Pite and Young argue it has been misread as a farce about mistaken identity when it was written to be “an urgent moral indictment, a religious allegory and a portrait of the universal soul in exile.”
Modern adaptations of the story, in which a low-level employee is mistaken for a highpowered inspector and spoiled with riches, luxury and flattery by a corrupt mayor and his en- tourage, have treated it as a comedy — from the 1949 film musical starring Danny Kaye to the Christopher Guest movie Waiting for Guffman.
The power in Revisor is its revision of that legacy.
Using Pite’s choreography underneath recorded text written by Young, which worked so well in Betroffenheit, the first third of Revisor plays into our expectations of The Government Inspector: Performances are large, characterizations are satirized and Pite’s choreography, timed to the natural rhythms of human speech, is surprising, vivid and often hilarious.
But when Minister Desouza (Ella Rothschild) confesses to the Revisor that she has “abstract physical evidence” of the horrors that have existed in this fictional government, the production breaks down and begins to revise itself.
The spoken text, featuring Vancouver actor Nicola Lipman as Desouza, is remixed into fragmented, repeating phrases. Rothschild’s movements morph from human into animal: A beast, a bird, a bear.
Shedding Nancy Bryant’s ornate militaristic costumes for plain clothes, the dancers recreate stripped-down versions of the preceding scenes. But instead of the text as before, the narrator (Meg Roe) describes the characters’ movements.
We hear verbally how characters are upturned, lose their footing, stop in their tracks as the body language of Pite’s choreography is translated into the English language.
It lays bare the manipulation and control that was in front of our eyes but to which we were blind because of the intoxicating, satirical style laid over top of it.
An absurd antlered creature (Matthew Peacock) is later revealed to be a grotesque monster, with antlers transformed into claws or sharp teeth: The comedy is destroyed and the evil is unearthed.
Even at its most abstract, Young’s script offers lifelines to keep you in lock step with the conceptual journey.
When Revisor takes away the costumes, set pieces and even the characters’ names and plunges us into abstract horror, the narrator, and ourselves, become the subject of the play’s moral indictment.
Revisor is the recipient of support from a long list of arts companies and government funders, a list recited by Canadian Stage artistic director Brendan Healy at Thursday’s opening performance in a performance of its own kind. Names like Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young are well established with their careers, but Canadians can be proud that productions like Betroffenheit and Revisor are representing the country on the world arts stage.
As Betroffenheit did several years ago, Revisor is set to revise international assumptions of what Canadian artists can accomplish.