POLITICAL THRILLER TEST OF LIVE THEATRE
Nicolas Billon’s Butcher is a mystery thriller with unusual political resonance, given some of the revelations of recent days. It may also be a better fit for the screen than the stage.
After the London spy poisoning and the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal, Billon’s subversively clever 2014 play about the long arm of extrajudicial payback and political interference has a contemporary feel, even if its ostensible subject is war crimes committed in an Eastern European country decades ago.
Formed specifically for this project, Vancouver’s Prime Cuts Collective successfully realizes some of the tricky script’s most powerful moments, but challenges remain.
One Christmas Eve, an old man (Peter Anderson) mysteriously arrives at a Toronto police station dressed in a military uniform and Santa hat with a meat hook hanging from his neck and a business card on which is written, “Arrest me.” The cop on duty, Insp. Lamb (Daryl Shuttleworth), has called in a lawyer (Noel Johansen) who can’t explain why his card came attached to the old stranger.
The man speaks only Lavinian, the language of a (fictional) former Soviet country that suffered a genocidal civil war, so the inspector brings in a translator (Lindsey Angell). She suspects the man may be the notorious, internationally sought Lavinian war criminal known as The Butcher.
From this point, after a leisurely opening 20 minutes filled with apparently arbitrary chat that turns out not to be so arbitrary after all, the action quickly builds as the script takes a series of unexpected turns.
Spoiler alert: Some characters are other than they at first seem. Life-and-death dramas play out both inside the station and beyond. Horrifying wartime atrocities are revealed in an examination of the ethics and mechanics of political and personal revenge.
Anderson is terrific as The Butcher. Never speaking a word of English, he’s all attitude, his facial and body language projecting that arrogant, unapologetic, “I didn’t do anything wrong and I’d do it again,” screw-you-all quality we’ve seen so often in clips from war-crimes tribunals. Angell, a compelling actress who appears far too infrequently on local stages, drives the action with hyper-realistic intensity.
The hyper-realism the play demands, though, also offers its biggest challenge: making the audience suspend its disbelief and momentarily accept that this isn’t just theatre but reality. The characters who have to surmount excruciating emotional peaks — the cop and the lawyer — have the toughest job.
Shuttleworth and Johansen hit some, but not all of those marks at the preview performance I attended. Director Kevin McKendrick needs to crank up the temperature another few degrees without making things feel stagy.
But how can physical torture, and even a killing, in an intimate space before a live audience not feel at least somewhat contrived? Billon has set an almost impossible challenge for himself, the theatre artists and audiences involved in Butcher.
Amid the visceral emotions, important ideas and surprising twists cascading down at the end of the play, I couldn’t help but wonder — despite my chronic prejudice in favour of live theatre — whether the fake real this story requires might be achieved more effectively through the technomagic of film.