Moving story of migration
Portuguese-canadian family in Little Portugal, Toronto.
Subica paints a vivid picture of a world full of straighttalking women, ever-ready with acerbic criticism from behind the ubiquitous coffee table – a community where neighbours live in their foyers or windows, and the phrase “dress nice” is not so much a lifestyle choice but a way of life.
Both the appeal and frustrations of close-knit family life shine through in Subica’s lovingly written and skilfully performed script, as she smoothly shifts between the well-defined characters. The story could be tightened up to have more shape, but over the course of an hour, it’s as much of a treat to spend time with our amiable narrator and her relations, as it is to eat one of the pastel de nata custard the mass westward migrations of a century ago, and particularly the arrival in Nova Scotia, in 1908, of Romanian Jewish migrants, driven out of Europe by a combination of extreme poverty and savage pogroms.
Musician and co-creator of the show, Ben Caplan, plays the narrator, known as The Wanderer, a kind of rabbi-cum-travelling showman of Jewish history and culture; and as the doors of the container open to reveal a four-piece band including the show’s two leading actors, he begins to roar, sing, cajole, weep and jest his way through the story tarts, from local bakery Casa Amiga, at the end. SALLY STOTT Laughing Horse @ Finnegan’s Wake (Venue 101) JJJ What’s the story? Well, the advanced driving course teaches you that when your car is spinning, drive into the spin. In a room packed with people, at least 25 per cent of whom have alcoholically altered sensitivities and no real idea where they are, Martha Mcbrier drives her delightful, tragi-comic tale of broken hearts and embedded maths, potassium highs and emotional lows into the drunken spin and brings it all of Chaim and Chaya, who meet in the immigration queue at Halifax harbour, and go on to marry, despite the fact that both of them are deeply scarred, Chaim by the murder of his entire family in a pogrom, Chaya by the death from fever and starvation of her adored first husband.
This is a show, in other words, about the detail of how people go on to build new lives after such horror, and the difficulty they experience in loving, and believing, and surviving the prejudice they encounter, when it may trigger such horrifying memories. The show draws deeply under her control. Teacher who falls victim of a school in search of a good Ofsted rating, victim of a vicious gang mugging who rises to be a Good Samaritan, Martha is both and much more. Her shows are very personal affairs, this one more than most. She is a phenomenal comic but this is her in storyteller mode and she makes her audience part of her life for an hour.
She never sacrifices the narrative to lever in a pointless gag but you will laugh because she can make any story funny. That is her gift. You will laugh, you might cry, your blood pressure will rise and your respect for the education department will fall, you will sing and you will be her friend for life. KATE COPSTICK and unforgettably on the wit and wisdom of Jewish culture about many of these questions, including the art of marriage.
If Caplan’s bravura performance is sometimes a shade too overwhelming, Mary Fay Coady and Christopher Weatherstone are so perfectly pitched and quietly charismatic as Chaya and Chaim that the Old Stock experience becomes irresistible, borne along on a tide of brilliant klezmer music and original song that links us to an old world, and helps us to live joyfully in a new one. JOYCE MCMILLAN Underbelly, George Square (Venue 300) JJ This is a gently amusing hour with a very charming comic. Religion and Netflix, alcohol, gorilla sex and emojis are given an Italian flavour and you find yourself smiling at Francesco’s thoughts on how people ruin everything, his inability to enjoy a bit of weed and why it is so hard to succeed as a stand-up in Italy.
He is confident, and owns his stage in a friendly, relaxed way. There are some great lines and you could do very much worse than spend an hour with Francesco. KATE COPSTICK Greenside @ Infirmary Street (Venue 236) JJJ As the bottles clink into the bottle bank, the Bone Woman pushes her shopping trolley down the alley, leaving the modern world behind and entering the realm of stories. Using found spars of wood, she starts to put together her chair, her throne, which continues to evolve throughout the performance. She is on the hunt for “wolf bones, and that which has been lost”.
Using the framing device of the Bone Woman, American storyteller Imani G Alexander slips into stories from different cultures: Irish, Mexican, Inuit. Bones play a part in all of them.
Alexander is a fine performer, not only telling the stories but inhabiting the characters, and expressing herself in song and movement as well as tales. All the tellers of the tales are female, women who are in danger of being punished for being “too wise, or wicked, or wild”.
It’s a strange, atmospheric, intriguing show about gathering up what might otherwise be lost, and breathing life into what appears to be dead. Running right through it is the image of bones which, like the stories, provide a structure on which the rest of life can be built. SUSAN MANSFIELD From yellowing, grimy sheets they emerge: rats – or at least people who might be described as acting like them. A couple breaking up hold a surprisingly lucid man prisoner, tortured and sedated, tied to a chair, as a woman worshipped as a god manipulates them to do the things she asks.
Writer-director Harry Ward Machray’s snappy dialogue has the “in yer face” appeal of 1990s theatre, and the cast’s polished performances bring energy to the heightened set-up. What feels like critique of organised religion and power is underdeveloped, but the dystopian mood is intriguing even though its purpose is part-hidden by the dirt. SALLY STOTT