Humour, humanity Terribly Nice
As much as I try to go to each play with a completely open, non-judgmental mind, prepared to be awed and amazed by that particular evening’s presentation, it doesn’t always work.
Some nights, you can’t help but feel judgment sneaking up and ambushing your better instincts.
But shows need to be seen, so Saturday night, it was off to the Pumphouse to see David van Belle’s and Ghost River Theatre’s new drama, Everything is Terribly Nice Here.
It was billed as a highly theatrical dialectical discourse into the clash between the West and Islam.
The launching point? A particularly grisly moment in 2004, when provocative Dutch filmmaker, artist, and columnist Theo van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri for his crimes against Islam.
As Clinton Carew (Theo de Vries) and Ali Momen (Haitham) played out their proxy war in a drab grey room that sort of resembled an East German Communistera idea of Hell, I prepared for my attention to wander elsewhere, but it didn’t.
Not when a show starts with a stunning image of a knife impaled into de Vries’ chest, attaching a thick manifesto of religious grievances there. Or else, watch Momen’s Haitham (inspired by Bouyeri), a small, self-contained Dutchman (of Moroccan descent) who finds himself sharing a place in Hell with his victim.
Even though he responds to each one of Van Gogh’s thrusts with an internalized parry that usually involves quoting from the Qur’an, Momen’s internalized intensity, his measured way of responding, and his sense of humour in dealing with Van Gogh’s bombast keep your eyes fixed on him. (If he reminded me of anyone, it’s young Al Pacino in the first Godfather film.)
Acting as a metaphoric mediator of sorts is Alexa Devine, playing the nameless She — a representation of all the Muslim women Theo van Gogh purported to be concerned about.
Draped in a blue veil, Devine provides a kind of ethereal presence throughout, particularly in the early stages of the duo’s thousand-year-long quarrel, when each still feels the need to win the argument.
It’s not a new argument, but van Belle’s script manages to ring liturgically true, and be irreverent and absurd at the same time.
Both guys might have argued their way right into Hell, but both also possess a self-awareness of the irony and endless chasing of your tail involved in trying to win such an argument.
Sometimes, it’s even funny, although Saturday night’s audience seemed a little unsure how to respond to the funny stuff.
Just when you think Everything is Terribly Nice Here is going to get stuck on repeating themes and tropes we’ve all read and heard about for decades now, van Belle’s script takes off into a flight of theatrical fancy.
There’s a small window in their slice of Hell, you see, and if the two of them just work together, they can manage to defeat the greyness of their stay in the underworld.
This leads to movement, humour and humanity that feels genuinely earned and is quite moving to watch.
It’s all directed with a stylized restraint by Eric Rose, who turns the playing space into a kind of living clock, as the actors pace out the seconds and minutes, as if to illustrate the absurdity of the ways in which men continue to this day to try to win the argument, no matter the cost.
Rose has an appetite for visual dazzle, so I was a little shocked by the restraint he showed throughout Everything is Terribly Nice Here — but delivers a final scene, complete with multimedia projected images, that is breathtaking and devastating.
Everything is Terribly Nice Here is the holiday show to see for theatre lovers who can’t take one more holiday show. It’s also another thought-provoking piece of theatre from Ghost River, which does more, theatrically-speaking, with less money than any theatre group since Guy Laliberte and those Cirque guys were busking on the streets of Old Montreal.