Farce of war proves sobering
AT A GLANCE
Mr. Goldberg Goes to Tel Aviv: plays to Feb. 19 at Théâtre St. James, 265 St-Jacques St. Tickets: $25, students and seniors: $20. Call 514-987-1774 or visit infinitheatre.com.
Intractable Woman: plays to Saturday, Feb. 18 at Centaur Theatre, 453 St-François-Xavier St. Tickets: pay-what-you-decide on the way out (suggested: $20, students and seniors: $15). Call 514-288-3161 or visit centaurtheatre.com.
Does a farce have to be funny?
If it’s about something as sobering as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arguably not. Oren Safdie’s new play, Mr. Goldberg Goes to Tel Aviv, certainly qualifies as a farce, with its madcap spiral into misunderstanding, abandoned propriety and Monty Python-esque bloody mayhem. But it’s not often a laughing matter, and not always because the grim topic forbids it.
The touring title character, Tony, is a Jewish-Canadian writer with a high-pitched bugbear about Israel. We first see him in his beachfront hotel room (elegantly designed by Cassandre Chattonier) kvetching down the phone line about illegal settlements, rampant bulldozers and “f---ing Israelis” as he prepares to give a blistering speech at a writer’s convention. Two visitors to his room, one a cheerfully impudent hotel clerk, the other a heavily armed emissary from “the other side,” bring the mayhem of the Gaza Strip to Tony’s comfortably complacent world.
There’s some lovely interplay between David Gale’s selfindulgently bristling Tony and Mohsen El Gharbi’s ever-smiling room-service provider, and when things go south, there’s a certain exhilarating frisson in watching how far Safdie is prepared to push it, both in terms of saying the unsayable and of topping the bloody excesses of Jacobean theatre (be prepared to look away).
The main problem lies in Safdie’s central premise that an outsider has no right to stick his nose into what he hasn’t experienced on a daily basis. From this rather didactic point arises a slew of dramatic problems to do with thinly drawn characters. Though Howard Rosenstein gives a meaty performance as Tony’s knife-wielding wake-up call, he also is stuck with a character who rarely goes beyond the cartoonish. Guy Sprung’s direction brings out some of the verbal sparkle, but struggles to find a balance of lurching moods.
The after-show discussion on the day I caught it was a fiery and provocative piece of theatre in its own right. Other after-show discussions are taking place this Sunday and Feb. 19.
Stefano Massini’s Intractable Woman takes a wholly different approach to the horrors of armed conflict. It’s a kind of choric documentary theatre piece, delivered, in Micheline Chevrier’s quietly devastating Imago Theatre production, by three actresses: Deena Aziz, Warona Setshwaelo and Laura Condlln.
It focuses mostly on Vladimir Putin’s brutal campaign in Chechnya as seen through the eyes of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Written several years ago, it’s suddenly eerily, disquietingly relevant, though the performers don’t push the topicality. Rather, they give subtle inflections to lines about, say, how the war in Chechnya has made Russia great again, or about journalists as the opposition.
Politkovskaya paid the ultimate price: threatened, poisoned and finally shot dead by a hit man.
Performed on a three-tiered set of bleachers connected by forbidding chain-link fencing, it’s a powerful and fascinatingly detailed show, enhanced by shadowy lighting from Robert Thomson and subtly ominous sound design by Peter Cerone, and is cleverly choreographed by movement coach Leslie Baker.