A lyrical look at the price of progress
A Man A Fish is a lyrical parable that seems somehow familiar and yet remains entirely unique.
It’s a cautionary tale of the type where a naif buys magic beans from a stranger. That is fused to the story of a troubled marriage haunted by infidelity and uncertainty.
A heavy air of longing inhabits the story as we meet the fisherman Prosper (Peter Bailey) and his wife Solange (Nicole Joy-Fraser). He’s distracted and she’s wounded. He still pines for the mistress he once had. She wants that spectre out of their lives so they can start a family. They’ll carry on like this forever unless things get better or worse.
Enter the instigator — shady salesman Eddy (Johnny Trinh) who is peddling progress. (He wants to put eels in the lake, but specifics don’t matter — he could be selling anything from genetically modified Canola to uranium).
You expect Prosper to be easily taken in, but he resists the promises of something new and better. He says he’ll think about it — but the brilliant look that Bailey and director Philip Adams concoct on Prosper’s face says the exact opposite. It’s so perfectly clear that you laugh at the truth of it.
It’s practically infuriating that Eddy gets his way even without the fisherman’s consent — the lesson within the lesson, playwright Donna-Michelle St. Bernard says, is that you can’t stop progress.
Every scene takes a detour through the bar owned by Edige (Matthew Burgess), who worships Solange’s beauty as much as Prosper takes it for granted.
Talented and engaging, it’s a suitably excellent cast for the play’s world premiere. Joy-Fraser makes you sad. Burgess evokes pity and humour. Bailey is the kind of actor you could watch do anything. And you even kind of like Trinh’s villain because there’s a refreshing honesty to his underhandedness.
It’s a play of mood as much as meaning. St. Bernard crafts evocative poetry for Joy-Fraser to recite, words that click to a beat like iambic pentameter. Her first speech sounds positively Elizabethan.
Flowing in its own way is the inventive set by Jenna Maren who was charged with the daunting task of putting a lake into black box. But the waves are there, from the horizon to the foreground, the space expertly lit by David Granger.
A Man A Fish is quiet, thoughtful and maybe too subtle for the mainstream, but the wisdom in it is undeniable and the resolution is as satisfying as it is unexpected.