High-water mark at Factory Theatre
Tideline OOOO By Wajdi Mouawad. Directed by Bill Lane. Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst St. 416-504-9971 A tide line is a high- water mark. And Tideline, the English version of Wajdi Mouawad’s Littoral, is a high- water mark for Toronto theatre.
Ametaphysical poem of a play, a meditation on death and a lament against war, Tideline has drawn some impressive talent to this first English-language production.
Wilfrid is just enjoying the sexual act of a lifetime (“ with a goddess whose name I don’t know”) when he gets a phone call. The language is salty, to say the least, as the frantic young man tells his story to a judge, expressing his pleasure in terms of a threetelephonering ejaculation. Then the news. His father has died. More stories ensue, as Wilfrid relates his trip to the morgue, seeing his father’s corpse, his meeting with his late mother’s wealthy family and his decision, requiring a judge’s approval, to remove his father’s body to the country where he was born.
Before Wilfrid gets too far into his explanation for the unseen judge, a camera crew rushes in. An aggressive director instructs Wilfrid on how to dramatize the next stage of the story. It’s a hilarious jolt. “ I don’t know when I got this crazy feeling I’m always in a film,” says Wilfrid.
Aknight literally in shining armour also intrudes on Wilfrid’s monologues. He is Guiromelan, another figment of the young man’s imagination: his moral guide. Guiromelan is also a selfconsciously fashioned character from King Arthur’s court.
After these ventures into fantasy, it comes as no surprise that his father, the corpse, takes an active, speaking role in the proceedings. Father, alternately a wrapped bundle and the real body of actor Sugith Varughese, tells why Wilfrid’s mother died and why her family hates him so. And he lets Wilfrid in on the unquiet life of the newly dead. The next two acts — this is a three- hour play — unfold as a contemporary Canterbury Tales. Wilfrid lands in an unnamed hot country with mountains and valleys, desert and a route to the sea. He’s bearing his father’s decomposing corpse. Tideline advances from a moreorless naturalistic narrative to a complex, unfolding metaphor. As originally written, Littoral won the Governor General’s Award for plays in French and France’s Prix Molière, which Mouawad politely declined, because he felt it unfair to pit playwrights against each other. That aplay with this much poetry in it works so well in translation is a tribute to Shelley Tepperman, also translator of Mouawad’s Wedding Day at the Cromagnons and Alphonse.
Director Bill Lane assembles an infinitely adaptable ensemble cast and manages the complex layers of dreams and imaginings like a sensitive conductor. Only Michael Rubenfeld, who turns in an extraordinary performance as Wilfrid, remains in one character. Lane gets the best out of Andrew Moodie, casting him in the satirical role of the movie director and the knight, who sometimes shoulders the director’s camera.
There’s a subtle touch of humour and self- awareness in the father’s role. Audrey Dwyer is alternately a frumpy aunt and the incisive Simone. Sean Dixon plays Ulric the blind seer and Massi, a fatherless man. Dalal Badr doubles as Wilfrid’s enchanting mother and Josephine, whose bundles of phone books carry the names of the deceased she hopes to preserve. Dylan Trowbridge embodies the gun- toting youth, turned murderer by war. He also does a turn as a halfnaked servant at an exaggerated orgy and a limping Uncle Lionel.
Factory Theatre, best known in recent years for a seemingly endless run of George F. Walker plays, steps into a more exalted character with a production that is intellectually challenging, emotionally engaging and artistically adventurous.