It’s worth the climb to top of stairs
The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs
(out of 4) By Carole Fréchette. Translated by John Murrell. Directed by Weyni Mengesha. Until April 8 at Tarragon Theatre, 30 Bridgman Ave. 416-531-1827.
Part Hitchcock thriller, part Pinter menace and pure Carole Fréchette in its prismatic view of human relationships, The Small Room at the
Top of the Stairs opened Wednesday night at the Tarragon Theatre and left this reviewer enthralled for most of its 90-minute length.
Of course, I have to admit that any show with Nicole Underhay and Rick Roberts in the leading roles has a head start on my admiration, thanks to their combination of emotional vulnerability and sheer stage charisma, but there’s more here than fine acting.
Fréchette puts us in a situation where a beautiful young woman has married a rich middle-aged man. He has given her full rein over a luxurious mansion and filled it with everything she wants.
His one request? She is never to go to the small room at the top of the stairs. Of course, human nature being what it is, you know that is the one thing she craves more than air and water, so as soon as he leaves on a business trip, that is just where she heads.
What she finds, or thinks she finds, will enthrall and/or horrify you in equal measure, while the premature return of her husband sets the stage for dramatic fireworks of a very potent kind. There are three other figures in the landscape: the woman’s doting mother and doubting sister, as well as a maid who arouses suspicion even as she courts devotion. All of this is delivered in an artfully rendered, seemingly empty stage, created with real minimalist beauty by Astrid Janson. And Bonnie Becher once again proves that she is atrue virtuoso of haunting shadows and sudden illumination. Weyni Mengesha has staged it all with a sculptural beauty that manages to deliver the most out of Fréchette’s script, which has been elegantly translated by John Murrell. Besides the incandescent Underhay, who goes from frosty blond beauty to tortured victim with a rapidity Hitchcock would have delighted in and the mercurial Roberts who can turn from hospitable to homicidal in a nanosecond, there is fine work from Sarah Dodd as the mother who lets love cloud her vision, Claire Calnan as the sister who cares too much to offer easy answers and Raquel Duffy as the truly mysterious maid. But, after holding me in the palm of her hand for 75 minutes, Fréchette lets things slip from her grasp in the show’s conclusion. Part of it is the fault of her own brilliance: having offered us so many possibilities, she can’t really give us one final ending. And the strong blast of familial love that comes along isn’t quite enough to warm the eerie chill of what has gone before. Apart from that reservation, this is a show that you ought to see. This particular small room is worth climbing to the top of the stairs to discover.