Intriguing, but never truly engaging
Harper Regan K (out of 4) By Simon Stephens. Directed by Matthew Jocelyn. Until March 22 at the Bluma Appel Theatre, 27 Front St. E. canadianstage.com or 416-368-3110
RICHARD OUZOUNIAN
THEATRE CRITIC It’s nice to have something solid to hold onto when you’re caught in the middle of a hurricane.
That’s how I felt about Molly Parker’s performance in the title role of Harper Regan, the Canadian Stage production that opened Thursday night at the Bluma Appel Theatre.
Simon Stephens’ 2008 drama deals with a British housewife in mid-life who finds her whole existence turned upside down when she returns to her hometown to visit her dying father.
Seemingly ordinary incidents suddenly turn askew and nothing is quite what it seems. As the evening continues on its corkscrew path, we also discover that apparently innocuous personal relationships have a much darker edge.
There is a fascinating saga here and Stephens writes with a darkly compelling style that rivets one’s attention, but director Matthew Jocelyn has given us a jarring production that provides layers of confusion I doubt Stephens intended.
The vast stage space of the Bluma Appel is stripped bare to the walls, with only a few random drapes and lighting fixtures to fill the void. And the front of the stage has been lowered to audience level, providing a kind of bear pit for the play’s numerous scenes of encounter and confrontation to take place, while the actors not involved sit upstage watching.
The hyper-theatricality is accentuated by the blinding light and deafening sound that punctuate the end of each scene. Jocelyn’s choice to double many characters, staging the play with seven actors instead of the 11 who filled the British production, causes additional confusion.
Matters aren’t helped by the fact
The darker Molly Parker’s character becomes, the more intrigued we are and the more the play holds our attention
that some cast members attempt sort-of British accents, while others are plainly North American, or that a few performers (Vivien Endicott-Douglas and Hardee T. Lineham) are overacting broadly, while others (Izaak Smith and Alex Poch-Goldin) are nicely subtle, and one (Philip Riccio) is very appropriately weird.
Then there’s Molly Parker. She starts out in a dangerously low key, but we soon realize these still waters run very deep. When she finally breaks loose at the end of an edgy and uncomfortable pub pickup scene with Riccio at his creepiest, you start to see where things are going.
She lets her hair fall down to her shoulders, puts on a leather jacket she’s stolen from another character and suddenly seems to be on a mythic journey through a deeply personal underworld that we’re glad to follow.
The darker Parker becomes, the more intrigued we are and the more the play holds our attention. But Jocelyn ultimately seems more interested in offering us jagged fragments rather than any kind of coherent journey, and it’s hard to figure out the intent of the long, pastorally rhapsodic final scene, which imagines a happy life for the Regan family that seems impossible to accept.
Harper Regan ultimately intrigues us without ever really engaging us, although there are moments — especially when Parker and Smith engage in a bizarre stalker-ish courtship — that have the stuff of real emotion woven through them.
And the offbeat charm that Poch-Goldin and Parker bring to an online-arranged hotel room seduction in Act II has a bizarre romanticism that touches the heart as well. But too often this production of Harper Regan fumbles the ball only inches from the goalposts. In its desire to be stark and striking, it manages to be disappointingly empty.
You will very likely leave the Bluma Appel Theatre appreciating the talent of some of the cast involved but wondering, “Why did they tell me this story?”