Nothing fishy about this man
The River (out of 4) By Jez Butterworth. Directed by Ted Dykstra. At the Coal Mine Theatre, 982 Danforth Ave. (temporary location) until Nov. 22. brownpapertickets.com At one point during the first preview of Coal Mine Theatre’s The River, a woman leaned over to her friend and whispered, “I hope there are no vegans in the audience.”
This wasn’t a moment of dietary intolerance. It was in response to the action onstage, in a narrow storefront on the Danforth temporarily converted into the setting of a rural cabin: to a jazzy, head-bopping tune on the radio, the play’s main character washes, slices, guts and cooks a real trout before our (wide or squinted, depending on the strength of your stomach) eyes.
Besides its pure novelty — how often do us city slickers get to see a fish prepared, let alone in the theatre — this is probably the most important moment in The River, U.K. playwright Jez Butterworth’s followup to the tour-de-force Jerusalem, which made waves in London and New York in 2011.
This enigmatic, poetic play centres on a man, named The Man, his fami- ly cabin on the cliffs surrounding an unnamed river and the woman/ women that he takes there.
The story jumps between two romantic fishing trips, as if in a whirlpool throwing us back and forth through time. What unfolds is at first a sweet, then a pathetically sad, look into The Man’s seduction routine (played by David Ferry with his heart on his sleeve).
Jane Spidell and Dani Kind play The Woman and The Other Woman, respectively, the objects of his desire, recipients of his poetry recommendations, subjects of his portraits, the ears for his passionate speeches about the magic of fishing on the one moonless night of the year or the greatest fish he almost caught — literally, the one that got away.
The chemistry between The Man and his women comes and goes, with Butterworth’s spurts of elegiac monologue sometimes feeling forced and, unfortunately in the case of Spidell’s character, sometimes dependent on the woman’s daddy issues and lack of self-esteem.
But the fish, oh the fish. There The Man is light on his feet, relaxed, joyful, if a little rushed (it was the first preview after all, and Ferry will probably work out the kinks with practice). It’s also one of the only times we see him alone on stage: just a man, a real intellectual outdoorsy guy, in his utopian, isolated cabin, preparing dinner to feed his woman.
The Man is the ideal archetype of masculinity and the women are, for the lack of a better metaphor, biting hook, line and sinker. And that’s not an entirely soothing image to come to mind immediately after The Man has just skinned, gutted, fried and consumed a fish onstage.
Meanwhile, deer horns hang on the walls of Steve Lucas’s wood-panelled set, as does a stuffed fish and a painting of a hunting scene; trophies of past conquests fill up this place and we learn of even more as the play progresses.
It’s not a spoiler to say The Man’s intentions with his guests are not so violent or dark, though the insinuations make it even harder to feel sympathy for The Man, though that’s what director Ted Dykstra seems to want by giving Ferry’s Man a rather gentle, calm personality.
Rather, this obsession with capturing animals feels like more of a hint of his inability to connect with other human beings. Regardless, there are plenty of layers and images to unpack in the Coal Mine Theatre’s first production of their second season, following up a very well-received inaugural season last year.
But vegans, you’ve been warned.