#soulpepper

Noel Coward is very popular in Ontario this summer with productions of “Private Lives” at Stratford, “Shadow Play” at the Shaw, “Hay Fever” at the Gravenhurst Opera House and “Present Laughter” by Toronto’s Soulpepper  Theatre Company.  While the other productions are all safely set in the periods Coward specified, Soulpepper, true to its goal of reinvigorating the classics, has given “Present Laughter” a more experimental production which luckily does not compromise the play’s humour.

Design is not normally the prime topic for discussion in a play by Coward, but in this case it is.  When you enter the Premiere Dance Theatre you can’t help but notice Guido Tondino’s handsome set.  The clean lines, the colour scheme of black, white and grey with a touch of natural wood, the rotary phone, the old movie projector suggest that the owner, West End matinée idol Garry Essendine, has bought the latest (for 1939) Bauhaus-influenced flat.  But, hold on, there’s a multicoloured Andy Warhol-like print of Juan Chioran (Garry) on the back wall.  Maybe this is really supposed to be a modern-day loft. As with the set, so with the costumes and accessories.  The valet may wear a bowler, but he has a spiky punk hairdo.  Garry’s producer may wear a suit with an Edwardian cut, but he wears sandals, has a pony-tail and carries a cell phone.  The obsessed fan, Roland Maule, has laptop and a digital camera. 

This is a play where people have servants, where one sails rather than flies to Africa and, indeed, where a person can be enormously famous from acting in plays rather than in television or movies.  The play is, after all, Coward’s satire on his life as a celebrity and the introduction of modern devices could seem like intrusions.  On the other hand, setting the play firmly in 1939, as in the 1990 Shaw Festival production, risks making the play seem merely like a period comedy with no contemporary significance. 

Tondino’s design that makes us ask “Is it now or is it then?” is precisely what director Joseph Ziegler is after.  The play may be Coward’s satire on himself but it is also a satire on the cult of celebrity in general.  Coward makes clear via the three outsiders to Garry’s “family” of secretary, ex-wife, producer and manager that they see in Garry only what they want to see.  The mad fan Roland, the star-struck  debutante Daphne and his producer’s wife Joanna all claim that they are the only ones who see and appreciate the “real” Garry Essendine. 

This is all the more ironic since Coward also clearly shows that there may not be a real Garry Essendine.  He is a performer both on and off the stage so that it is impossible to tell  when he is acting and when he is not.  Since Coward generalizes this theme to include all the other characters, the play, especially when not presented as a period piece, become a critique of the nature of personality.  Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt”, mentioned twice in the play, contains the famous onion metaphor that could apply to all of the characters—we are merely a series of layers but have no core.  Such depths, not just the surface wit, are what make Coward’s plays last.

Ziegler and his cast fully bring out both the wit and what lies behind it to make this both an hilarious and intellectually stimulating evening of theatre.  He has given the play a perfect pace so that seemingly haphazard incidents gradually crystallize into structure and the humour builds and builds until the riotous final scene.  He makes us see, before it is said, that this seemingly realistic glimpse into the life of a star actually takes shape as that most theatrical of genres--the French farce. 

The cast is excellent.  Juan Chioran, in his first appearance with Soulpepper, plays Garry as someone whose life is so theatrical the mask has stuck.  Even he can’t tell when his emotion are real or not.  For a character who mostly indulges in a series of tantrums, Chioran does not make the mistake of starting out too big, but rather always keeps something in reserve for general brouhaha of the ending.  Chioran’s character is always “on” leaving us wanting to have a glimpse of the real Garry.  But that is the point. 

If Garry is selfless in a literal sense, his ex-wife Liz is selfless in a figurative sense.  As played by Martha Burns, she is the calm centre of Garry’s life, the stage manager of the convoluted plots he gets himself into who can rewrite them to have a happy ending.  Nancy Palk shows that Monica, Garry’s faithful secretary, gives him the logic and efficiency he himself lacks, and lets us see the suppressed love underneath the stiff exterior.  Patricia Fagan gives her best performance yet for Soulpepper as the calculating Daphne.  Brenda Robins is magnetizing as the equally calculating but mature Joanna  and manages to exude sensuality despite the dreadful frock Tondino has designed for her. 

Rick Miller lends the obsessed fan-from-hell Roland an upsetting, dangerous edge that well suits this 21st-century vision of the play.  Michael Hanrahan gives us a confident, materialistic Henry (Joanna’s husband) and Neil Foster a tortured Morris (who is having an affair with Joanna).  In lesser roles, Joyce Campion, Garry’s Swedish spiritualist maid, can get a laugh merely through her deliberate walk and dialect-distorted vowels.  Allan Hawco gives a assured performance as Garry’s jaunty, no-nonsense valet—quite a stretch from the melancholy prince in “The Triumph of Love” just last month.  Charmion King is delightful as Lady Saltburn, the unsuspecting mother of the errant Daphne.

Guido Tondino’s costumes (except for Joanna’s) are attractive and give the sense of the 1930s as reinterpreted in 2001.  Louise Guinand provides the kind of lighting that is so natural one completely forgets that primary light sources are not the ones on stage.

You’ve heard of a movable feast. This is the movable interview. I’m in the lobby of the Premiere Dance Theatre, waiting for Allan Hawco and Holly Lewis. They’re two of the 10 talented actors in Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, presented by Soulpepper in a new adaptation by Toronto playwright Jason Sherman.

The daisy-chain of a play follows a succession of two-person sexual liaisons and subtle power struggles, one character from each scene moving on to an erotic encounter with someone in the next.

Hawco shows up a few minutes late, after being caught in traffic on Queen’s Quay. We’re meeting at Harbourfront because he has a matinee of Present Laughter here in barely 90 minutes.

Hawco’s a hot young actor in several senses. Just a year out of the National Theatre School, he’s impressed viewers and critics as an innocent prince in The Triumph Of Love and — in an abrupt turnaround — as the cockney valet in Present Laughter. In the fall, he opens the Theatre Passe Muraille season in Daniel MacIvor’s You Are Here.

At the moment, having rushed to get here, his heat is physical. Hawco spends the first five minutes of our conversation mopping the sweat from his forehead. He’s carrying around a script of Richard III, a play that might be in his future.

There’s too much tourist traffic in Queen’s Quay Terminal, too much commotion for an interview, so when Lewis shows up — having biked over from La Ronde rehearsals on King — we move to the second-storey lobby of the theatre.

In La Ronde, Lewis plays a hooker involved with an athlete — Sherman’s changed the character from a soldier — and a politician, while Hawco’s student first seduces his family’s maid and then the wife of a family friend, kind of a reverse Benjamin-Mrs. Robinson relationship from The Graduate.

What was shocking at the turn of the century — the play’s sex — won’t affect an audience used to Internet porn, X-rated mags and business personals.

“What’s more disturbing about the play today is the nature of the relationships,” offers Hawco, “how everyone achieves what they want and how they go about getting it.”

“Some of the best theatre deals with two people in a room breaking each other’s heart,” adds Lewis, whose Toronto work includes the Dora-nominated fforward, Midnight Sun and Spring Awakening. After the Soulpepper season, she joins Canstage’s production of Judith Thompson’s Habitat.

“Yes, there’s sex in almost every scene, but director Herbert Olschok says there’s nothing more boring onstage than a naked person. He likens the feeling of the play to watching someone through a keyhole for weeks and then suddenly becoming aware that the person on the other side is looking back at you. Who’s the observer? Who’s the observed?”

I’m having trouble hearing. The bar is being set up, bags of ice are being delivered noisily, attendants are shouting across the lobby to each other. Hawco suggests we move elsewhere, so we decamp to the downstairs lobby.

Hawco’s new to Soulpepper, Lewis is in her second year. She was to have played Juliet last summer, but an accident to her Romeo knocked the show out of the season.

“It’s great for someone like me, recently out of theatre school, to be working alongside people like Diego Matamoros and Martha Burns,” says Hawco. “And we can watch any rehearsals we want.”

Now the downstairs lobby is getting noisy as the efficient house manager starts giving instructions to her staff about latecomers and how to handle emergencies.