Plus ça change

Fallowing the Arts Plus ~a change In this anicle Keith Garebian, who is a regularcommentatoron the ShawFestival for the Journal, looks at repenory and commercial theatre in Toronto in 1988. While Toronto pretends to beshaking the theatre out of its comfortable sleep, some recent productions have caused nightmares. Abrasive orchallengingconceptsoftheatre do exist, but too often they rub against conventional practice so that thrilling but flawed plays - such as Newhouse or Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing - effectively provoke audiences without in the least disturbing what is bound to be at leasta year's run for the splendid opera Les Miserables at the Royal Alex. This theatrical schizophrenia is nothing new, but what is disturbing is that nothing much has really changed in the centre of the most active theatre-city in Canada. You could go to a different play two or three times a week and yet comeaway repeatedly without a senseof having encountered something that has radically affected yourculturalsensibility, let alone your life. Thereare good intentions all around - all the way from the ethnicallyconscious but artistically mediocre We Are One Theatre Productions and the modestly-innovative Theatre SmithGilmour to the starchy, stiffTheatre Plus, the inconsistentTarragonTheatre, and the astonishingly erratic Canadian Stage Company. But the flurry ofactivity does nothing to balance the markedly contrary experiences that make Toronto theatre a case of arbitrary impulses, random eccentricities , and expensive foibles. The so-called alternatives (and this is a label that has long lost whatever limited meaning and truth it ever had) sometimes provideoccasional damn-you exuberance and extravagant visions, but too often these alternatives are stuck within narrow circumferences and limited crusading passions. 128 IfToronto audiences do not seem to behave passionately in the theatre, it may well be because theatre in the city has not espoused credible passions credibly or interestingly. It is difficult for audiences to become partners in experiments that have lost their way or that have not found one in the first place. Recently, the Factory Theatre presented Gordon Pinsent's Brass Rubbings, a play about class conflict that is so tritely structured and worked out that many spectators were aghast at the spectacle of some splendid actors flaunting their accomplished technique in what was a palpably old-fashioned melodrama masquerading as a contemporary urban satire. Worse than this, Theatre Plus's pallid, unstylish production of Noel Coward's Design For Living, a comedy once considered outrageously daring in the early 1930s, was played as a periodpiece about an amorally whimsical trio of two men and a shared woman. The shock built into the comedy is Coward's notion of the subversively anti-social menage atrois. He never intended that ... the design for living suggested in the play should apply to anyone outside its three principal characters, Gilda, Otto, and Leo. These glib, overarticulate , and amoral creatures force their lives into fantastic shapes and problems because they cannot help themselves. Impelled chiefly by the impact of their personalities each upon the other, they are like moths in a pool of light, unable to tolerate the lonely outer darkness, and equally unable to share the light without colliding instantly and bruising one another's wings. {Introduction to the Eyre Methuen Noel Coward: Plays 71zree, n.p.) Not only did Malcolm Black's three principals (Dixie Seatle, Geoffrey Bowes, and Ian Deakin) fail to convince us that they were an interior designer, painter, and playwright respectively; they also failed to convince us that they Revue detudes canadiennes Vol. 24, No. 2 (Eri 1989 Sum-r) were characters in a Coward comedy. No matter how much Dixie Seatle lounged across a settee or used her toes in playful mischief, she was scarcely the sort of Gilda whom Coward saw as someone stamping on her own qualms as if killing beetles. Geoffrey Bowes's diction and delivery were uneasy and slurred, while Ian Deakin, the most effective of the trio, was too young for the acerbic playwright modelled on Coward himself. The fact that Gilda and Otto were supposedly projections of those epitomes of graceful and witty acting, Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, compounded the sense of woeful miscasting. Style, or the lack of it, was at the root of all...