Mother Courage at MTC

With a coterie of fellow theatre lovers, I went to see what for me was one of the most anticipated events of the winter theatre season here: MTC's co-production with the NAC of Bertold Brecht's MOTHER COURAGE.

It was my first chance to see the English language theatre company artistic director Peter Hinton created at the NAC.

Hinton is a director with a fine visual sensibility and the team he assembled for sound, set, lighting and costumes were all first rate. The use of the black uprights was absolutely inspired. However his production of this play about the folly of war and the costs of doing business that unfolded under a red sky felt curiously - bloodless. It's a dog of war with few teeth.

The comedy in the script was played for all it was worth, and largely to good effect, by the seasoned cast. Tanja Jacobs is excellent at depicting the world-weary cynicism of Mother Courage, her short-sighted greed, and her motherly wisdom, but the bottom notes of the depth of character's pain and suffering seemed to elude her tonight.

Similarly the Cook, played with a kind of louche pickled pathos by Geordie Johnston is a womanizer, but the sharp knife of his contempt is flashed ever so briefly in SOLOMON'S SONG. He's an asshole, but a nice asshole who knows that, thanks to his mom, he has a nice home to go to in the end no matter who dumps him.

Richard Donat as Chaplain gets some great lines and he makes the best of being cast in the loser role in a romantic triangle.

Jani Lauzon plays the flashy Yvette the hooker/countess flat-out, making the most of the comedic elements of the character, and showing off her vocal chops.

Still, when I came home, I put on Marianne Faithful singing that rep. Her whiskey gravel voice hits every note in Brecht and Weill's compositions: humour, irony, pathos, rage, desire, longing. It was a breadth and depth of feeling that largely went missing for me, tonight.

I think the blame for this has to be placed on the shoulders of the director. It was as if he thought the only way to sell an audience on a three hour Brecht play was to treat the thing as if it were some sort of musical comedy, that comes to a bad ending quite by accident.

Instead of building on the play's increasingly tragic losses, almost all the big action that happens to the main characters, takes place off stage. Both of Mother Courage's sons, the brave soldier and the honest payroll clerk are dispatched with so we hear, not see, what happens to them. Katrina, her mute daughter is deflowered by  a bunch of drunken rapists, with barely a notice.

The death of Mother Courage's last child, for the one real act of selfless heroism in the entire play gets cut off, almost instantly by a blackout, and the rolling around of set pieces in the dark. The audience was left to cough under a cloud of gunpowder for the denouement:  the delivery of Katrina's lifeless body to her mother. Is there no way in the 21st century to make a big noise on stage, without filling an interior space with stench and smoke? How fair is it to the actors to have to perform under this pall?

Jacob's director left her to perform her big final scene as several people in the audience struggled to breathe. Patrons and performers were both deprived, one final time, of a chance to connect emotionally with the tragedy of the play for the sake of an effect.

There were some great moments in the production: the procession of pianos for the great military leader's funeral, four women singing in beautiful harmony about a poplar at the gate, viewed from the warmth of their home, lit only by the reading lamp on the piano with Mother Courage's peripatetic wagon stationed just beyond the light. The scene between Jacobs and young hothead who wants to kill his boss was brilliance. It was these nuanced moments that made you see all the production could have been, in terms of poignancy and affect, and sadly, is not.

Waneta Storms as Mother Courage's mute daughter Katrina, steals the show by giving a performance full of heart without one false or strained note. If only all the gunpowder, and piano music had held more moments equal to her silence, this might have been a more satisfying, and less shallow-feeling production. Certainly war, of which Brecht speaks so powerfully, has lost none of its power to wreak havoc on our lives.

itin/erant lit: Women Can't Write: AKA Friday, Less Than Fun Facts

itin/erant lit: Women Can't Write: AKA Friday, Less Than Fun Facts

This link courtesy of Derek McGrath offers an interesting (and depressing) theory on why women are under-represented as writers on stage and in television.

Top Girls First Rate!

OK, first off, an apology. I have seen so much less of Churchill Fest than I 'd planned to, it's ridiculous.

Apart from the fine BLUE KETTLE which closed last weekend, this is the only other show I've made it to.

Judging from the standard of the two productions I did manage to see, that's a pity because both were both very good.

TOP GIRLS is currently playing at the Tom Hendry Theatre ( the theatre formerly known as MTC Warehouse) You still have a chance to see it this weekend and it is outstanding.

Ann Hodges does a fabulous job of directing her fine cast in multiple roles. The pacing and the transitions with one exception were very adeptly handled.

This is a difficult play about the intersection of the personal and the political in women's lives. In the wrong hands, it could easily have become a rant or worse yet, a soap opera. Here, each performance is marvel of nuance and restraint, illuminating the individual character's struggles to navigate a world where a Top Girl still holds a one-down position.

Sharon Bajer, Philippa Domville, Jacqueline Loewen, Tracy Penner, Daria Puttaert, Marina Stephensen Kerr and Jennifer Villaverde all deserve kudos for their fine ensemble and character work.

The set, projections and costume designs by Denyse Karn were elegant and effective. The contrast between the modernist dining room appointments and the period costumes on the actors in the first act worked particularly well. This was the best use of that space I'd seen in a while.

My only complaint was with the decision to dispense with the interval at the end of Act One and break the play in the middle of the second act instead. Yes, it's a long play. However the audience needed a pause at the end of the first act to sit with what they'd just see and heard. Breaking up the play two-thirds of the way through the second act felt awkward and arbitrary and created uneccessary confusion. It was the only cumbersome choice in an otherwise great production.

Up In The Air

Middle-aged people in extra-marital affairs must be the zeitgeist in Hollywood this season.

Jason Reitman's latest picture UP IN THE AIR is a mirror held up to a moral vacuum in 21st century American society and as such it's unsettling and more than a little depressing.

There's a lot of Oscar buzz around this film and I must say I infinitely preferred it to the cloying and self-consciously clever JUNO. This is a great cinematic adaptation of a novel, unabashedly posing hard questions and offering no easy answers. The film is anchored by a trio of extraordinarily fine performances.

George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man who has made a life making the best of a bad job: firing people on behalf of bosses who lack the balls to do their own dirty work. He swirls through concrete airports and beige hotel rooms, leaving voided lives in his wake as he racks up frequent flier miles. The distance he's covered in his travels is the only value he holds sacred. He keeps his human connections to a minimum: movement maintains distance.

He's framed by two women: a corporate newbie (played with wonderfully intensity by Anna Kendrick) who wants to ground everybody and fire people online and his lover, fellow frequent flier Alex Gordon ( a cooly elegant Vera Farmiga ) a woman whose life is as compartmentalized as the backpack Ryan talks about in his corporate seminars.

It's a rare American film that manages to be this thought-provoking and nuanced. I lay awake for a long time last night thinking about those people's lives. Completely worth seeing.

"It's Complicated"

I saw this rom-com for the freedom fifty-five set with two friends tonight at a late screening. It's a very well-written comedy about love in late middle age and like the kitchen our heroine is building, there's a few sharp knives of wit hidden in its well-oiled drawers.

The film stars the great Meryl Streep who has shown much flair for romantic comedy in recent years ( Mamma Mia!) as Jane Adler, a divorced woman in her '50s with a successful bakery business, three great kids, a gaggle of girlfriends and a large, beautiful and suddenly very empty house as her youngest heads off to university.

On the weekend of festivities for their son's graduation, Streep and her ex-husband find themselves alone in the bar of a hotel where they're both housed, pre-commencement. He has remarried: she has not. His second wife is at home with her young child, which, conveniently for the plot, is not his. It's the Adler's first dinner together alone, in a decade. A few bottles of wine later, complications ensue.

As befits a comedy for middle-aged people, the action is divided between the kitchen and the bedroom. Streep is preparing to renovate both with the help of an architect who has more than a professional interest in her. Steve Martin comports himself with admirable restraint as Streep's other love interest.

The ex-husband, played brilliantly by Alex Baldwin, is a somewhat louche legal lion who has realized, a decade later that the kitten he ran off with has long since become a cat and he already had a much nicer one and kittens in his former home. His appropriately tiger-tattooed second wife is marching him off to the fertility clinic at a point in his life when his children from his first marriage are finishing college. His longing for the comfort of his former life is palpable: you feel him wanting not only to sleep with Jane but to just come home where he knows he belongs and stay there, raiding the fridge with his grown kids and drinking wine in the garden.

This is a romance: all weddings and nice hotel rooms and witty friends and homes beautiful and an endless procession of culinary delectations. You know the Adlers belong together in cosy, late night domesticity: but there's a fly in the ointment. It's not the obstacle of Mr. Adler's current marriage which seems like one of the warmer rooms in hell, but rather the fact he's the kind of man who is only truly in love when he's after something he knows he shouldn't be having at the moment. The former Mrs. Adler knows him too well to be so unwise the second time around. Her wisdom tinges the film with sadness, a problem in a vehicle that requires by its very nature for love in all its heady blindness to conquer all.

I'm the target audience for this sort of thing and I enjoyed it. Unlike the lovely pastry Streep's character offers guests throughout the film, the ending was bittersweet and a little flat: not in the best way for such a frothy confection of a film to end in my view, but it's a small quibble with a mostly charming offering.

OPEN SCREEN DOOR THIS SUNDAY DEC 6th At THE KING'S HEAD

OK peeps, this Sunday I am helping host the second OPEN SCREEN DOOR, sponsored by Film Training Manitoba, OnScreen Manitoba and the Winnipeg Film Group.

This month's feature film script is LIPSTICK AND A REVOLVER: THE PEGGY TAYLOR STORY by Winnipeg writer CAM PATTERSON.

This is an epic WWII drama based on the true story of a Canadian woman who was a spy for the Resistance during WWII. Alicia Johnston is going to play Peggy. Come on down and support your local screenwriters!

OPEN SCREEN DOOR

KING'S HEAD PUB

SUNDAY DECEMBER 6th, 2009

1:00 pm

Admission is free ( we take donations!)

East of Berlin

Hannah Moscovitch's much-hyped new play is currently on at MTC Warehouse and last night I ventured out with two hard-core theatre goers to see what the fuss was about. My companions loved it as did much of the audience but I felt rather lukewarm about yet another post-WW II drama.

It's a well-constructed three-hander about the son of a Nazi death camp doctor raised in blissful ignorance in Paraguay and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who grew up in New York. Set in the mid-sixties its a love triangle with a dark twist.

Rudi is fed the poisoned fruit of truth about his past by Hermann with whom he has a complex and sexually charged friendship. Overwhelmed, Rudi flees Paraguay for Germany to study medicine and explore his family's dark roots. Brendan Gall, all twitchy neurosis off the start, speeds through the text at a gallop. It's a credible performance but the break-neck pace left me with little time to empathize with him and left his character with little time to make any discoveries.

Diana Donnelly does some nice work and is deft with the darker comedic aspects of her role, but I didn't really see the emotional evolution of her relationship with Rudi.

The stand-out of the show is Paul Dunn in the role of Rudi's friend Hermann. It's a brilliant performance full of flashes of the emotional underpinnings beneath his character's wit and revelations. I was left feeling far more for Hermann than for the suffering Rudi.

The set by Camillia Koo is a marvel of suggestion, the rows of charred tomes and vaguely threatening objects suggesting a dark and hidden history. The lighting and sound were both used rather in the manner of B movies, telegraphing emotions the audience should have been left to feel from the text and the performances. The score was particularly overwrought.

I don't know if the brusque pacing was the director's decision or if the actors were just worried about holding our attention for 90 uninterrupted minutes. More time for discoveries would have gone a long way towards making this well-worn territory connect better emotionally with the audience.

Ah, Jews and Germans after WWII: I saw the NIGHT PORTER a long time ago which dealt with similar subject matter in a much more gripping and subversive fashion. It's not that you can't write about the past but rather that this play felt like it had been written in the past. Perhaps that's why the mostly grey haired audience connected so well with the material. If the play had been written in the late 60s, it would have been novel but it's fifty years later. I infinitely preferred SCORCHED: a truly brilliant and contemporary take on war and its aftermath.

Moscovitch has some half-dozen commissions from various theatres across the country for new work. I'd like to see what she does with a less shop-worn subject.