Theatre North West always produces high-caliber material, but there is a scale of TNW's own. The last play generated the wrong kind of buzz, indicating audiences found it among the worst done by the local pro theatre company. Still a top-drawer production, but somewhere near the bottom of the drawer.
Their latest play that opened this week will flip that conversation 180 degrees.
The Girl In The Goldfish Bowl may well be one of the Top 10 plays TNW has produced in its history, and anyone who regularly buys tickets might argue it is the best drama done in Prince George in a decade or more. Even on the TNW scale, Goldfish is a triumph.
The reasons start to pile up as soon as you walk into the room to take your seats. The set is on display before the action begins, a surrealist waterscape with a living-room in the middle. (Designer Hans Saefkow scores again for TNW.) You are shown immediately that you and the cast are submerged, and perhaps you are floundering yourself.
It takes little time to establish that these characters are flailing for their domestic lives. Mother, father, daughter, tenant, and stranger all take their turns revealing the different phases of dysfunction in modern society. How is it all to fit under one roof?
It is a script that offers no train wrecks but constantly hurtles these people - and the audience with them - along winding tracks with the sound of other locomotives whistling all around. Collisions felt constantly imminent.
Every moving part of this play was well oiled and calibrated. The acting part of the experience was a clinic in how human beings are so gifted at moulding themselves into someone else in order to make art. None stood out because they all stood out. Had any one of these five come up short, it would have glared like a chip out of a mirror.
Natasha Greenblatt is who we meet first, and what a remarkable casting coup she was, able to transform with little more than the shake of her hair from a precocious child into a confident young woman. Most of that work is done in the form of the child, Iris, a name precisely chosen by the playwright for symbolic reasons. Iris is the one who sees for us all how difficult the world of family and the world at large can be to understand, through the distorted lens of a kid trying to make sense of it all. If Greenblatt ever blinked in her depiction of Iris, we in the audience would recoil from that bit of dust.
David Leyshon is becoming well known to local audiences, having played prominent roles in Art at the beginning of this season and he was the title character in Billy Bishop Goes To War last season. There's a reason he keeps getting these parts. He played Hamlet at the Stratford Festival, for goodness sakes, so clearly he can drink the strongest scripts without cream and sugar. He has a David Schwimmer ability to generate affable awkwardness but also a Richard Dreyfuss ability to portray gutsy human grit. Leyshon gave what was needed to make us all feel alright, somehow, with his daughter Iris bringing home a wet stranger now wearing his bathrobe. He also gave us what we needed to know he was truly disconnected in his marriage but didn't want the last word of the relationship to be "goodbye."
That enigmatic wet stranger is portrayed by Haig Sutherland, an actor slickly adept at stoic curiousity. I'd seen this from him before on television. On an episode of the TV comedy Psyche he also played a character with a maniacal blankness, and here the blankness was always in motion. Was he crazy? Was he stupid? Sinister? Innocent? He could have been an alien from outer space, for all we knew, and Sutherland's sensitive intelligence allowed all the possibilities to remain alive in our minds. We rooted for him; we were afraid of him. Sutherland toned him to perfection.
Lauren Brotman showed us just how deep our local talent pool is, with this sharp portrayal of Iris's mother. Tiny tilts of her head, the flick of her gaze, the adjusting of a foot can drive home her character's message as much as any lines of dialogue, in Brotman's performance. These characters are supposed to be people, we have to believe in this family as a real household, and Brotman delivers a woman on the brink of falling into domestic duties one way or out the door to a new life the other. Her terror at either choice was palpable, as was the conflicted love clearly felt for her by Leyshon's husband and Iris's daughter.
The other presence is in this house is the tenant Ms. Rose, who promiscuously tries to fill some undescribed but understood hole in her life with futile intoxicants. She was comic relief with the foundations exposed - the foundation of all humour being pain. You can tell a terrific actor by their ability to convincingly play drunkenness, and Martha Irving is a strong tonic for this befuddled but steely character, be the moment lewd or shrewd.
The temperament of the play could have taken any number of different paths. The full power of its success comes from the choices made by guest director Daryl Cloran. TNW brought him in from the Western Canada Theatre Company in Kamloops, one of the nation's most respected small-city dramatic groups. It's his first time working in Prince George and I'm willing to bet conversations are already underway for a return engagement.
Cloran had to work with what TNW artistic director Jack Grinhaus gave him, though, and it was a rich chest of assets for this play. The casting was, as mentioned, nearly pristine. And the script was stellar. Morris Panych won the Governor General's Award for this play in 2004. It is set in the 1960s in the throes of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Forget about what's going on in this Canadian living room. Forget these characters have names and supposedly an address. This play is about Western culture itself. Like few other plays, its allegories leap off the page, jump from the stage into the laps of the audience. This is a demonstration of how a pivotal generation that grew in the rocky soil of Second World War PTSD and Cold War insanity had an emotional maturity higher than its parents, but for all the wrong reasons. The older generation tried frantically to pretend the old ways were still the solid foundation of society while a younger generation, even as children, understood those ways never were anything more than an overdrawn cultural bank account they were having to pay for. The institutions of politics, religion, picket-fence family were all just artifice and it brought the world to the brink of global death with the push of a few buttons.
And it was television that broke the ice jam. A television is not part of this family's household possessions, but a big, empty fishbowl is. The script bears out the deliberation of this. When TV broadcast war itself, brought the whole world into the common household, and the common household out to the world, that is when Western culture's childhood innocence came to an end. The curtain was pulled back to expose the Wizard of Oz, and he was just a regular person. The walls of the TV set were now bigger than the walls of the church, the walls of the White House, the walls of school. And the walls of families all over Canada, America, England, etc. all got blown apart - for the worse and for the better.
It was the moment when the lightbulb of realization went off that the asylum was crazier than the lunatic. Straight lines and squares were replaced by triangles and arcs, but as every architect will tell you, those are ultimately the strongest geometric shapes of all. You can build a better world, a better goldfish bowl, from those shapes.
You can also build a first-rate play. The Girl In The Goldfish Bowl is on now at TNW until April 27.
