The Pumphouse Theatre
The Blue Room - Round Robin Copulation.
After an absence of twenty years in Calgary, I finally visited the Pumphouse Theatre this week, to see the Sage Theatre production of The Blue Room, in the Joyce Doolittle Theatre.
Little has changed. There are two theatres in the Pumphouse. The Doolittle is the smallest of the two, seating around 80 people. It's intimate, cosy, and ideal for plays that require stage intimacy and close connection with the audience. This particular theatre brought back sweet memories of a forgotten past in apartheid South Africa in the mid seventies. The Space Theatre in Cape Town, which spawned some of the finest acting talent in Southern Africa. A community activist theatre, providing a defiant non-racial theatre venue, to a racially divided society and fragmented country. I remember the tiny entry lobby, the cramped facilities, and the uncomfortable seating...very similar to the Doolittle. Never complaining in those days about the cramped conditions, why should I do so now?
The Pumphouse provides valuable facilities to the various arts groups in Calgary and needs to be fully supported.
The Blue Room is a play by David Hare, adapted from a Schnitzler drama written around 1900. The original play was too sexually explicit to be performed at the time and was intended to be read by friends. The format of the play is unusual, in that it is daisy chain, or rather Round Robin arrangement, of sexual encounters, between ten characters, played by two actors. A copulates with B, B copulates with C, etc, in all sorts of places and in all sorts of positions, but never for very long, until the circle closes.
This is not an easy play to direct, nor is it an easy play for the actors to exhibit their sexual and erotic experiences in their performances. The difficult aspect in this play is the line between gratuitous nudity and titillating sex, and indecent pornographic exposure.
Having seen two productions of this play in London and in Cape Town, I was curious to see how the Calgary production one was going to be directed and how well the chemistry and coital copulations between the two actors would be handled.
Personally I don't believe that this is a great play. On a number of levels, the play is thought provoking and entertaining, but never profound. The play is fundamentally about dialoque. Words, give all the meaning and significance to the characters and the performances. Not their actions. And that`s where I feel that the play fails. None of the productions I`ve have seen, have managed to boldly cross the boundary of words. So we have superb and accomplished acting performances, using the right voice, the right gestures, the right words. They slip comfortably into their characters, their personalities and their accents, all in record time, like their copulations. But something is always missing! The irony, the mood, the sexual tension, the ephemeral sparks, the overheated flames are simply not there. The play simply fails to live up to its risqué reputation, as the actors simply cannot, or will not, cross the very boundaries that are needed to make this a riveting performance.
The Calgary Herald and Sun gave this performance rave reviews. I am less enthusiastic about raving about the performances. I believe that the two actors, Vanessa Holmes and Chad Nobert who played all the characters, are accomplished and excellent actors with huge potential, who could have pulled it off. But they held back under Reay`s direction, which appears to have been a little too taut and subtle. Maybe the Director should have left it to the two actors to find that fine balance of sexual tension and mood, instead of the pathetically mechanical, cynical, boring outcomes.
While recognising the distraction of nudity on stage, the decision to play the roles as `sexy` and scantily clad, (whatever that means) simply made little sense to me. I found the single male nude scene most distracting and somewhat gratuitous in the circumstances, when all the other non tittillating character copulation scenes could have accompanied the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Copulation and decadent sexual encounters are not sexy. It`s cold, brutish, it`s empty, its futile, and it cannot be portrayed as if it is, or was, sexy! It`s neither glamorous or pleasurable. The actors should have recognised this, if they had any real life experience!
The set was beautifully designed and all credit to Gunvordahl. The music was fabulous and all credit to McGuigan.
A young 30 something blonde, leaving the theatre in front of me, muttered to her friend....`what a big yawn! And then commenced to read her emails on her mobile. I did not share her view about it being boring. But I was disappointed too (once again?) ...as sex and meaningful relationships are always an illusion! read more
