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TORONTO - In The Oxford Roof Climber's Rebellion, playwright Stephen Massicotte combines historical fact and a measure of his own fiction to powerful effect.
He illuminates the lives of two of England's most famous "walking wounded" in the wake of World War I (too often mistakenly referred to as The War To End All Wars) and spins out a cracking good yarn in the process.
Rebellion opened Tuesday on the Tarragon Theatre mainstage, under the direction of artistic director Richard Rose in a co-production with Ottawa's Great Canadian Theatre Company.
Set in the ivy-covered halls of Oxford, circa 1920, the play re-imagines the friendship that sprung up there between two veterans of a war then only recently ended -- the poet Robert Graves, played by Jonathan Crombie, and adventurer T.E. Lawrence (Tom Rooney), even then more broadly known by the more swash-buckling sobriquet, Lawrence of Arabia.
While Graves is the most scarred from the recent hostilities -- the wounds, both physical and mental, he sustained at the Somme would haunt him throughout his long life -- Lawrence too has been deeply marked by his experiences marshalling the Arab tribesmen to overthrow their Turkish masters.
The perfidy of the British (personified here by Lord Curzon, British Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of Oxford University) in allowing a developing thirst for oil to outweigh the Arabs' wish for an independent state has driven Lawrence into a major funk.
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So instead of working on the manuscript that would become The Seven Pillars Of Wisdom, he instead enlists the idealistic and fresh-faced Graves and his own batman (Paul Rainville) as accomplices in a series of seemingly light-hearted pranks, designed to tweak the dignity of the pompous Curzon, played by Victor Ertmanis.
Slowly, however, the relationship between poet and adventurer takes on an intensity that is disturbing, as the aristocratic Lawrence becomes more erratic and Graves spends less and less time with his wife (played by Michelle Giroux) and family.
Woven through the ebb and flow of their friendship, however, are threads of distrust that still cloak our world.
While Lawrence relives his childhood, scrabbling over the roofs of Oxford with his new found friend, he is also covertly helping to sow the seeds that will grow into present-day Iraq, unwittingly rendering Operation Enduring Freedom the latest battle of World War I.
Playing on Charlotte Dean's magic cupboard of a set, Rose draws fine performances from his leading players -- particularly from the too-often undervalued Rooney, who turns in yet another remarkable performance, utterly devoid of visible acting.
For his part, Crombie counters Rooney's flawless performance with a powerful mix of tragic innocence and boyish insouciance that is equally impressive.
In supporting roles, Ertamis and Rainville turn in strong performances but Giroux imbues her character with everything but depth.
That's problematic, of course, but it diminishes only slightly a lovely little play that manages to say a whole lot about friendship, responsibility, innocence and the utter futility of war -- and all that in only 90 minutes.