TORONTO - In a world where no one would even think of fielding a hockey team that couldn't skate, it's tough to imagine a theatre company that would attempt to stage a deconstructed version of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest without first being able to stage the classic comedy as it was written.
Tough to imagine -- but not impossible, thanks to the good folks at Soulpepper.
To refresh your memory: In 2006, Soulpepper tackled Wilde's classic comedy in a lacklustre production helmed by Ben Barnes -- a production plagued not only by casting and set problems but by a fundamental lack of appreciation of the source material and how it should be used.
All of which might have given them pause when they considered producing Tom Stoppard's Travesties -- but if it did, it wasn't pause enough.
Travesties -- Stoppard's topsy-turvey deconstruction of Wilde's comedy -- opened earlier this week at the Young Centre.
In Travesties, Stoppard treats Earnest as a memory play, setting it in the addled recollections of an aging British civil servant who once performed one of the leading roles in an amateur production of the play.
As an historical note, it is a production that actually took place in Zurich during World War I, staged as a theatrical diversion by an Irish writer and ex-pat named of James Joyce of Ulysses fame.
And history also tells us that British diplomat Henry Carr was in that production, having been posted to in Zurich after being wounded in battle.
Now in his dotage, Carr (played by Diego Matamoros in a yet another pique of technical earnestness) finds his recollections of Joyce (David Storch) and his production of Earnest all wrapped up with memories, either real or imagined, of early Dada-ist poet Tristan Tzara (Jordan Pettle) and one Vladamir Ilyich Ulyanov (Oliver Dennis) before he made a name for himself as a fellow named Lenin, both of whom happened to be in Zurich at this same time.
Maggie Huculak is along for the ride as Mrs. Ulyanov, while Kevin Bundy, Krystin Pellerin and Sarah Wilson join the fray in supporting roles.
And while Stoppard appears to have been motivated at least in part by a desire to match wits with Wilde in the word-play department, he also scores telling comment on the role of art in revolution and the role of revolution in art, underlining at the same time, the minimal role the common man plays in either.
Where Stoppard takes historical proximity in time and place and spins it into a theatrical confection, Soulpepper trips up on the same elements.
Bernard Shaw may have been writing comedy at about the same time as Wilde, but assuming that director Joseph Ziegler, a masterful interpreter of the Shavian canon, can do the same for Wilde is a mistake.
In the worlds of wordplay and the tradition of music hall, Wilde may be a gazelle to Shaw's pachyderm but Ziegler nonetheless directs Wilde's work as if it were Shaw's.
In the process, he transforms the champagne of Stoppard's homage to Wilde into plain old seltzer, accepting lines that are just tossed aside by his cast rather than thrown away with wit and style.
In the face of Matamoros' oddly joyless technicality, Storch retreats so deeply into mannerisms once again that he's all but paralyzed, save in a soaring demonstration of sleight of hand that ends the first act.
And while Pettle seems to have found the key to the comedy, he gets scant help from even Dennis and Huculak, both excellent in roles all but disappeared in Stoppard's re-write of his own script.
Not surprisingly, this isn't so much Earnest deconstructed in the end as Earnest underwhelmed.
More Theatre Reviews
