How would you act if you were harbouring a weapon of mass destruction in your heart? British playwright Martin Crimp’s fascinating adaptation of Sophocles’ The Trachiniae (The Women of Trachis) places violence in the same cavity as love, crushing them together into one flinty, bloody event and asking us to separate the shrapnel from the living flesh.
Amelia (Arsinée Khanjian) can’t sleep, can’t get dressed, and longs for her husband, the General (Daniel Kash). While he is at war in Africa, ostensibly fighting terror at its source, a housekeeper, a physiotherapist, and a beautician keep her company in a vast white home near the airport, providing moral and choral support.
It’s a lonely, eerie place, and director Atom Egoyan has emphasized the alien emptiness of Amelia’s existence. She pines for her husband (Heracles in the original myth) and reminisces about her idyllic past. Amelia’s pulled from her reveries with the introduction of two African refugees, brought to her home by Jonathan (the addictively watchable Nigel Shawn Williams), a bureaucrat who manages to make every violent act sound so much more agreeable than it actually is.
Crimp wrote Cruel and Tender in 2004, right in the thick of the Anglo-American War on Terror. But the play isn’t exclusively about terrorism, mythology, or even love. In Egoyan’s production, it seems to explore the human capacity for pendulous swings between violence and benevolence — swinging so arhythmically that it’s nearly impossible to see cruelty and tenderness as discrete concepts. Instead, there is a sense that the unifying force is the instinct to avoid being made a victim — even if that means becoming a terrorist yourself.
As Amelia, Khanjian stalks the stage in a bathrobe and mules with a confidence that belies her fear and anxiety – revealing in quieter moments a woman who never really grew up, emotionally or otherwise. When she discovers that her husband’s “cleansing” war was founded on his desire for Laela, the elder of the two African children now living in the great white house, she digs up a potion that’s been buried in her perfume drawer since her youth — a potion that she believes will bring the General back to her loving embrace. She is wrong, and the fallout is, naturally, Greco-tragic.
Khanjian is supported by an exceptionally strong cast. Jeff Lillico shakes the sweetness of some recent roles by making Amelia’s son James a slippery, volatile young man, languishing morally somewhere between his two parents. Nigel Shawn Williams takes immense pleasure in the demonic Jonathan, his darkly comic sensibility jiving perfectly with Egoyan’s whimsical directorial choices.
If the staging seems determinedly avant-garde, Egoyan also invests each piece of stage business with the same sense of humour that Williams invokes so well. Examples of this include an enormous stage, a third of which plunges into darkness; a chandelier that spends much of the production suspended a few feet above the ground and half-lit; and best of all, an eccentric choice to have the actors sing the Billie Holiday song “My Man” karaoke-style, to one another, producing a sort of sedative effect for everyone onstage.
From the looks of it, Egoyan seems to have enjoyed being a little extreme, arguably introducing visual elements — like the final sequence involving a live video feed — that overwhelm Crimp’s challenging, lyrical text.
Still, it is better to see too much imagination and ambition in one production, especially in a play that thrives on its own permutations the way that Cruel and Tender does.
CRUEL AND TENDER
By Martin Crimp; directed by Atom Egoyan; starring Arsinée Khanjian; set and costume design by Debra Hanson; lighting design by Michal Walton; sound design by John Gzowski. At the Bluma Appel Theatre, 27 Front St. E. Through February 18. Running time: 90 minutes. Tickets and info: canadianstage.com; 416.368.3110.
Naomi Skwarna is Toronto Standard’s theatre critic. Follow her on Twitter at @awomanskwarned.
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