THEATRE REVIEW: HOMAGE
18 June'10

‘Homage’ drums up outrage

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Most art forms can trace their origins to some form of religious worship -- and with good reason. For in the creation of art, man seems to move beyond the confines of mere existence and touches something deeper and more enduring. As a consequence, within the confines of a temple, a work of sculpture, a painting, a theatre or dance piece -- even a song -- helped to move a congregation closer to the god or gods they gathered to worship.

But once art moved outside the temple, all that changed. While artists continued -- and continue, still -- to regard their work with an almost religious reverence, the consumers of that art have come, too often, to consider it merely as decoration or entertainment.

Those two views collide in a new work titled HOMAGE, which had its Toronto debut at the Joey & Toby Tanenbaum Opera Centre Thursday, courtesy of the Halifax-based 2bTheatre Company, who produced it, and the folks at Luminato, who are presenting it as part of their ongoing celebration of arts and culture. Written by Anthony Black and directed by Christian Barry, HOMAGE is based on the real-life story of Ontario artist Haydn Davies, a Canadian who made an impressive name for himself in the art world, despite the fact that he came to art late in his life.

Commissioned early in his new career by Sarnia's Lambton College, his first public work, titled Homage -- an oversized tribute to Stonehenge built out of red cedar -- was the work that would bookmark his career. It earned him artistic credibility when he started out and, at least according to this play, all but broke his spirit when it was demolished without consultation after it was deemed structurally unsound 30 years later.

Set in a wooden circle which itself has faint echoes of Stonehenge, HOMAGE the theatre piece is played out simply in the round, using set pieces created by designer Peter Blackie to not only echo Davies' work, but to furnish the world the play inhabits. With Jerry Franken playing a crusty Davies, and Barbara Gordon beautifully cast as his wife Eva, HOMAGE begins with Davies' decision to walk away from a successful career in advertising to pursue art and follows him through the next 30 years. Karen Bassett, Hugo Dann, Gordon Gammie, Ann-Marie Kerr and Hugh Thompson round out a dedicated cast playing an ever-shifting array of largely two-dimensional townsfolk, business men, family members and arts administrators.

But while the purpose of HOMAGE seems to be to create a theatrical biography of the artist and his ill-fated work, more than names have been changed -- and apparently not so much to protect the innocent, but to damn them. In the world according to Black, the ill-fated artwork is conveniently commissioned not by an institution of higher learning, but by a small Ontario town looking for a way to mark the 150th anniversary of its founding. It's a small but pivotal change, for, in a drumming up outrage, few can argue that a group of small-town hicks and hockey fans makes for far more compelling theatrical villainy than the presumably educated administrators of an institution of higher learning.

Finally, when it comes to drumming up outrage over the public's mistreatment of works of art, a Luminato volunteer who not only used her cellphone twice during the opening night performance, but used it as a camera as well, provided a far more visceral argument and outraged far more patrons than this preachy little play ever could.