THEATRE REVIEW: SOULSEEK
8 Oct'10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 1.5 out of 5

The increasingly brazen intrusions of television cameras notwithstanding, grief remains a very private affair in large swaths of our population, steeped as we are, in a tradition of Calvinism. But the tepid response to BirdLand Theatre’s world premiere of SOULSEEK — a highly personal examination of one woman’s mourning at the death of her partner — has more to do with an aversion to bad theatre than any deep thread of lingering Scottish stoicism that might run through the fabric of our multi-cultural world. SOULSEEK opened Thursday at the Walmer Centre.

Written by playwright Ognen Georgievski — a man whom, one suspects, was either hugely impressed by the private life of his leading lady or more likely suborned to serve as her amanuensis — it is the story of Vita (BirdLand’s artistic producer Zorana Kydd), a woman so overcome with grief at the death of her husband that she attempts suicide. Rather than waking up dead, however, she wakes up in a coma, in hell or purgatory or Hades or maybe even Rob Ford’s Toronto, because, as her guide Morpheus (played at top volume by Andre Sills) explains, there is no art here, wherever here might be.

Instead, there is reality television (which is hardly surprising in hell, after all) and Vita finds herself hosting a show called SoulSeek as she struggles to reconnect with her dead husband, played by David Ferry, who along with Janet Porter, spends a lot of time doing the video equivalent of phoning it in.

When she’s not hosting her show, Vita is searching high and low (although mostly low) for comfort and when all else fails, she asks to have all memories of her husband erased, only to discover that their connection is too strong. Without dwelling on them, many of the details of Vita’s life seem to have been ripped from the headlines of Kydd’s future autobiography and, while Kydd’s commitment and sincerity are to be applauded, sadly, her acting ability is not likely to ever be. Let’s simply say she is hellishly bad, and draw the curtain on further discussion.

In an attempt to mask his leading lady’s (and his new wife’s) shortcomings, director Stefan Dzeparoski does his level best to distract us with an array of the latest in digital technology that only serves, in the end, to highlight everything that is wrong with this project.

There are, of course, a lot of good people involved here — Ferry, Sills and Porter have all done impressive work elsewhere as have designers Camellia Koo, Gareth Crew and Richard Feren — but SOULSEEK never rises above the level of a really bad vanity piece, despite their best efforts. Worse, it doesn’t bring its audience any closer to an understanding of Vita’s grief, although one suspects, most of the audience were unspeakably sad by the end of the show.

Waste will do that.