THEATRE REVIEW: LENIN'S EMBALMERS
4 Nov'10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 2 out of 5

About half an hour into Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company's rather lifeless production of LENIN'S EMBALMERS, it just might cross your mind that, if embalming were indeed a spectator sport, then surely, by now, it would have been incorporated into the Olympics. But even the IOC has its limits, it seems, and thankfully, they drew the line at curling.

Which leaves it to playwright Vern Thiessen to try to make the whole process of preserving the mortal remains of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, revered icon of Russia's communist revolution, into compelling theatre, if not a riveting spectator sport. And while Thiessen doesn't exactly come up aces, his script, one suspects, has a lot more going for it than the production of it that opened onstage at Al Green Theatre of the Miles Nadal JCC earlier this week, in a co-production with Winnipeg Jewish Theatre.

For while Thiessen has mixed comedy and drama to cook up a Molotov cocktail of tension, laughter and suspense, director Geoffrey Brumlik does his level best at every turn to defuse the playwright's efforts, watering things down with so much miscasting and misdirection that he turns it all into a theatrical bomb, which is not the same thing at all.

It begins with the death of Lenin, played by Harry Nelken as a sort of wannabe stand-up comic who, just before his death, has told his audience that he wants no big fuss made of his passing, no reverence shown his mortal remains. Those wishes, of course, mean nothing to Joseph Stalin, played here by David Fox, who is determined, despite Lenin's wishes, to preserve those remains for posterity and to further his own ambitions.

To that end, he recruits (read: shanghais) two Russian scientists to do what has to be done, even though it has never been done before, namely to preserve human remains in such a way that they never ever show signs of putrefaction or decay. Aside from that fact that they are both Jewish, these two scientists have very little in common. Vladimir Vorobyov (played by Hardee T. Lineham) is already a bit of a success -- albeit in a big fish in a small pond sort of way -- but his provincial status ensures that no one examines him closely enough to spot the colour of his Czarist roots. Meanwhile, Boris Zbarsky (played by Martin Julien) finds his career languishing, due perhaps to his support of Stalin's principal rival Trotsky (played by Arne MacPherson) and welcomes the opportunity to redeem himself But in a world that clings to anti-Semitism, despite Lenin's rejection of it, it is obvious these two are doomed despite their successes.

Thiessen's starting points can be traced to a book of the same name, written by Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson, and to Ben Lewis' Hammer & Tickle: A History of Communism Told through Communist Jokes. And despite the obvious gulf between the two, he manages to fuse them with stitches of the blackest humour. But black humour is clearly not director Brumlik's oeuvre, and rather than playing things with a degree of subtlety the work demands he turns things into an episode of the Three Stooges -- or two Stooges and a Corpse, if you will.

While Julien and Lineham suffer under his limited vision, it is the supporting cast -- James Durham, Steven Ratzlaff and Janine Theriault join MacPherson and Nelken -- that really takes a beating in this production, leaving an obviously miscast Fox to rise above that miscasting to turn in the kind of work this production demands if it is ever going to succeed.

In the end, LENIN'S EMBALMERS may save the body, but they can't, under this director, hide the stink.