THEATRE REVIEW: BROTHEL #9
4 MAR/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

TORONTO - One never merely watches good theatre. Because when you think about it, good theatre engages all five senses. We see it and hear it, and while we may not touch it, it certainly touches us. As for smell and taste, anyone who caught the late Peter Donaldson doing a hangover in A LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT or Sandra Shamas' describing the virtues of pumpkin pie fudge a few shows back knows what it's like to smell and taste theatre.

And the omens are good for a full sensory experience when we enter the Factory Theatre for Thursday's opening night performance of BROTHEL #9, the latest -- and certainly the most ambitious -- play from rising star Anusree Roy, who's made a big splash on the playwrighting front of late. In fact, thanks the artistry of designer Shawn Kerwin, we are dropped immediately into the squalid slums of Calcutta, specifically a dank courtyard at the centre of a warren of alleys and hallways -- a place where life thrives, even though the sun rarely penetrates the exotic miasma moodily rendered by lighting designer Bonnie Beecher.

It is, it develops, the courtyard of the establishment of title, a play-for-pay emporium of the slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am variety run by the amoral Birbal, played by Ash Knight, and ruled over by the slatternly Jamuna, played by Roy herself. Introduced to the flesh trade by Birbai's late father, the aging Jamuna now knows all the tricks of her trade -- and it falls to her to teach young Rekha (Pamela Sinha) the ropes, when the beautiful young country girl arrives under the delusion that she is about to begin employment at a factory where they make something other than whoopee.

Jamuna, of course, quickly disabuses the new arrival, and with the enthusiastic help of the corrupt Salaudin (Sanjay Talwar), introduces the reluctant young girl to her new duties. That Salaudin happens to be a married man and a cop -- not to mention, a member of completely different religious faith -- presumably makes her offstage violation all the more horrific.

But involving Salaudin, with whom she has shared a longtime business/personal relationship, proves to be the aging Jamuna's undoing, for Salaudin is soon paying regular visits to the young interloper and ignoring the fading charms of his one-time paramour and confidant in the process. It is a transfer of affections that will break both women's hearts.

In bringing Brothel #9 to the stage, director Nigel Shawn Williams makes some good moves, capturing a cultural ethos that certainly feels authentic. But in the end, it adds up to not much, thanks to his failure on a very basic level. For while his audience may indeed be engaged on all five sensory levels, one of them -- hearing -- proves to be a major stumbling block. It's not that the work is inaudible -- in fact, one occasionally wishes Williams would tone things down a bit -- but rather, it is too often incomprehensible, at least for ears untuned to the thick sub-continental patois that marks both Knight's and Roy's performances.

If Roy wants to tell stories of her homeland to an audience exclusively of her homeland, then she's certainly on the right track. If however, she hopes to tell those stories to a broader audience clearly hungering for them, she needs a compromise that preserves the verbal flavour of her homeland while still rendering speech comprehensible to an untrained ear. This might be a great play -- my guess is that it is merely on the plus side of adequate -- but in the end, that can only be determined if and when all five senses can be fully engaged.