THEATRE REVIEW: THE ALEPH
18 MAY/11

JOHN COULBOURN,
QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5


TORONTO - Simply stated, they have unravelled the threads of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, THE ALEPH, and rewoven them into a new work for the stage. And watching the result, a stage play of the same name, is an experience not unlike an encounter with an old flame who is suddenly sporting a new look — that strange mixture of the familiar and the alien that leaves one torn between nostalgia for the old and interest in the new, even while we embrace the familiar in a whole new light.

It’s the handiwork of three of Toronto’s most respected theatre artists — actor Diego Matamoros, director Daniel Brooks and designer Michael Levine — and it opened at the Young Centre Tuesday night under the Soulpepper imprimatur.

For the uninitiated, an aleph, in Borges’ world, is something far more than merely the first letter of the Hebrew, Arabic, Phoenician and Syriac alphabet or the number 1 in Hebrew, or even the symbol that folklore insists must be drawn on the forehead of a Golem to bring it to life. In Borges’ world, it is also a mysterious point in space that contains all other points — a portal through which everything (and everybody) in the entire universe can be seen, from every conceivable angle, from the very beginning of time.

In Borges’ short story, his narrator, mourning the death of a woman he loved, is introduced to a functioning aleph, courtesy of a poet with whom he has become acquainted through the death of his beloved. What he sees amazes him, but also brings about a youthful act of petty and casual cruelty that seems to haunt him.

In this reworking of the tale, Matamoros himself — or at least a very believable facsimile — is transformed into the story’s narrator, a 50-ish actor who recalls, as a young man just out of theatre school, visiting his diplomat father, then cutting a romantic swath through Buenos Aires. There, the young man falls in with a group of cousins and friends, and is particularly attracted to one young woman whose engagement to his cousin doesn’t seem to stand in the way of a reciprocal attraction. That attraction is barely explored however, before the young man finds himself en route to Canada, and by the time he returns to Argentina, the young woman is dead.

To assuage his grief, the young Matamoros falls in with the woman’s cousin, a theatre artist who seems perpetually locked in a fruitless  creative process. And, you guessed it: The cousin just happens to have an aleph in his basement.

It is a story that works on many levels, the aleph serving as a metaphor for everything from the creative process, youth and even theatre itself, and under Brooks’ direction, Matamoros gives a masterful performance, impressive in its carefully cultivated simplicity.

That simplicity permeates virtually every second of this show, as Brooks measures out the carefully considered contributions of his design team — set and costumes by Levine, lighting by Kevin Lamotte and sound by Jean-Sébastien Côté — with a wise but frugal hand, creating a theatricality that is little short of stunning. This is a world where a simple revolution of an office chair can carry Matamoros from Argentina to Toronto and back again and the shifting of a single wall can make an entire world move on it axis.

It’s a production that may not allow us to glimpse all points through a single point, but it is powerful enough at last to make us believe that such a point exists and that we might once have glimpsed it from afar.