THEATRE REVIEW:
HIS GREATNESS
22 SEPT/11

JOHN COULBOURN,
QMI Agency
R: 4.5/5

TORONTO - With all due respect to Shakespeare and his theories on how people arrive at greatness, there seems to come a point in every great life when how one arrived becomes secondary to how one leaves — and what they leave behind. Which leads us rather smoothly to HIS GREATNESS — a not-so-new work by Daniel MacIvor that’s finally arrived on a Toronto stage, thanks to a promising new production company.

HIS GREATNESS opened in the Factory Studio Wednesday under the aegis of the newly minted independent Artist’s Repertory Theatre — and one only has to look at the impressive set created for the work by designer Kimberly Purtell to know iART means business. And happily, the commitment to excellence doesn’t stop there.

Purtell’s set evokes an upscale Vancouver hotel room, circa 1980, temporary home to the great Tennessee Williams, who’s come to town for opening night of a local production of his now all-but-forgotten Red Devil Battery Sign. While the visit and the production are both a matter of history, the rest of this story is fiction, labeled by MacIvor as “a potentially true story about the playwright Tennessee Williams.” It is the set on the day of the opening and the day following, and Williams, well past the zenith of his career, is in pretty rough shape from the get-go, thanks to a boozy evening the night before, during which he seems to have offended pretty well everyone involved with the production.

Played with real relish by Richard Donat, the "Playwright" is a quivering mass of insecurity, clinging to the wreckage of his reputation as he floats on a sea of booze and self-indulgence wondering what hit him and where the magic has gone. Meanwhile, the “Assistant” — a one-time-lover turned nursemaid, played with characteristic nuance and polish by MacIvor himself — does his level best to throw the floundering writer a life-line, cleaning up the playwright’s messes and trying to maintain order in the increasing chaos that has become William’s life.

It is the Assistant, in fact, who, in an attempt to keep the Playwright’s demons at bay and thereby keep him on a leash of respectability, introduces the “Young Man” to the mix, a born-in-Newfoundland, reared-in-desperation rent boy played by Greg Gale. While MacIvor’s script suggests the Young Man sees his best-before date relentlessly bearing down on him, both Gale and director Edward Roy have skated over that, allowing the character’s theatrical innocence to spill over into his work-a-day world and subtly weakening the superb structure of a play that is, in fact, about three people, all who fear the best is behind them. Fortunately, the other two performers and the play itself are all strong enough to weather such minor oversights — and together MacIvor and Donat create a portrait of function-within-dysfunction that is deeply touching, richly informed with empathy and, one suspects, experience.

While there is great tragedy in the obvious and almost willful decline of a great talent who yearns to be caught once again in the pull of a creative river he himself has polluted beyond redemption, MacIvor the writer finds an equal measure of humour, balancing it all with an impressive level of humanity and compassion. And with a certain knowledge that the fruits of true greatness can never be diminished by how one arrives at greatness, or how they leave.