THEATRE REVIEW: HALLAJ
23 NOV/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
R: 3.5/5

Pictured: Peter Farbridge

TORONTO - Based on religious iconography, martyrdom is a subject more suitable to the painter’s brush and the sculptor’s chisel than to the playwright’s pen. And even on the rare occasions that a playwright picks up his pen to paint a theatrical portrait of a martyr — Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan comes immediately to mind — success seems predicated more on establishing the subject’s humanity than in revealing the convictions that drives him or her.

So, full credit then, to Modern Times Stage Company’s Peter Farbridge and Soheil Parsa for putting a work like HALLAJ on the stage, exploring as it does the life and, equally important, the death of Mansur al-Hallaj.

For the uninitiated, Hallaj was a ninth-century Sufi poet and religious mystic whose quest for God led him into a direct conflict with the clerics and the rulers of his time — a conflict that ended with a particularly grisly execution in old Baghdad. HALLAJ opened Tuesday on the mainstage of Buddies in Bad Times in a Modern Times’ Production, where it will run through Dec. 4.

We meet the title character, played by Farbridge, on the eve of his execution. As the night wears on, he is visited not only by his enemies, represented by Nasr (John Ng), the chief of police who has long plotted against the poet, but by his friends and sometime-supporters as well, like his one-time teacher and now father-in-law, Junayd (Steven Bush), who has played a major role in Hallaj’s religious evolution.

But mostly, Hallaj is visited by his memories — memories that trace not only his religious voyage, but more personal memories as well, like his courtship of Jamil (Beatriz Pizano), the loving woman who would first become his wife and then the mother of his son. Those two worlds collide, however, when Junayd informs Hallaj that Jamil and the couple’s son are currently being held in the same prison and are slated to be executed before his very eyes — the last thing he will see before his own execution sends him to meet his god. As Hallaj wrestles with his conscience and his convictions, he is joined by a fellow convict (Stewart Arnott) who becomes the audience’s eyes and ears as the story marches to its inexorable, bloody and ultimately triumphant conclusion.

Working under Parsa’s direction, the cast is rounded out by Costa Tovarnisky, Carlos González-Vio and Bahareh Yaraghi, the latter two turning in particularly impressive performances in small but pivotal roles.

And as he has done in productions that range from Hamlet to Aurash, Parsa once again blends Persian, Asian and contemporary theatrical influences in a spare staging, using Trevor Schwellnus’ spare set, David DeGrow’s precise lighting and Thomas Ryder Payne’s often subtle sound palette to add emotional intensity to performances that are rarely anything less than fully and deeply committed.

But while HALLAJ certainly does a fine job of exploring the depth of its subject’s religious convictions, establishing his bona fides as a holy man beyond even a shadow of a doubt, it is less successful in bringing full dimension to his humanity.

A too-brief, playful scene between Farbridge and Pizano exists, tragically, not to create a sense of human intimacy but merely as a launching point for further religious exploration, missing what proves to be the one chance to allow an audience to identify with him on the most basic human level. Because, finally, that is the only level from which his tragedy can be fully appreciated on a theatrical level.