THEATRE REVIEW:
CRUEL AND TENDER

JOHN COULBOURN,
QMI Agency
27 JAN 2012
R: 3/5

Pictured: Thomas Hauff, Arsinée Khanjian

While we all know that war — even a just war — is pure hell, we are less certain on whether those who make war are the sinners who have been consigned there or the devils who run the place.

In his modern day revisiting of Sophocles' Trachiniae, British playwright Martin Crimp echoes the Greek master's suggestion that those who make war are, in fact, a strange sort of amalgam of both, whether the war in question is conducted on an international level between political enemies or one waged on a more intimate, domestic front, between a husband and wife. His 2004 play, titled CRUEL AND TENDER, opened at the Bluma Appel Thursday as a production of Canadian Stage.

Where Sophocles concentrated his focus on the heroic Hercules, and his wars with the nation of Euboea and with his wife Deianeira, Crimp opts for a more modern view, setting his war somewhere in Africa, where The General (played by Daniel Kash) has gone to root out terrorism by becoming a terrorist in his own right. Meanwhile, his wife Amelia (played by Arsinée Khanjian), with no kindling from her husband, has grown weary of keeping the home fires burning, and sends their son, James (Jeff Lillico) off to the front to do a bit of paternal recognizance. James has no sooner departed, however, than she receives a strange shipment from The General.

Mixed in with the more conventional swag that comprises the spoils of modern war is the lovely young Laela (Abena Malika) — a simple refugee who, with her brother, was rescued from the carnage by her husband, Amelia is assured. But the loving wife becomes suspicious and with her suspicions confirmed, she resorts to dark arts to secure her husband's affections — with tragic results for all.

Directed by Atom Egoyan, the work is ostensibly set in a safe house in which Amelia is held, presumably to protect her from the her husband's bad press while he wages his ongoing war on terror — a locale set designer Debra Hanson, (in collaboration with assistant Michael Gianfrancesco) imbues with all the intimacy of an operating theatre, its cavernous expanses lit by the too-often flickering lighting of Michael Walton.

And while Nigel Shawn Williams, Thomas Hauff, Cara Ricketts, Brenda Robins, André Sills and Sarah Wilson all make strong contributions in supporting roles, they simply can't cut through what proves to be CRUEL AND TENDER's major flaw. For, while it initially proves easy to embrace Egoyan's hugely operatic take on Crimp's polemic, it finally only serves to underline that his leading lady can't carry this particular tune.

Seemingly fascinated with a newly-discovered gift of wrist and finger articulation, Khanjian follows her over-active digits around the stage, more concerned with diction than with such minor considerations as the emotional arc of her character. Where Crimp's script asks that we witness Amelia's descent from complacent security to paralyzing insecurity, Khanjian refuses to share the ride, oblivious, it seems, to the fact that it is what her audience is feeling and not what she feels that will drive the show.

Kash, for his part, is riveting when he finally appears, although he seems to be in mighty fine shape for the shape he is supposedly in, turning in a hugely athletic performance as a dying man. As the couple's son, Lillico too is superbly assured. But, finally, Crimp's play and Egoyan's production, which runs through Feb. 18, proves to be a lot more cruel than tender, leaving the troubling impression that war isn't so much hell as Bedlam.