THEATRE REVIEW:
MY GRANNY THE GOLDFISH

JOHN COULBOURN,
Special to TorSun
26 MAR 2012
R: 2.5/5

Pictured: Kawa Ada, Yolande Bavan

TORONTO - If dysfunctional families didn’t exist, theatre would have had to invent them. From the travails of the House of Atreus, first family of ancient Greek tragedy, through to the brawling Weston clan at the heart of Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, familial dysfunction has been a theatrical mainstay for millennia.

So, at least in that respect, novelist Anosh Irani isn’t exactly sailing into uncharted waters when he boldly sets sail on the high comic seas of family drama in a play titled MY GRANNY THE GOLDFISH, which opened Friday on the Factory Theatre mainstage. But, it is, it turns out, a voyage fraught with peril nonetheless. In a play that splits its time between a hospital room in Vancouver and an apartment in Bombay (or Mumbai, as it is now known), Irani strives to transform the dross of simmering, booze-addled family resentment into comedic gold.

The hospital room, it develops, is the temporary home of Nico (played by Kawa Ada), a young man born in Bombay who has fled to Canada to study high finance and instead finds himself in the hospital, awaiting biopsy results from a tumour he has only recently had surgically removed. His self-diagnosed hypochondriacal reflections, however, are interrupted by the arrival of his beloved maternal Granny (gamely, if archly, played by Yolande Bavan), who has travelled from Mumbai to ensure all is well with the ailing youth. But, as the title implies, this is not your milk ’n’ cookies Granny, but rather one who eschews a view of the world through rose-coloured glasses in favour of the one through glasses of well-aged scotch. By her own confession, Granny drinks like a goldfish and she’s been happily plotzed for years.

As we meet Nico’s estranged parents in their rather squalid home in India — his father Dara, played by Sanjay Talwar and his mother Farzeen, played by Veena Sood — it is apparent Granny’s taste for the ‘water of life’ has been passed down to her daughter, who in turn, has shared it liberally with her husband, a book-maker.

Having thus established fertile dramatic ground, Irani fails to dissect his characters in ways that make us laugh or weep at the humanity he reveals — or, if he were really good at his craft, make us do both. Instead, he contents himself with crafting a series of loosely joined one-liners that might, with some effort, be cobbled into a good half-hour sitcom. But, sadly, this is a play that stretches — often painfully — over two hours, during which Irani fails to develop character, much less the kind of ties that would bind this lot into family unit.

From her director’s perch, Rosemary Dunsmore finds precious little she can add to the sprawl, so she simply contents herself with keeping things moving at a brisk clip and ensuring that the various glasses and flasks that drive the action are kept topped up at all times. Sadly, she gets scant help from her design team. John Thompson’s set is perhaps one of the most visually elegant to ever set down on the Factory stage, but it fails to function believably as either a hospital room or a Mumbai flat, and on the rare occasions that it is asked to be both simultaneously, it becomes utterly ridiculous.

In writing the play, Irani quite wisely recognized that family dysfunction is often the backbone of great theatre, but he has failed to take note of the fact that the families in question —  whether they comprise the house of Atreus, the house of Weston or even the House of Bunker — are comprised of living, breathing three-dimensional characters, not strident caricatures like this.