 "Photo: All photos Marni Keenan")
3 stars
The New Leaf Theatre is kicking off their 2009-2010 season with playwright Bilal Dardai’s adaptation of The Man Who Was Thursday. The original novel proves hard to categorize. G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 masterpiece works as a farce, a police adventure and theological allegory all in one. Chesterton was the author of the “theological mystery” series of Father Brown novels, and published a number of essays on Christian belief. TMWWT — subtitled, importantly, “a nightmare” — is considered by many to be his magnum opus. The short book moves quickly and is filled with unexpected turns and fantastic, almost mystical forces. Superficially, it is about a police operation to infiltrate the high anarchist council. Each of the seven members is named after a day of the week, culminating in the awesome power of the council’s mysterious leader, Sunday.
Certainly, it would be difficult to translate successfully any one dimension of Chesterton’s intricate fantasy, not to mention its labyrinth of implications, allusions and metaphors: and, for the most part, Dardai’s script succeeds, bringing out many of the important ironies and conflicts and providing a touch of the fantastic when needed. But it unpleasantly suppresses the more overt theological content, draining the story of some of its most impressive dynamics. The ending is changed so as to be almost unrecognizable, giving the play’s conclusion a comparatively bleaker, less mystical tone.
Director Jessica Hutchinson and her cohorts do a great job bringing the story to life. During the course of the play, cast members use signs and spoken directions to move the audience from one room to another or into different configurations, so that the action can take place in a new and sometimes surprising space. Being shifted about in this way makes TMWWT a transitory, uncertain experience. Just as one cannot be certain who is an anarchist and who is a policeman, at any given junction one cannot be sure that the audience will not be asked to move. This style of presentation also captures nicely the shifting, fleeting settings of Chesterton’s novel, which moves quickly and easily from pubs to meadows to underground lairs.
The ensemble is used to great effect as extras who facilitate the transitions between scenes (and stages) and clown around with the audience, giving the convoluted, somewhat ridiculous storyline an appropriately lighthearted, facetious context. The costuming, too, is excellent, using flamboyant attire and color-coordinated converse chucks to set the actors in a world apart from the audience, a world not so different from our own, but inexorably so. The only place the production team goes wrong is the soundtrack, which is full of half-relevant makeovers of popular songs like “Karma Police” and “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.” They distract from the real action at hand and feel out of place in the hypothetical, historical world of the play.
The actors are, for the most part, effective. They clearly feel at home in each iteration of the stage. Our own Loyola senior Nate Burger is chilling as the formidable pet secretary Monday, and other principal players manage to be affecting and humorous, like Professor De Worms (Andy Hager) and Dr. Bull (Ted Evans). Sean Patrick Fawcett pulls off Sunday with an impressive detachment that narrowly escapes being mobster-cynicism.
Adapted for the stage, the work loses its textual richness, and, despite the cast and crew’s best efforts, a measure of its narrative agility. What it gains in return is the immediate personal impact of image and tone, as when the high anarchist council is unveiled to strobe lights and corny techno; but it’s not enough to give the play a satisfying punch. The humanity of the final confrontation is belied by the patent absurdity of the preceding events and the apparent insincerity of the principal characters. Despite an impressive presentation, The Man Who Was Thursday gives the audience just as much to puzzle as the novel, but less of an incentive to do so.
The Man Who Was Thursday will be at the New Leaf Theatre through Nov. 21. Tickets are $12.
Be the first to comment on this article!