culture
IFOA 2011: Fleck, A Verse Comedy
Authors as actors? Done—and nicely—at Thursday night's reading
Author Miriam Toews, the heroine at Thursday's staging. Photo courtesy of IFOA.
In terms of sheer volume, Thursday night’s staged reading of Alasdair Gray’s Fleck, A Verse Comedy may have been this year’s most ambitious Festival of Authors production yet. Indeed, the sight of 22 writers solemnly filing onto the stage to take their seats at a massive semicircle of microphoned stands immediately set the tone for a thing of grandeur. But, did it succeed?
Gray’s play, a modern-day interpretation of Goethe’s Tragedy of Faust, involves a Faustian hero, Fleck, who allows himself to be corrupted by Satan (here named Nick) in exchange for such soul-worthy trappings as youth, love, and power; as might be predicted, hijinks ensue.
The play is a comedy in the sense that, eventually, the hero turns away from what he has wrongfully acquired–the ending is ultimately a happy one, or at least morally satisfying to a sufficient degree. But Gray’s script is also downright funny, and the cast of largely inexperienced actors played by hugely accomplished authors lent it a quirky dose of community theatre appeal. This is as Gray intended it, pointing out in the evening’s program that the play’s only full rehearsal took place a few hours before the performance in an effort to “give the whole show the charm of remarkable spontaneity.” Intentionally or not, this lack of rehearsal also helped to exploit the authors’ general inexperience, which–again, intentionally or not–came off as charming rather than bumbling.
Not an underrehearsed amateur, however, was the author/actor who voiced the comedy’s most prominent character, C.C. Humphreys as the delightfully fiendish Nick. Humphreys immediately stood out as someone who knew what he was doing, reciting his lines with the studied confidence of a veteran actor–which, as it turns out, he is. This casting was a prudent choice, providing the momentum necessary to keep the 90 minute-long staging from feeling bogged down by the potential pitfalls of “remarkable spontaneity” among less-than-seasoned actors. But Ian Rankin as Fleck (post-soul suck) and Miriam Toews as the heroine, May, kept up with a clear sense of humour.
For all the namedrop-worthiness of a cast that included the likes of Andrew Pyper (clad in a tee shirt that read “the pen is mightier than the ford”), Marina Endicott, Linwood Barclay and Guy Vanderhaege, the trio of Humphreys, Rankin, and Toews–in addition to narrator Meaghan Strimas–carried the brunt of the dialogue. It was fun to watch the others onstage as they reacted to the story’s unfolding, though, while speculating over which were zoning out entirely (Torontoist has some theories, but will decline from naming names). It turns out acting prowess isn’t a necessary ingredient for theatrical entertainment with a stageful of writers willing to wing it.