culture
Revenge Porn From the 19th Century
The Coal Mine Theatre's revival of August Strindberg's Creditors is a brilliant, brutal look at jealousy and marital breakdown.
Liisa Repo-Martell and Noah Reid star in the Coal Mine Theatre’s production of Strindberg’s Swedish classic Creditors, adapted by David Greig. Photo by Michael Cooper.
Creditors
The Coal Mine Theatre (798 Danforth Avenue)
Runs to May 17
$15 – $30
In its first season, the Coal Mine Theatre has been more like a torture chamber. The new indie company, located in the basement of the Magic Oven pizzeria on the Danforth, has shown a decided preference for plays about agonizing doubt and psychological cruelty. There was Stephen Adly Guirgis’s drug- and jealousy-fueled The Motherf**ker With the Hat, which opened the season with a bang back in November. And just this past March we saw Mike Bartlett’s Bull, a squirm-inducing depiction of office bullying. But Bartlett’s bullies were crude and obvious next to the exquisitely nasty mind games played by a revenge-bent ex-husband in the Coal Mine’s latest show, August Strindberg’s Creditors.
Strindberg, who was pen pals with Nietzsche, had a famously harsh view of the human psyche, especially when it came to male-female relationships. He was a bitter misogynist and there’s a speech in Creditors mocking women’s bodies that’s so absurd it makes you laugh and curl your toes at the same time. It’s far more outrageous than any of the obscenity-strewn dialogue in The Motherf**ker… Yet for all that, Creditors is a masterful play with some piercing insights into what actor Hardee T. Lineham’s character cynically calls “the game of marriage.”
The play is set in a seaside hotel, where the ailing artist Adolph (Noah Reid) is receiving career and marital advice from Gustav (Lineham), a new friend. Gustav has already convinced Adolph to throw over painting for sculpture and, when we first see them, is in the process of attributing Adolph’s illness to his marriage. He believes Adolph’s wife, the novelist Tekla, has emasculated him creatively and is now turning him into a physical wreck. Coolly, methodically, Gustav cultivates the seeds of doubt already planted in Adolph’s mind as to Tekla’s fidelity, while shrewdly picking apart the pretense of a child-like innocence that sustains the couple’s relationship. It’s a display of artful deviousness that even Shakespeare’s Iago would envy.
What follows, without spoiling the plot, are a confrontation between Adolph and Tekla (Liisa Repo-Martell), and then an encounter between Tekla and Gustav. Suffice to say that Gustav’s surgical dissection of their weaknesses—and the revelation of his own motives—leave us with a bleak picture of love and marriage, the most intimate of human connections, as an ongoing power struggle with winners and losers, creditors and debtors.
That sex-and-hate masterpiece Miss Julie is the Strindberg play most audiences are familiar with today. Just in the last two seasons, Toronto has seen at least three productions of it (four, if you want to count the film version with Jessica Chastain). But Creditors, written immediately after it in 1888 and also a taut, fierce one-act, was judged by Strindberg to be the superior work. Certainly, it feels fresh in its comparative unfamiliarity and this transfixing production shows it to be just as powerful.
Veteran actor Lineham, whose distinctive sandpaper voice can sometimes be complemented by a rough performance, this time around is wonderfully smooth and urbane. His Gustav discreetly turns the screws on Reid’s Adolph like the most refined of sadists, and he’s disarmingly tender in his meeting with Repo-Martell’s Tekla.
Repo-Martell just happens to physically resemble Strindberg’s first wife, actress Siri von Essen, which gives an added frisson to her strikingly conceived Tekla. She has the ease of a successful writer and the teasing nature of a habitual flirt, but she also clearly dominates Adolph as the “big sister” to his “little brother” in their puerile fantasies. Reid’s boyish Adolph, meanwhile, hobbles about on crutches while being psychologically crippled by self-doubt and his pathetic susceptibility to influence.
Director Rae Ellen Bodie uses Scottish playwright David Greig’s acclaimed 2008 adaptation of Strindberg’s Swedish text—which, apart from the occasional British phrase (e.g. “knocking about”), sounds comfortable in the mouths of Canadian actors—and she guides the trio with precision. Her designers do what they can with the Coal Mine’s cramped playing space. Andrea Mittler and Ming Wong sketch in the locale and period convincingly with their décor and costumes, respectively. Richard Lam’s sound design suggests the nearby sea and composer Ted Dykstra (also the theatre’s artistic curator) opens the show with some romantic piano flourishes whose prettiness contrasts with the ugly truths revealed later on.
And you don’t have to subscribe to Strindberg’s pessimistic views to see that there are truths here. Watching him ruthlessly expose the dark workings of the human heart is a chilling experience, but an illuminating one, too.