By Caroline Elias, Arts Contributor
Dal’s theater department has started this season off with a bang. For their first show in the series Through the Looking Glass, the fourth-year students put on two one act plays by Eugene Ionesco: The Bald Soprano and Jacques or Obedience. Lasting just 45 minutes each, they were both a pleasure to watch.
Ionesco, a French-Romanian playwright, wrote these plays in the late 1950s and early 1960s, after the Second World War. They belong to the Absurdist theater movement, which denies the use of language as an efficient means of communication. It is, in effect, an anti-play, and the actors seemed to understand this well.
The Bald Soprano began with Ben Irvine, playing the role of Mr. Smith, and Helena Pipe as his wife, Mrs. Smith. The on-stage couple played their roles very convincingly. Mr. and Mrs. Martin, played respectively by Jonny Thompson and Jamie Galbraith, entered a few scenes later. Though everyone in the play did a great job, Pipe stole the show. She was a joy to watch. With great stage presence and a true grasp of who her character was, she seemed to know exactly what she was meant to convey. She elicited both laughter and pauses from the audience and truly captured the essence of Mrs. Smith.
Jacques or Obedience had a much larger cast than The Bald Soprano. It was very entertaining, but not as funny as the first play. Although the seduction scene between Jacques, played by Dave Hung, and Roberta II, played by Kaleigh Graham, was not a 100 per cent success, their absurd sex scene stole the show. They got the perfect response from the audience: laughter followed by an uncomfortable silence. Mara Zigler did a great job in the role of Jacques’ mother, and provided the audience with the majority of the laughs during the first half.
I sat down with Irvine, who played Mr. Smith in The Bald Soprano and Jacques’ grandfather in Jacques or Obedience, after the show to ask him a few questions about the plays and the difficulties the actors encountered.
“Trying to play a straight English gentleman and conveying the total picture, when Mr. Smith has no core, was probably the most difficult part,” says Irvine. “Jacques’ grandfather was much more liberal a character and easier to understand than Mr. Smith. He had no depth.”
When asked why he decided to depict the character as more comedic than tragic, Irvine replied, “When you try to play for laughs, the audience sees right through it, and it loses the funniness. I tried to make my character as serious as possible, and because of that the tragedy is there, and not seen at face value.”
Catch the fourth-years in November with the Sondheim musical Into the Woods.
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