FF OFF STAGE

OFF
OFF STAGE
★
2016/2017
The Newsletter for Off-Mirvish Subscribers
David Mirvish Presents
Theatre that
starts a conversation
THE FIFTH OFF-MIRVISH SEASON
Nov 4 - 20, 2016
Feb 10 - 26, 2017
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March 25 - April 9, 2017
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OFF-MIRVISH SHOW #1
RUNNING TIME: 85 MINS
Fight Night
Fight Night promises to be a political boxing
match with one-liners flying around, instead of
teeth, and every fifteen minutes the audience
gets to pass an uppercut to one of the candidates
in the arena. May the best win – or maybe not?
AD: The idea for Fight Night has been sitting
on a shelf for a while, but initially, I envisaged
a popularity contest, a Big Brother-type of
elimination game in which the audience could
vote actors out until only one was left. Looking at
it now, I’m happy we didn’t get a chance to work
on it then, because it would’ve been more form
than content.
Enter the political outlook – it sounds logical,
now that elections look more and more like
popularity contests.
AD: I was triggered by a quote of the Flemish
nationalist Geert Bourgeois, of all people. He
remarked that, during the protracted government
formation of 2010 - 2011, Belgium had better move
towards a two-party system, like in America or
in the UK. After 541 days without a government, it
seemed that this could facilitate political decision
making considerably. Left wing versus right wing.
But then again, I don’t envy the political situation
in America or the UK. These considerations are
only subliminally present in the performance,
but the “plot” does evolve around the tyranny of
the majority. The majority that suddenly gets to
dictate things after elections and they often act as
if their opinion represents everybody’s opinion.
An important core question is: do you trust the
majority here tonight? Another point is the way
Directed by Alexander Devriendt
characters like Bart De Wever or Mitt Romney
succeed in manipulating the public opinion and
marketing their own personality in order to divert
attention from their points of view.
Five candidates, the audience decides who goes.
Are there potentially five different performances,
dependent on the audience’s vote?
AD: The order in which the candidates are
eliminated and the candidate that remains can
be different each time. It’s certainly not a fixed
fight. The text does evolve along a set system,
although there is one scene I’ve had to elaborate
in five different ways. The last three remaining
candidates each represent one idea. One of them
will try to unite the forces, another will embrace
the differences and the last one is the anti-vote.
The point always comes down to the same, albeit
voiced by a different actor. This implies that
my actors need to know the complete text and
perform it. The annoying thing for them is when
they’re voted out after one elimination round.
Because they’ll have performed for 15 minutes
and for the rest of the evening, they’ll be twiddling
their thumbs backstage. The result is that the
actors, just like politicians, will give it their best
shot, sometimes desperately, to stay in the race.
They really want to get to the next rounds.
Political strategies, certainly in the frame of
election campaigns, are profoundly constructed,
tactically and psychologically, by professional
spin doctors. What did you watch or read
for inspiration?
AD: How to Win an Election by Cicero, still
relevant today. A few books by republican
campaign strategians. And then there’s
Photo by Chad Batka
Interview With Director:
Alexander Devriendt
Ontroerend Goed and The Border Project in
co-production with Richard Jordan Productions,
Theatre Royal Plymouth, Kunstencentrum Vooruit
in association with Adelaide Festival of Arts
The Life and Death of Democracy by John Keane,
a must-read for everyone who is interested in
politics. It opened my eyes to a lot of things and
it’s certainly one of the under layers in Fight Night.
Before I started working on the performance,
I toyed with the idea to give that one remaining
candidate the fictional power to work out
operational solutions for, let’s say, the climate
crisis and to apply it. As some sort of enlightened
despot, yes. But in spite of my frustrations about
the insufficiencies of the democratic system,
Keane’s book made me realize that for now, we’re
condemned to it. To paraphrase the legendary
words of Winston Churchill: “democracy is the
worst form of government”, but the alternatives
are much worse. You need to embrace a certain
form of populism, if you want to get somewhere
as a political party. You need to convince the
“people”, if you want to get votes, that means
you’re obliged to participate in the game.
OFF-MIRVISH SHOW #2
RUNNING TIME: 1 HOUR, 50 MINS
THE STUDIO 180 PRODUCTION OF
My Night With Reg
At Guy’s London flat, old friends and new
gather to party through the night. This is
the summer of 1985, and for Guy and his
circle the world is about to change forever.
Deliciously funny and bittersweet, My Night
With Reg perfectly captures the fragility of
friendship, happiness and life itself.
Contains mature content, strong language
and nudity.
Kevin Elyot’s My Night With Reg:
‘the perfect West End play’
Excerpts from the article that ran in
The Guardian - Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Shortly before his bittersweet comedy
was revived at the Donmar in 2014, the
playwright Kevin Elyot died aged 62.
Stephen Daldry, Hugh Bonneville and
Lindsay Duncan remember their friend.
STEPHEN DALDRY
(Director - Billy Elliot film and musical)
It was quite early in my tenure as artistic
director at the Royal Court when My
Night With Reg landed on my desk. It was
commissioned by Hampstead Theatre, but
they decided not to show it. I’ll never know
why. It was one of those plays that we read,
and straightaway said: “Let’s do it”. I sent it
to Roger Michell, a director I really wanted
to work with us, and again his reply was an
instant “yes”.
It is an incredibly funny play. We billed it
as a comedy, but it isn’t a comedy at all –
it is this heartbreaking tale of emotional
yearnings and mistakes and infidelities,
which really categorised the rest of Kevin’s
work afterwards.
It captured the mood of a particular time.
Don’t forget this was when Aids was
breaking down upon us all. But Kevin, very
cleverly I thought, never described it as
an Aids play, so it never got pigeonholed. I
think audiences who saw it on the West End
thought it was this tragicomedy.
By Kevin Elyot
Directed by Joel Greenberg
There were other plays tackling gay issues
on the British stage, but none had Kevin’s
lightness of touch and humour. Kevin
himself was this wonderful figure – a funny,
careful, charming and heartfelt soul.
Though it is set in the 80s, I don’t think it’s a
play only of the 80s – it speaks to us directly
and vividly now. In many respects, My Night
With Reg is the perfect West End play:
audiences will either be hysterically laughing
or crying. It is a really fun evening out, and
then you come home feeling deeply touched.
And you can’t ask for much more than that.
ALL-CANADIAN CAST
A Canadian premiere production
with an all-Canadian cast!
The Toronto production of
My Night With Reg features:
TIM
FUNNELL
HUGH BONNEVILLE
(Actor - Earl of Grantham, Downton Abbey)
At the time Reg came to the West End, I was
co-producing another play, Beautiful Thing
by Jonathan Harvey, that had just transferred
from the Bush theatre. It was a very dynamic
time, and there was a real sense these
two “gay plays” – as they were christened –
were rattling the conventions of what made
a West End play, tackling subject areas
that at the time weren’t so palatable for a
theatregoing audience.
When the director Roger Michell asked me if
I’d like to come and replace John Sessions as
Reg, I hadn’t seen the play yet. We had a jokey
rivalry, and I was loyal to Beautiful Thing. But
when I saw John Sessions in the role, I was
utterly bewitched. I don’t think I’d ever been
in an auditorium where the laughter was so
uproarious and the aching, painful silences
were so intense.
ALEX
FURBER
MARTIN
HAPPER
JEFF
MILLER
LINDSAY DUNCAN
(Actor - Birdman and Alice Through
the Looking Glass)
My Night With Reg almost defines Kevin as
a writer. His familiar themes of secrecy and
longing are threaded through a masterly
structure, completely under his control,
remorseless in its lack of sentimentality and,
therefore, heartbreaking and hilarious.
GRAY
POWELL
JONATHAN
WILSON
OFF-MIRVISH SHOW #3
RUNNING TIME: 90 MINS
THE WHY NOT THEATRE PRODUCTION OF
Directed by Weyni Mengesha
Butcher: Can a play about torture and
genocide be too entertaining?
By J. Kelly Nestruck
As originally published on October 23, 2014
Can a play be too entertaining?
Butcher, a new stage thriller from Nicolas Billon, opened at Alberta
Theatre Projects on the same day it was published by Coach House
Books in a handsome edition with a foreword by former Supreme
Court justice Louise Arbour.
In Billon’s play, a victim confronts the perpetrator of a war crime in
a Toronto police station, and Arbour, former chief prosecutor for the
International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, distills
the themes in her introduction: “Where can victims find peace if
justice is elusive? Can offenders find closure if punishment is not
extended to them?”
Tough questions, but instead I left opening night with the one asked
at the top of this review: Is it wrong to pen a gripping nail-biter about
torture and genocide and civil war?
Butcher opens with a mystery: Inspector Lamb is working the
Christmas Eve shift when an old man named Josef is left on the
station’s doorstep – drugged, wearing a Santa cap and with a
butcher’s hook hanging around his neck.
Impaled on the end of the hook is the business card of a lawyer named
Hamilton Barnes with the words “arrest me” on it. Barnes has been
summoned into the police station at 3 a.m. to explain his relationship
to the mysterious man, who only speaks Lavinian (a Slavic-sounding
language invented by two University of Toronto linguists for the play).
Also on the way is a translator named Elena, who I’m hesitant to say
anything else about.
Indeed, it’s difficult to describe the plot any further, either, because
the twists and turns start early and allegiances and aliases are
switched as often over the course of this 90-minute play as they might
be in a particularly torturous season of 24.
This one spoiler seems justified, however: Josef turns out to be
“the Butcher,” a notorious war criminal who was in charge of a
concentration camp in the Balkan country of Lavinia. He’s wanted by
Interpol and also by a group of survivors known as the Fjurioji – or the
Furies.
While the fictional country and its avengers’ names bring to mind
Shakespeare and Aeschylus, Butcher’s action seems equally inspired
by the Saw torture-porn movie franchise, with Billon introducing a
new variation on Chekhov’s gun: A butcher hook introduced in the first
act must absolutely be used by the fourth.
Onstage violence is not the easiest to pull off, but director Weyni
Mengesha bridges hyper-real scenes with stylized, slow-motion
interludes – and she and her committed cast do an effective job of
making the audience squirm and gasp out loud.
Does Butcher do its subject matter justice? Once the adrenalin
rush dies off, you may realize that Billon’s play has more depth and
subtlety than it initially appears – and that the medium of the thriller
is part of its message.
Billon, best known for his relatively mild-mannered monologue plays
Iceland and Greenland, has not conjured up the Lavinian language
merely to engage his Tolkienian impulses or to avoid offence.
Language and difficulties in translation are recurring themes in
Butcher – highlighted by a running gag about Inspector Lamb mixing
up his Latin and Greek. (The play itself mixes up the two: Lavinia
gets its name from a character born of Roman mythology and later
borrowed by Shakespeare, and the Furies get theirs from the beings
who chase Orestes for the murder of his mother in The Oresteia.)
When Josef is compelled to confess his worst crime, he does so in
Lavinian – and the audience can only guess at what he did based
on the horrified reactions of other characters. Billon has crafted a
compelling dramatic metaphor here – those of us blessed to have be
raised in peace can only grasp at the edges of understanding when it
comes to war crimes.
Likewise, Billon suggests that the civilized language we speak
surrounding war crimes – words such as “closure” and “justice”
that Arbour uses in her foreword – can sound meaningless to people
who have lived through violence. Indeed, violence might be the only
language that they can speak back.
That’s not to say that Billon endorses the idea of vengeance over
justice. But by crafting Butcher as a thriller, he puts the audience in a
bloody mind – and we root for righteous revenge until it goes too far.
So, no: Butcher is not too entertaining, but it is dangerously so.
The thrills in the play distinguish it from worthier plays that seek
to illuminate human darkness, but don’t expose us to the human
instincts that lead to it.
Photo by Dahlia Katz
Butcher
By Nicholas Billon
OFF-MIRVISH
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
NOVEMBER 2016
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
1
6
7
2
8
2PM
13
14
2PM
20
21
FEBRUARY 2017
Wednesday
Thursday
3
Friday
Saturday
4
5
8PM
2PM & 8PM
9
10
11
12
8PM
2PM & 8PM
8PM
2PM & 8PM
5
15
16
17
18
19
12
8PM
8PM
8PM
2PM & 8PM
2PM
22
23
24
25
26
19
29
30
FIGHT NIGHT
13
20
26
Monday
Tuesday
7
Wednesday
1
Thursday
2
8
9
Friday
3
13
8
9
Friday
Saturday
3
4
10
11
8PM
8PM
14
15
16
17
18
8PM
8PM
8PM
8PM
2PM & 8PM
21
22
23
24
25
8PM
2PM & 8PM
8PM
8PM
2PM & 8PM
28
MY NIGHT WITH REG
10
Saturday
Sunday
Monday
14
15
16
17
Tuesday
4
11
18
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
2
3
Saturday
1
BUTCHER
2PM & 8PM
4
5
6
7
8
8PM
8PM
8PM
8PM
2PM & 8PM
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
2PM
12
Thursday
2
APRIL 2017
BUTCHER
6
27
Wednesday
1
2PM
MARCH 2017
Sunday
Tuesday
7
2PM
28
5
Monday
6
8PM
2PM
21
Sunday
9
2PM
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
8PM
26
27
2PM
28
29
30
31
8PM
2PM & 8PM
8PM
8PM
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