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From the script, direction and designs to the performances, Alberta Theatre Projects’ The Seafarer is theatre that consistently engages, surprises and rewards.
Conor McPherson’s 18-year-old script is Irish folklore drama at its finest, and it’s as sly and deceptive as the stranger who visits a quartet of downtrodden, woe-begotten Irishmen for a card game one fateful Christmas Eve. Mr. Lockhart, as he calls himself in this particular incarnation, is the devil and he’s come to claim the soul of Sharky Harkin. They met 25 years earlier in a jail cell where Sharky was being held for a crime. They played cards that night and Sharky won, so he was never punished for his crime. Mr. Lockhart is coming this night to take Sharky through the darkest of holes, to the darkest place possible, but he must first win the poker game.
McPherson’s supernatural shenanigans are couched in old-fashioned kitchen sink melodrama. Sharky (Shaun Smyth) has returned to Baldoyle to care for his brother Richard (Christopher Hunt) who was blinded while rummaging around in a dumpster and needs constant supervision. Seldom sober, Richard spends his time drinking with Ivan (David Trimble), a well-meaning but ineffectual drunk. Hunt and Trimble devour and savour McPherson’s dialogue, throwing caution and decorum to the wind. As McPherson intends, all their raucous tomfoolery makes us laugh with Richard and Ivan, not at them, and, given what seeming reprobates they are, that’s not an easy task. It takes actors with superb comedic sensibilities to pull it off so winningly.
Richard has invited Nicky Giblin (Chirag Naik), a posturing braggart, to join them for a few drinks and a couple of hands of cards. Nicky comes in tow with Mr. Lockhart (Paul Gross) who he met in a pub. Nicky is now dating Sharky’s ex, and driving Sharky’s former car, adding insult to injury for poor Sharky. It’s up to Smyth, as the play’s straight man, to keep grounding the evening in some kind of reality. It’s a tightrope act that Smyth walks with confidence and precision. Smyth lets us see all the torment Sharky has endured and caused in his life, bubbling beneath his restrained demeanour, but we’re just waiting for the moments when he will, and does, explode.
Gross’s name may appear on the posters and marquee at ATP, but make no mistake, this is neither a star vehicle nor a star turn. It is ensemble acting at its finest, and Gross proves a most gracious actor. Hunt and Trimble have their grand comic moments, and Smyth his dramatic ones, while Naik has the difficult job of being the unsympathetic outsider.
McPherson has a clever device to get Trimble, Hunt and Naik off stage, so Gross can reveal Lockhart’s true identity and true intention to Smyth in the play’s most powerful scene. It is here that Gross accomplishes the near impossible. He manages to gain a little sympathy for the devil as Lockhart tells Sharky what awaits him in hell and what he’ll miss in heaven. He also reminds us how these bodies we, and he, inhabit are so imperfect and burdensome. It’s not just in Gross’s voice but in his physicality that we see the hell he must endure for eternity.
Director Peter Pasyk takes his cues from McPherson’s script. Initially, he makes us think we’re watching a farce, then a folksy comedy, Eventually, he lets the play slide effortlessly into fantasy, making for a wild ride. Any time Satan appears in a play, there is a good old-fashioned battle of good and evil. Pasyk makes certain Christ is present in McPherson’s play, in wonderfully, subtle ways.
Hanne Loosen gives the actors one of the most lived-in sets imaginable, as does Relamy Kneeshaw with their outfits. Anton deGroot’s lighting lets us know who the stranger is, as does Kathryn Smith’s sound design.
All this delightful Irish magic, courtesy of some impressive homegrown talent, runs in the Arts Common’s Martha Cohen Theatre until Nov. 10 and demands to be experienced.