Riffs on Shakespeare: A Tender Thing,
Soulpepper Theatre
the national post

It's a critical commonplace that Romeo and Juliet were lucky to die when they did. If they had survived, their image wouldn't have. Neither perhaps would their happiness. It would have fallen prey to all the shocks that middle and old age are heir to. I had rather expected that Ben Power's A Tender Thing would trace the course of this disillusion. It doesn't.

It may not be strictly true to say that Power, a British playwright, wrote A Tender Thing; rather, he assembled it. The words, including those that make up the title, are all Shakespeare's: most of them from Romeo and Juliet but some from elsewhere in the Works, mainly the Sonnets. The lines have been bestowed on an elderly married couple who also go by the names of Romeo and Juliet. It's never clear whether this is just a coincidence, or whether we're meant to regard them as Shakespeare's lovers in later years, with his play behind them - except of course the inconvenient part about them having both committed suicide when still in their teens.

"Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death" says Power's mature Romeo at the beginning of the play, just as Shakespeare's Romeo did toward the end of his. Young Romeo was entering a tomb; old Romeo is entering the bedroom where his wife lies, mortally ill. The new play's topical hook, invoked but not explored, is assisted suicide; Juliet wants Romeo to release her from her pain, and though at first horrified - by the idea of helping her die, and also by that of living without her - he eventually consents. This leads him to appropriating Friar Lawrence's speech about the harmful or beneficent effects of drugs, and then to following in his namesake's footsteps by wheedling a potion from an accommodating apothecary, though not altogether for his namesake's purpose.

The main attraction of Michael Shamata's Soulpepper production is the presence of Joseph Ziegler and Nancy Palk, Canada's best-loved acting couple, as the devoted pair. In the company's early days it was rare to see these two on stage together, and rarer yet to see them playing husband and wife. Maybe their glorious proposal scene in A Month in the Country sealed a new deal for them; at any rate, we've since seen them memorably married in Death of a Salesman and Long Day's Journey into Night. (I'd also like to see them in Strindberg's The Dance of Death, though it seems a hell of a thing to wish on any married couple.) A Tender Thing lets them apply their warmth and skill to the archetypal love scenes of English drama, and it's heart-stabbing to see and hear them re-create the lovers' first meeting ("if I profane with my unworthiest hand...") in the show's final moments. Palk, who these days seems more graceful and glowing in each role she plays, is moving throughout, notably when recalling a daughter who died young and whose name was Susan. The name, and the relevant lines, are lifted from a speech of the Nurse in the original play, and they constitute probably the boldest bit of reassigning in the piece, along with our only glimpse of the history of the characters' marriage. They also, momentarily effective though they are, point up the shallowness of the whole enterprise. Superficially it resembles the recent Cymbeline's Reign, in Withrow Park, which also trimmed its original while interpolating other bits of the canon. (The "O Mistress Mine" song from Twelfth Night crops coincidentally up in both.) Cymbeline's Reign, though, was using Shakespeare's words to tell what was still essentially Shakespeare's story, which gave it purpose and drive. A Tender Thing merely shuffles speeches around; it doesn't tell Shakespeare's story but is so dependent on it that it can't tell its own either.

Soulpepper's other new production, a revival of David Young's 1992 play Glenn, is likewise a case of performance outstripping play. It isn't pointless, like A Tender Thing, but its points are made early in a long evening and then repeated, although in scrambled form. Its four characters represent aspects of Glenn Gould, and the play's non-sequential structure is avowedly based on Bach's Goldberg Variations, though I would defy anyone who hadn't been told this to work it out. Gould made two widely spaced and widely contrasting recordings of the Variations; his explication of the music's architecture, and of his own unconventional choices of tempos, is the play's most interesting sustained sequence. Jeff Lillico, billed as The Prodigy, has the clearest biographical identity, a boy secure in his burgeoning talent and insecure in everything else. Mike Ross is The Performer, the concert virtuoso who has a meltdown, graphically evoked, while the applause continues to thunder. Brent Carver is The Puritan, Gould at the reclusive end of his life, public appearances long forsaken and even the studio suspected, but still seeking ultimate artistic and personal control; he wants, as he tells us in the play's best line, to conduct both his music and his life. Carver is at his uncanny best, tetchily human while still summoning genius. Steven Sutcliffe plays a Gould of no apparent chronological abode, somewhat perplexingly labelled The Perfectionist, which seems to mean a fetching fondness for critical sarcasm; he also turns up as some characters who aren't Glenn, a less rewarding task. Fine individually, the performances are finely orchestrated by their director, Diana Leblanc. When they all line up in Gould's trademark coat and muffler, worn even on the hottest days, they make an endearing, oddly Chaplinesque quartet.

They don't, though, interact to any great purpose. This is basically a one-man show arbitrarily divided into four: Gould may well have been a multi-sided personality but this, for all its experimental airs, is a doggedly literal way of depicting it. Meanwhile, a lot is taken for granted. The play is informative about Gould's growing distaste for audiences, and somewhat amusing about his fear of flying. Everything is so allusive and elusive that we actually learn hardly anything; the play is too busy playing games. There's one particular game - "If you were [fill in the blank], what kind would you be?" - that the Glenns themselves play repeatedly, and that one of them eventually describes as tiresome, though not until long after the audience has come to the same conclusion. The production is virtuosically lit by Michael Walton, who's also responsible for the more sedate illumination of A Tender Thing. All four actors are accomplished musical theatre performers, and they give a beautifully harmonized performance of a funeral hymn. But there's no emotional effect, even though the person they're mourning is their mother, since we've been told nothing about her. Gould's own death is foreshadowed in an abrupt line apparently designed to shock us into feeling. But death happens to everyone, and the play has given us no reason to care about this one more than any other.