Review: WINTER SOLSTICE at Canadian Stage

What if fascism knocked at your door, with a pleading look and an easy smile on its face? Would you turn it away, or would you welcome it with open arms? That’s the question behind German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig’s WINTER SOLSTICE, currently at the Berkeley Street Theatre in a Necessary Angel production in association with Canadian Stage and Birdland Theatre. Programmed to coincide with the first week of Donald Trump’s second term as president, the show’s look at the seductiveness of fascism’s appeal to populism and nostalgia, personified by a charming stranger who drops in on an intellectual family’s Christmas eve celebration, could hardly be more topical.

Schimmelpfennig’s text, in translation by David Tushingham, subtly takes viewers through the way an ideology can take hold, entrenching itself when groups value politeness and social cohesion over progress and safety. Married couple, successful author Albert (Cyrus Lane) and indie filmmaker Bettina (Kira Guloien), are members of the lefty intelligentsia who seem to barely stand each other. Though quieter than that of the couples in Canadian Stage’s other current production, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, their disdain for each other is palpable as they try to provide a suitable Christmas for their daughter (unseen but voiced in an affected high pitch as part of the show’s narration), for Bettina’s overbearing, lonely mother Corinna (Nancy Palk), and painter friend Konrad (Frank Cox-O’Connell).

It's Corinna’s loneliness that makes way for the interloper, Diego Matamoros’ seasonally-named Rudolph, a man she met on the stopped, broken-down train on the way to town. Rudolph’s chivalry in that uncomfortable situation gains him an invite to the family’s festive celebration. Friendly and charming, Matamoros’ distinguished guest initially seems a welcome balm and distraction from the obnoxious family’s quarrels. However, as they debate the merits of art, travel, and historical movements, his insistence on the supremacy of a comforting past world that never really existed begins to strike Albert as increasingly uncomfortable.

Necessary Angel has produced some of my favourite works in the past couple of seasons, with director Alan Dilworth’s productions of Pamela Mala Sinha’s New, about a sextet of Bengali students in 1960s Winnipeg, and Sarah Ruhl’s Letters From Max: A Ritual, about the playwright and professor’s correspondence with a talented student with a terminal illness, particular highlights. Both of these productions hit right in my heart and have stayed lodged there. Yet WINTER SOLSTICE, a cleverly written, layered story acted by a talented cast, remains more of an intellectual exercise than either of the two works about academia ever were.

Why? Because WINTER SOLSTICE gives us a message buried behind three levels of remove, the better to consider it, but the worse to feel its impact.

First, the play is largely narrated, rather than enacted, told largely by an actor (Frank Cox-O’Connell) who later becomes a character. Though the way the narrative eventually switches to a different character is thematically important to the message of the story, suggesting that who controls a narrative is of vital importance, the effect is lessened because that narrative is not especially linked to the initial person who delivers it. As well, while Schimmelpfennig’s text is rich in description, the sheer onslaught of narration lengthens the action, describing the action minute by minute without necessarily deepening it, while providing a slight occasional stumbling block for Cox-O’Connell’s delivery.

Second, the way that Rudolph ingratiates himself into most of the family is elegant but, because of the way the play is marketed, entirely anticipated. Given a conclusion before the play begins, it’s hard to wait as the characters catch up to the clues so delicately laced throughout the evening. The character’s ideological seduction is clear as to what it provides for Corinna (love), the child (a surrogate grandfather), and the couple’s artist friend Konrad (passion, direction, and class solidarity), with Albert also clearly the lone standoffish dissident. Where Rudolph stands with Bettina, however, is less clear; her character is harder to puzzle out, perhaps representing the undecided and merely polite segment of the populace.

Being that there are few characters, however, it might have been more compelling to see Bettina’s seduction or a more obvious neutrality. Instead, the play spends much of its time detailing the couple’s infidelities and flaws, creating characters that are neither likable enough to be sympathetic nor loathsome enough to be interesting. Guloien and Lane do their utmost to breathe life into the disapproving wife and drug-addled husband, with Palk most emotionally affecting as a woman who feels unwanted by her family and grasps desperately at a second chance, and Matamoros an appealing element of chivalrous chaos.

Finally, the show’s design, while intriguing, doesn’t help matters. The playing space by Lorenzo Savoini is surrounded by a low illuminated bench that forms a square with rounded corners, with a small opening in the back so the players can enter. While some props and an inviting Christmas tree eventually appear, the sterile nature of the playing space keeps us at a metaphorical arm’s length. Keeping us at a physical arm’s length is the fact that, for much of the first half, the action takes place with the characters sitting on the bench at the back of the stage. At the same time, Savoini’s directed lighting is relatively low and hazy, with the fluorescent quality of an office. Combined with the narrative distance, the set and lighting have an unfortunate soporific effect.

The topic WINTER SOLSTICE covers is urgent and necessary. It’s important for all of us to recognize that fascism works by appealing to our moral and aesthetic sensibilities and desire to exclude an undesirable other, which can affect any part of the political spectrum. In deliberately not appealing to those same sensibilities, the production is intellectually sophisticated but misses the heart of the matter.

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