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2016/2017

Nov 4 - 20, 2016 Feb 10 - 26, 2017 March 25 - April 9, 2017

THE FIFTH OFF-MIRVISH SEASON

Exclusively for current season ticket holders! Check it out today!

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

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

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 #1RUNNING TIME: 85 MINS

Fight NightOntroerend Goed and The Border Project in co-production with Richard Jordan Productions, Theatre Royal Plymouth, Kunstencentrum Vooruit in association with Adelaide Festival of Arts

Interview With Director: Alexander Devriendt

Directed by Alexander Devriendt

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A Canadian premiere production with an all-Canadian cast!

The Toronto production of My Night With Reg features:

TIMFUNNELL

ALEXFURBER

MARTIN HAPPER

JEFF MILLER

GRAYPOWELL

JONATHAN WILSON

RUNNING TIME: 1 HOUR, 50 MINS

OFF-MIRVISH SHOW #2

ALL-CANADIAN CASTAt 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 fi lm 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.

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.

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.

LINDSAY DUNCAN (Actor - Birdman and Alice Through the Looking Glass)

My Night With Reg almost defi nes 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.

My Night With RegTHE STUDIO 180 PRODUCTION OF

By Kevin ElyotDirected by Joel Greenberg

Butcher: Can a play about torture and genocide be too entertaining? By J. Kelly NestruckAs 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.

RUNNING TIME: 90 MINS

OFF-MIRVISH SHOW #3

ButcherTHE WHY NOT THEATRE PRODUCTION OF

By Nicholas BillonDirected by Weyni Mengesha

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FIGHT NIGHT

OFF-MIRVISHPERFORMANCE SCHEDULE

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