DITCH by Geoff Kavanagh, directed by Ed Roy (Sometimes Y Theatre). At Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace (16 Ryerson). To November 20. $10-$20, Sun pwyc. 416-504-7529, sometimesytheatre.com. See listing. Rating: NN
Sartre may have determined that hell is other people, but Ditch, Sometimes Y’s uneven revival of Geoff Kavanagh’s hectic Arctic romance, argues something a little lonelier: hell is being abandoned by all to die in a pit with the man you hate to love.
In this story of doomed, or maybe just incomplete love, two Royal Navy men, Whitbread (Clinton Walker) and Hennesey (Robert Tsonos), have been literally ditched by their hunger-crazed shipmates on John Franklin’s 1845 Arctic expedition. They have feelings for each other, but they’re guarded and, in their perilous situation, they experience a mix of acceptance and reflexive shame, uncertain how to love each other given their Victorian values.
This ain’t The Ride Down Mount Brokeback Whitbread and Hennesey prod and pick at each other, hungry and weak, disappearing into crazed reveries for minutes at a time.
This is where the production begins to falter. Director Ed Roy, while finding some nice levels in Steve Lucas’s serviceable but unattractive set, doesn’t calibrate Walker and Tsonos’s pitch enough. Trying to offset the static setting, he has them swing wildly between hysteria and strangled woe, with little in between. Too quickly the men succumb to terror – hallucinating so vigorously that there’s rarely a moment for them to simply connect.
Only one scene diverges from that pattern under the canopy of an overturned lifeboat, Hennesey tells a story about selling onion soup on the streets of London. Momentarily, we feel the men’s valiant humanity, a lantern playing across their exhausted faces.
Ditch may be based on a horrific historical event, but it’s also a striking analogue for all-consuming, unattainable love – if only briefly affecting.
stage@nowtoronto.com
