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Culture Theatre

Cruel And Tender

CRUEL AND TENDER by Martin Crimp (Canadian Stage). At the Bluma Appel Theatre (27 Front East). Runs to February 18. $22-$99. 416-368-3110. See Listing. Rating: NN

You can say this about Atom Egoyan’s production of Martin Crimp’s Cruel And Tender: it’s never dull. How could it be, with a bad karaoke session, blown-up video projections and many scenes that end with characters shattering glass?

But these gimmicks don’t leave much of a lasting impression, and they steal focus from Crimp’s play, which is an update of a lesser-known tragedy by Sophocles.

Amelia (Arsinee Khanjian) is a bored, pampered wife and mother whose husband, the General (Daniel Kash), is engaged in an anti-terrorist operation somewhere in Africa. When it’s revealed that he razed a city to capture a young woman named Laela (Abena Malika), who then shows up on her doorstep, Amelia concocts a plan to win her man back.

Crimp wrote the play in the aftermath of 9/11, and it’s easy to see a metaphor here about the suspect motives for waging a war on terror. The script is less successful in detailing the disintegration of a family, and it doesn’t help that Crimp, like Sophocles, doesn’t allow husband and wife to confront each other.

As Amelia, Khanjian thrashes around and has an intriguing stage presence, but her familiar quirky vocal rhythms and inflections add nothing to her character. (She was much better in Canadian Stage’s The Palace Of The End.) Contrast this with Nigel Shawn Williams’s velvet-voiced government spin doctor, or Brenda Robins’s crisply matter-of-fact housekeeper, and you’ve got a black hole at the centre of this production.

Even Kash, in his single scene, makes a strong impression, clad in a yellow track suit and stumbling down the staircase on Debra Hanson’s stark white set, then shouting out his messianic gibberish to a video camera.

Egoyan also should have told his design team to tone things down. John Gzowski’s sound design grumbles and roars for no apparent reason, while Michael Walton still seems to be working out his lighting design (On or off? Please decide.)

That said, one of the best moments in the show comes during a blackout, when a character aims a flashlight all over the theatre and talks about the destruction of the war. The horrors we imagine are more brutal than what we witness onstage.

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