Here we go. Where to start? I watched this production three times over a 25-hour period.
Here We Go is a short one-act (in three parts) by British playwright Caryl Churchill — about 45 minutes in total. Churchill is one of the smartest playwrights I’ve encountered, and I’ve found that, when approaching her work, it’s best to have my wits about me, but the first time I saw Western Gold Theatre’s production I was so exhausted I could barely stay awake during the wordless third section. That wasn’t the fault of the script or production. When I returned for the matinee the next day, I was rewarded with what I could clearly see is one of the best shows I’ve witnessed from Western Gold. The script is smart, funny, adventurous, in many ways expertly performed in this mounting, and exquisitely produced.
Churchill, who is now 86, wrote Here We Go in 2015. It’s about aging and dying. And, with one exception, it’s being performed in this iteration by a cast of six who, like me, are staring mortality in the face.
In the first section, five acquaintances converse — often in shards of sentences — after a funeral. “We miss him” is the first line, but it’s not long before they start admitting they’ll forget. A lot of the content is funny. There’s some disagreement about whether the departed was a political anarchist, but consensus on the notion that he was a sexual anarchist.
Rosy Frier-Dryden glows in this section. I haven’t seen her onstage in decades and it’s a gift to have her back. She infuses every utterance with a vivacity that’s informed by a fully imagined worldview.
In the script, death is a prismatic presence. Every so often, one of the characters will break the conversation to turn to the audience and, spotlit, say something like, “I die six months later. I hang myself. I should have thought about who’d find me.”
In part two, we meet a character who has recently died. As he — the character is male in this production — considers what he might encounter in the afterlife, visions appear — terrifying sometimes — then disappear as he realizes he doesn’t believe in any of them. It’s a fantastic, fantastical conceit, filled with jackal-faced gods and carousing Vikings. And the capper, when this figure decides that we’re all, ultimately, temporary formulations in the endless ebb and flow of energy, is transcendent: “You’re just a thing that happens, like an elephant or a daffodil.”
David Bloom is compellingly physical in this role, poling his way across the River Styx, swaying in the boat. This full-bodied commitment and the specificity it demands are arresting and they highlight the text’s humour. Imagining being reborn as a kestrel, Bloom throws himself into “Drop on the mouse!”, then suddenly sobers: “But I might be the mouse.”
Part three is the gut punch.
It’s simple: a caregiver helps a person who’s using a wheelchair to change from nightwear into daywear. The caregiver wheels that person to a spot in the sun (in this production). Then the carer helps their companion into nightwear and wheels them to a spot lit by the moon. At every pause between the clothing changes, the caregiver sits in a chair. The cycle repeats. This passage must take about 15 minutes.
For me, it’s all about the tedium of end-of-life intimacy and the intimacy of this kind of tedium. Rosy Frier-Dryden in the chair and Bernard Cuffling as her attendant delineate a tender — and exhausting — descent, as Frier-Dryden’s affectionate glances, her ability to help, her will to keep going fade and Cuffling’s resources, but never his love, are depleted. Well into the second day of this condensed decline, he strokes Frier-Dryden’s hair matter-of-factly and it’s so touching I gasped.
During each of the pauses, as Cuffling sits, John Webber’s lighting pulls his face out of the darkness. I’ve never seen Cuffling look so beautiful, a sculptural distillation of fatigue and devotion.
These two are such pros.
So is Webber. I can’t remember the last time I saw lighting as evocative as the series of cues Webber offers in the second section, the one about the newly dead guy. Colours shift, angles of illumination alter, intensities vary — and it’s all faultlessly, creatively in service of the text.
Torquil Campbell’s sound and music design is similarly successful in its service: lyricism to introduce the challenges of parts one and three; distant Vikings and others in part two.
Glenn MacDonald’s elemental set, with its arched portal in a blue wall, is sophisticated in its simplicity.
I watched this production a third time because Churchill offers wide-open interpretive leeway: speeches aren’t assigned; there are no defined characters. She stipulates that between three and eight performers can deliver the text.
Given this freedom, Bracht is also offering a second version of Here We Go, in which some of the characters, as they have been defined by this company, are assigned to different actors. To check this out, I watched Here We Go a third time. The second casting mostly didn’t work as well for me, but it has its strengths and comparing the versions is instructive — mostly about the range and influence of interpretation.
I want to say one more thing: this mounting of Here We Go is a persuasive validation of Western Gold Theatre and its mandate. Western Gold exists to provide a showcase and home for older artists. No other company I know of has been able to persuade Frier-Dryden to perform onstage recently. Where else could I have seen Here We Are so meaningfully embodied by the actors who should be performing it?
HERE WE GO by Caryl Churchill. Directed by Kathryn Bracht. A Western Gold Theatre production. At the PAL Theatre until May 25. (Tickets and information)
PHOTO CREDIT: (Photo of Rosy Frier-Dryden by Javier Sotres. Costume by Barbara Clayden.)
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