The Globe and Mail, January 19, 2005
Taut family portrait hits all the right marks
By: Kamal Al-Solaylee
The powerful production of A Whistle in the Dark from the newly formed Company Theatre is proof that you can't beat a good script, a strong cast and a director who knows what he's doing. These are simple elements when broken down but their combination, as is the case in this claustrophobically intimate production, can create ticking time bombs that keep audiences on their toes for two hours.
First, the script. Tom Murphy's 1961 story of an Irish immigrant family in Coventry, England, has some specific social and economic echoes of its time -- black and Muslim immigrants were a relatively new phenomenon in postwar England -- but its psychological realism and muscular language could have been written the other day for all we know.
The main story is that of Michael Carney (Jonathan Goad), the older son who rebelled against the violence and petty crimes of his brothers and married an English woman, Betty (Sarah Dodd). His life is turned into a nightmare when three of his brothers move in with him, including the psychopathic Harry (Allan Hawco), more or less the gang leader. When the patriarch DaDa (Joseph Ziegler) and the youngest son Des (Philip Riccio) come for a visit, the family history of emotional manipulation, sordid survival tactics and violent confrontations is distilled in the course of one fateful day.
Murphy, only 24 when he wrote it and new to the theatre, dwells on a notion of Irish manhood and identity that is far from the quaintly rural and the mythical of his native predecessors. A Whistle in the Dark is what it feels like to be Irish, male and working-class immigrant in England in the 1960s -- in part a kitchen-sink drama for guys who never lift a finger in the kitchen. The dialogue may get the occasional mangled or inaudible delivery from a cast struggling with its distinct dialect but its punch remains intact.
Jason Byrne's direction is focused and unobtrusive, serving the needs of the script and helping his cast navigate a series of timed explosions, both physically and emotionally. There's no musical accompaniment to enhance a scene or act as a bridge to another: With so many distractions in the Carney family, Byrne tones down the outside world and allows this insider look to receive his cast's and his audience's undivided attention.
Even in smaller if not by any means underwritten roles, actors of David Jansen's, Oliver Becker's or Aaron Poole's calibre can create character parts to spread the action over a bigger and wider psychological terrain. With minor tonal and physical adjustments, Jansen's Mush for example, a hanger-on and wannabe Carney, reveals his outsider status, even if he longs to be one of the Carney boys. Dodd also holds her own against this full-throttled male assault with a quiet performance as the long-suffering English housewife.
It's when we come to the four main Carney men under Murphy's microscopic lenses that one senses certain discrepancies between actor and character, role and performance that Byrne hasn't quite adjusted. Much as I admire Hawco's persistence and integrity as a performer, I find it hard to believe in him completely as Harry, a man who can turn on a dime and against his own family. Physically, Hawco doesn't have the presence -- he is, among both his virtues and curses, too baby-faced -- but he carries the role on the strength of his mental prowess and instinctive reading of the character. Riccio suffers from the same problem but has a better chance because Des gets to morph from the younger brother into the psychopath-in-training he fully inhabits over the course of the day.
But if Hawco and Riccio have trouble reaching for their inner thugs, Goad creates the all-round good guy who wants out of his family's trail of destruction. It's an emotionally anchoring performance and Goad nails it with his characteristic intelligence and warmth.
Which leaves me with Ziegler's wonderfully operatic performance of the father, a mass of parental and masculine contradictions. Ziegler finds the humour and the pain of years of social degradation and missed opportunities in every one of his lines. However, occasionally he's so over the top that his performance jars with the verbal economy of the writing and the production. It may be intentional: It's no coincidence that the final scene isolates him from his children -- he may be the patriarch but he's also a breed apart.
By no means do these discrepancies undermine the production or skew it radically. They are mere quibbles about tone and delivery from a critic who stubbornly seeks perfection. The overall effect of the performances, writing and direction proves that this new company is one to welcome with open arms.