John Nyman
Senior Staff writer
@excalweb
Cruel and Tender should not have had trouble pleasing a contemporary audience.
Projects taking aim at America’s War on Terror, Bush-era militarism, and the hell both impose on our emotions and sensibilities have been happily received by liberal-minded arts fanatics over the last 10 years. By combining these themes with the gravitas of an ancient Greek classic, Cruel and Tender, Canadian Stage’s new production, seemed to have all the tools it needed to repeat the pattern.
But whether the genre has grown stale or the production’s flaws were overwhelming, filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s most recent theatrical work failed on nearly all counts. In both script and presentation, the play was overdramatic, predictable, and grating. At its best, the play built to visually stunning but meaningless tableaus drawn from Egoyan’s expertise in film. At its worst, it was an act of cruelty to its audience.
Adapted from Sophocles’ The Trachiniae (c. 430 BCE), which covers the fall of Heracles and his wife Deianeira, Cruel and Tender follows Amelia, the General’s wife, as she and her attendants await her husband’s return. Amelia’s place in the General’s house is threatened by the arrival of Laela, an African woman the General has taken as a lover and a spoil of war, and she is driven to send her husband a love potion which turns out to be a debilitating poison.
The plot’s extravagance was Cruel and Tender’s first and biggest problem. Monologues and exchanges were often taken over by unnecessary back story, and the play’s progression was dominated by over-explained plot twists that barely followed narrative or dramatic logic and were not important to the play’s artistic direction, making the audience unsure of how to view further actions.
Following from its flawed story arc, the production was dull. New plot points, important or not, cropped up in dialogue constantly, creating an overabundance of dramatic reveals and long explanations. Actual interactions between the characters, where they did appear, were stilted and unfulfilling. Where the script did reach some kind of conclusion, it gave little beyond shallow truisms: war is bad, lying is bad, etc.
Actress Arsinée Khanjian, as Amelia, did a decent job of keeping her lines engaging and high-stakes, but her character was written with too much unfocused whining and too little understandable development to keep the play together. Even considering its short duration (about one and a half hours with no intermission), Cruel and Tender was very hard to sit through.
Supporters of the play may point out that its imperfect plot construction and lack of subtlety were mostly a result of its source material, a Greek tradition rooted in extensive dialogue and powerful drama. Cruel and Tender, however, got every step of the adaptation process wrong. The script tried too hard to maintain the unbelievable plot complexities and character traits that make the original unpalatable to modern audiences. At the same time, it did away with the sense of significance Sophocles achieves by linking his play to legend, to instead build a clumsy structure of contemporary contexts and references.
Thankfully, Egoyan was able to put the breadth of his film experience to work with his visual effects—the one redeeming feature. Though the bare white set presented problems for the actors, being too large to facilitate intimate interaction but too small to emphasize the grandeur of their performance, it provided a dramatic canvas for Egoyan’s inventive scene-ending tableaus. Unfortunately, alongside a poorly handled storyline, these scenes seemed more like surreal interludes than significant contributions.
Despite Cruel and Tender’s blemish on their current season, Canadian Stage is a theatre company for students to look out for. While tickets to the performance are normally priced up to nearly $100, the company’s C-Stage promotion offers tickets to viewers under 30 for only $12.50. Even the best seats in the house are included in the promotion, if patrons book early enough.
Cruel and Tender was not that knockout performance its renowned director, respectable cast, and classic source material suggest it should have been. On one level, it completely missed the point of adaptation, transplanting its original’s flaws and trashing its merits. More importantly, it was simply intolerable to watch.
Cruel and Tender will be performed at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts’ Bluma Appel Theatre until February 18.
