The good folks at Studio Theatre set a mighty high dramatic bar mounting Howard Baker’s Scenes from an Execution.

Baker, for starters, is not a playwright who comes to mind when you’re thinking "theatrical cakewalk," "crowd-pleaser," or "accessible."

This rascally British dramatist eschews traditional theatre tropes, easy entertainment value, realism and psychological veracity for a more-serious-than-serious idea-based body of deconstructive work.

These are the kinds of plays people feel compelled to talk about using words like "patriarchy," "cultural lens," and "the psychopathology of capitalism"–at least when they are feeling kind. When they are not feeling kind, they’ll add words like "verbose" and "agitprop" and talk about the piece’s overall narrative shortfalls and didactic excesses.

Fun stuff, especially his early work like A Passion in Six Days which was wholly set in a Labour Party conference, a venue most of us would likely chew our own arm off to escape in real life. A company needs to really work to makes these plays truly come to life and allow their darkly bitter intellectual light to shine in their stone-cold postmodern, emotionally low-wattage precision.

But this Studio Theatre production of Baker’s 1984 Scenes from an Execution is a wildly successful and crafty cracking of this toughest-of-tough dramatic nuts. In particular, I’d have to tip the reviewer’s shiny black top hat to director Kathleen Weiss, assigning full points for minimizing the work’s structural quirks and emphasizing the play’s dry literary wit and brainy themes.

Typical of many a self-referential work, Baker’s piece is about the oft-ignored process of cultural construction and assessment, probing the tough questions about artistic responsibility and the vicissitudes of public taste. Plot-wise this thematic struggle is embodied in the form of fictionalized Renaissance Italian painter Galactia (loosely based on Artemesia Gentileschi and played with harridan-like volume by Nadien Chu) who is assigned a 100-foot-long public painting commission honouring the bloody sea-battle of Lepanto.

The painter decides that her deeply essentialist mania for truth allows her to visually hector the Venetian state and its chillingly passive-aggressive doge (played with a surreal if not sublime edge by Jesse Martyn). Predictably she piles on the terror and unvarnished realism until she’s jailed for bad moral hygiene.

This being a Baker play, just when you think it’s going to stoop to the level of an Oscar Wilde bon mot (i.e., there being no moral or immoral books, just well-written and badly-written ones), it twists midair. Morphing into an oddball poststructural meditation about the semiotic free-floating nature of art, the play makes a brilliant point about the critic’s sang-froid ability to lick "100 feet of pain smooth" off of a work, exposing the short-lived and easily decontextualized nature of artistic scandal. The last great irony is watching Galactia be more effectively destroyed by superficially praise and the semiotic rehabilitation of her work than she would have had she remained a happy martyr for Truth.