When Irish Guys Are Riling | James Hamilton, Chris Bullough, and Collin Doyle get into a scuffle in The Lonesome West.
THE LONESOME WEST
Directed by Julien Arnold. Written by Martin McDonagh. Starring Chris Bullough, Collin Doyle, Clarice Eckford, James Hamilton. To Mar 23. The Roxy (10708–124 St.) Tickets available at the Roxy box office (453-2440).
For an actor to say that theatre saved his life might sound pretentious, but Julien Arnold’s claim is actually legitimate. The local actor/director was appearing in a performance of Noises Off at the Citadel last November when he started to feel more than a little poorly.
“We were about halfway through,” he recalls, “and I started to feel what they describe as ‘the elephant sitting on your chest,’ this strange feeling of pressure on your breastbone, and I started sweating and getting nauseous, short of breath. The interesting part was that I was playing a character like that. It was a farce and my character was supposed to be fainting and nauseous and dizzy, so it was kind of ironic.”
This was something much more serious than a case of identifying too closely with his character. Ever the trouper, Arnold refused to let his mysterious affliction stop the show, even though his situation proved to be dire.
“I’d had a heart attack in front of 700 paying audience members,” Arnold says. “I didn’t know what it was and I thought, ‘I can’t let people down just because I’m a little under the weather.’ And who knows? Maybe that saved my life, because it was only the second preview so the adrenalin was still pumping pretty hard.... I was in ICU for about a week, of which I remember very little—though I do remember thinking, ‘This is going to make a great Fringe play one day.’”
Work might have been foremost in his mind as he recuperated, but it would be two months before the actor was physically up to the rigours of the stage. Now that he’s feeling better, Arnold is launching his professional directing career and his new company, the Atlas Theatre Co-op, with a production of The Lonesome West by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh—which just happens to be a play Arnold directed while doing his MFA at the University of Alberta a couple of years ago.
“The thing about doing it at the university,” he says, “is that you rehearse it like a regular play. It’s fully produced, then you only get to run for three days. You put all that work into it, but it’s more of an exercise than an actual show. So I figured if we could cobble together some of the same actors, we could probably put this show on somewhere and it won’t be like doing a show from scratch. And we had such a great time doing it at the university—it’s such a fun play to direct and act in, I think, and watch.”
The Lonesome West is the third and final of McDonagh’s Connemara plays, which use the same remote, depressed region of western Ireland as the backdrop for their savagely humourous depictions of small-town malaise and extreme familial strife. This visit to Connemara focuses on two brothers whose lifelong antagonism is compounded by their late father’s decision to leave everything to the elder son.
Those who saw the recent local productions of the other Connemara plays, The Beauty Queen of Leenane and A Skull in Connemara (in which Arnold performed), probably still bear scars from McDonagh’s dark, downbeat brand of comedy, but Arnold says The Lonesome West isn’t just more of the same.
“There isn’t actually any bloodshed,” he says. “There’s a certain amount of violence, but it mostly happens to inanimate objects, and the characters seem a little more sympathetic. They’re fairly despicable, the brothers, but you end up really rooting for them. The playwright gives them a moral dilemma toward the end of the play, and they’re really doing their best to be good people.”
According to plan, Arnold conscripted actors Collin Doyle and James Hamilton to reprise their roles as the brothers, while Chris Bullough and Clarice Eckford are the newcomers to the cast. Arnold says the combination of old and new elements in this production take some of the guesswork out of deciding whether it’s going to work in front of a crowd.
“There’s always this funny thing that happens when you rehearse a comedy: for the first few days everyone laughs and laughs, then after a week or so you start finding the jokes really lame and everybody stops laughing and you start to worry that maybe the play isn’t funny. But usually what happens is the audience does find it funny. In this case, we don’t have so much of that looming dread, so we can delve into the characters and the subtleties of the play a little more.”
Following the maiden voyage of Atlas Theatre, Arnold will warm up for the Shakespeare in the Park season by co-directing a fundraising production of Arsenic and Old Lace starring a cast of lawyers and judges. And later in the summer he’ll reunite with Teatro la Quindicina for a Fringe show, the nature of which is TBA.
