Ed Ellis

Cushioning The Blow Of The Satire | Tess Degenstein wallops Joel Crichton in Largo Desolato.

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Timms Centre for the Arts

LARGO DESOLATO
Directed by Beau Coleman. Written by Václav Havel. Translation by Tom Stoppard. Starring Joel Crichton, Holleay Rohm, Joëlle Préfontaine, and Tess Degenstein. Timms Centre for the Arts (University of Alberta). To Nov. 8. Tickets: 420-1757/tixonthesquare.ca
***1/2

A lot of art ends up being autobiographical by accident, but in Largo Desolato, Czech playwright and politician Václav Havel deals his friends and fans a particularly harsh, undisguised blow: he equates them, one to one, with totalitarianism and the secret police. The more supportive they are of his work, the more fascist they’re made out to be. I’d hate to be on the guest list at that premiere.

The gala at the Timms Centre last week, on the other hand, had a much more jovial tone to it. Director Beau Coleman’s production for Studio Theatre is a decidedly upbeat romp, with zippy choreography and lightly barbed dialogue. In fact, most of the darkness in Havel’s script (and there is plenty there) gets pushed way out to the margins — with generally good effects.

Largo Desolato is set in the house of Leopold (Joel Crichton), a dissident writer who’s as scared of being hauled away by the government as he is of having recently been championed as the spokesman for the oppressed. He sits facing his door in a state of constant worry, dreading the inevitable buzz of his bell and unable to do anything but obsess and self-medicate. The bell does ring, many times: only instead of the police, Leopold has to contend with his roommate, his quasi-girlfriend, his friends, and his adoring fans. They all want to know where his long-awaited new book is, and why he isn’t doing more to help the revolution.

I don’t doubt for a second that rebel writers can freeze up just when action is needed, but come on: there’s something really distasteful about Leopold’s woe-is-me attitude, in part because it seems like a thin veil for Havel’s thoughts on his own situation in the 1970s and ’80s. Crichton’s Leopold is a nice mess of tics and panic attacks — I particularly liked his little running fits back and forth in front of his couch — but the world he’s in is solipsistic. Everyone else exists only to bother him, the genius at work.

Still, there’s a lot to like about Coleman’s production. Havel’s cyclical dialogue (nimbly translated to English by the Czech-born Tom Stoppard) gets matched with wonderfully stylized movements, notably the way Leopold looks out his peephole, as well as basically every move his equally paranoid friend Eddie (Joëlle Préfontaine) makes.

Colin Winslow’s set is sparse but efficient, a combination of modern furniture and paneless windows and patio doors; there’s also live video of the audience screened against the rear wall, further driving home the surveillance themes.

Making best use of the play’s amped-up absurdity are Mathew Hulshof and Branden Martin, who perform double duty as Leopold’s devoted fans at the paper mill and the glowering government agents who eventually come knocking. Again, there’s an obvious parallel being made between fans and enemies, but these two have great comic timing, and bounce off of one another with an easy charisma that makes the metaphor much easier to swallow.

The play’s big argument is that if you live under totalitarianism, you will become a totalitarian. In that respect, the real hero of Largo Desolato is Leopold’s lover Lucy (Tess Degenstein). Where most characters are reduced to clinging to one emotion, or repeating the same monologues again and again, Lucy feels in all directions: she laughs, and cries, and gets angry, and challenges the absurdities around her rather than automatically accommodating them.

Leopold is lucky to have her, and the bubbly Degenstein makes her extremely easy to love, but she gets swept aside midway through with barely a second thought. It’s a twin tragedy: neither Leopold nor the production pauses to notice that the police have abducted the very model of what he’s supposed to be fighting for. Rather than chase her down, or even acknowledge the police’s viciousness, he goes back to worrying about what kind of paper his manifesto ought to be written on.