Interesting Acting

Now for the actors—all highly competent, but not all entirely successful in what they seemed to be attempting in this play. Murray Gronwall held the audience's attention throughout. He looked right, his exits and entrances were superb; but he lacked something needed for a tragic figure, the battlefield of good and evil. Perhaps his voice has not the kind of depth and flexibility that the rather spare lines of the part needed to give them body. The confession scene came off because the audience was captured, like the reader of a detective novel, but the morning-after scene with Lisa failed because the tentative nature of what seemed like improvisation was working against, not with, the actor.

A performance doubtful in a different way was Anne Flannery's as a Dickensian grotesque, the lame, Cassandra-like Maria. This was horrid realism, and successful; but the characterisation seemed to be established from the head down, rather than from the heart up. When Maria was one of a group, with attention focused elsewhere, she ceased to be Maria.

This never happened with Maarten van Dyke's characterisation of the enthusiastic, idealistic, self-willed revolutionary, Verkhevensky. He exhausted the audience with his exuberance and captivating malice. Yet the strength of the political agitator was demonstrated most successfully in the one scene, the revolutionaries' council, where he was both still and silent; a rather fine achievement.

Irene Esam, as Lisa, was most convincing, and consistently so; the languor and stability and beauty of the old Russian upper class was never in doubt. She, with Pat Evison, as Vavasa, and Ronald Lynn, as Stepan, created a Chekovian stillness against which the attack and undermining instincts of the revolutionaries became clearly outlined. It was Pat Evison's magnificence and professional style which pulled the production to Its final note of real tragedy. But how to reconcile this with the general disparity of tone originating in the play itself?

Mathew O'Sullivan's ompassionate performance Shaltor was balanced by Raymond Boyle's perverse and comic morbidity as Kirilov; Ariadre Damlov's sophisticated burlesque by Sonja Savelius's ingenuousness and Russell Duncan's boorish drunken irascibility by Ross Jolly's cringing yet insinuating devil promptings.