Stage/Theatre

What: (Everyone I Love Has) A Terrible Fate (Befall Them)
Where: VideoCabaret’s Deanne Taylor Theatre, 10 Busy Street
When: Now, until Sun., Nov. 12
Highlight: Raha Javanfar’s highly theatrical lighting design
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Cliff Cardinal’s latest is well-directed, consistently engaging and ambitiously conceptual.

FOR ACTOR AND PLAYWRIGHT Cliff Cardinal, solo shows are sandboxes to experiment in. In 2012’s Huff, he uses 20 characters to tell the story of an Indigenous family. And though the stand-up format of his William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, A Radical Retelling is more conventional, when it premiered in 2021, it caused a stir through bait-and-switch advertising.

His latest, (Everyone I Love Has) A Terrible Fate (Befall Them), produced by VideoCabaret in association with Crow’s Theatre (where As You Like It premiered and Huff will return in April), lies somewhere between those two approaches; its form is a sly and confessional monologue, but its content focuses on a fictional character dealing with a surreal dilemma in a dystopian world. Though the 80-minute show isn’t a full meal, it’s well-directed, consistently engaging and ambitiously conceptual.

Cardinal plays Robert, a man inflicted with a curse: every person he cares about is doomed, either to a life-altering illness or death. In an opening explanation including many repetitions of the play’s title, Robert details this predicament to the audience. The rest of the show explores his attempts to cope with its implications — how, he wonders, is he to live without loving?

It’s also the apocalypse, so meteors routinely fall from the sky. Just as Robert’s curse is a theatrical way of telling the story of someone who feels they can no longer love unreservedly, this dystopia — about which we get fairly little information — plays like a heightened version of our own fossil fuel-burning world.

Cardinal’s script is Kafkaesque, both in its linguistic complexity and its playfully winding approach to the representation of despair. Its pleasures, too, are similar to that of a good short story. Though (like much of Kafka’s work) it doesn’t feel wholly finished, its smart concept is enough to give it momentum.

Director Karin Randoja is key in ensuring the show doesn’t become overly literary. Together with lighting designer Raha Javanfar, she injects theatricality everywhere she can. Precisely hung lights carve out settings on the floor and spotlights isolate Cardinal in worlds of his own. Set designer JB Nelles gives Cardinal three different spaces to play about in, all with their own chair; behind each is a panel painted with edgy graffiti fit for a punk concert merch table.

Cardinal’s performance is an odd beast. By some traditional theatrical metrics, it could be improved — his struggle to keep up with the text is sometimes evident, for instance; it’s certainly not a realistic portrayal. Yet, having seen Cardinal perform a couple times before, it has an odd allure: the writer underneath the fiction is always present, poking through. It’s as if he’s doing a reading of this strange tale in a dingy bar rather than truly embodying it. Whether we’re laughing or crying at Robert, we get the sense Cardinal is doing so with us.

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