Arts & Culture

What: Winter Solstice
Where: Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley St.
When: Now, until Sat., Feb. 2
Highlight: The in-the-moment excitement of trying to piece together where the plot is heading
Rating: NN (out of 5)
Why you should go: A solid cast doing their best to make this material work in an ill-suited context

FOR ANYBODY WHO’S been baffled to witness the rising tide of global fascism, Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Winter Solstice has at least one prescient insight to share: fascists, like vampires, cannot enter your home without being invited. If they’ve managed to take root, it’s worth examining how we’ve made them feel welcome.

Making its Canadian English-language premiere in a classy production by Necessary Angel Theatre (in association with Canadian Stage and Birdland Theatre), Winter Solstice presents a microcosm for a liberal nation at odds with its history. Set during Christmas Eve—contrary to what the title might suggest, an imprecision that the script acknowledges—married artist-intellectuals Albert (Cyrus Lane) and Bettina (Kira Guloien) have their quiet holiday plans disrupted when Bettina’s mother Corinna (Nancy Palk) invites an enigmatic stranger named Rudolph (Diego Matamoros) to join their festivities.

Something seems a little off about the genial houseguest. He’s recently returned from Paraguay and casually expresses disconcerting views on national identity, artistic ideals, and the proper circumstances in which killing might actually be justified. And in case that was all too subtle, he even manages to slip in a Mein Kampf  joke.

You’ve probably already figured out what’s going on here, of which the play is well aware. It wants you to pat yourself on the back for noticing these details, building anticipation for how this will all come to a boil when the other characters eventually catch up with what we’ve surmised. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of other drama destined to enter the fray, with aspects of Albert and Bettina’s marital strife promising similarly explosive revelations soon to come.

Upon establishing these seemingly predictable (however engaging) circumstances, the script manages to thwart audience expectations by refusing to pay off these set-ups with a conventionally satisfying climax. This is, above all, a play about living in a state of inertia. It deliberately seeks to frustrate expectations in service of that core theme, so I suspect the production team will have no objections if audiences go home frustrated. Ticketholders, on the other hand, might not be so keen.

Try as they might, the heavy-hitting cast can’t salvage the material. As much as Matamoros is a reliably compelling stage presence, he falls short of rendering Rudolph as being charismatic enough to charm the audience into overlooking his fascistic rhetoric—let alone becoming unexpectedly seduced by it, which is so clearly the desired outcome. Lane does a fine job as an empathetic central character slowly questioning reality; those who saw Wedding Band at Stratford two summers ago might experience some déjà vu at a few key moments. Palk excellently pairs starry-eyed infatuation with tragic loneliness in her amusing portrayal of a senior woman exhibiting behaviours associated with a schoolgirl crush. Guloien, likewise, merit’s a nod for imbuing enough of Palk’s essence to believably come across as a chip off the same block. Frank Cox-O’Connell showcases impressive range in his oscillations between the inferiority complex-laden family friend, Konrad, and the confidently omniscient voice of the principal narrator. (Oh yeah, there’s third-person narration. A lot of it.)

If the characters are condemned to coexist with their nation’s ghosts, it’s worth questioning what nation this is, exactly. As timely as this premise might seem on paper, the resonance falls flat by not feeling sufficiently placely. David Tushingham’s translation (originally commissioned for a 2017 UK production) and Alan Dilworth’s direction aim for a sense of placelessness that’s never quite German, but never allows itself to become fully British or Canadian either. There are few (if any) direct references to a specific setting, and the elegant minimalism of Lorenzo Savoini’s set and Ming Wong’s costume designs seem intent on corroborating that ambiguity.

In this same geographic vein, I’m left wondering how this parable is meant to connect with Canadian audiences, for whom the legacy of World War II is far less a matter of haunting than it would have been to the play’s original audience. As a national consciousness, we bear no collective guilt for the atrocities that weigh so heavily upon the German national spirit. That’s not to say that we don’t have our own fair share of repressed phantoms and closeted skeletons, but this text is too particular to its original context to meaningfully gesture toward any of those. Our demons have not been exiled to South America, patiently awaiting their opportunity to return with a vengeance.

As incongruous as the play feels, there’s nonetheless something admirable about Dilworth’s ongoing commitment to introducing Canadian audience’s to Schimmelfennig’s work—see also, Necessary Angel’s immersive audio-staging of The Great Fire and Soulpepper’s production of Idomeneus. Winter Solstice provides another glimpse at what this fascinating writer has to offer. Let’s see if we continue to welcome him into our home.