Director: Robert Garfat

Cast:
Gilbert Martineau: Stephen Bland
Thomas Wancicovski: Tim Healy
Her: Sharon Heath

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a review from our archives...

PUT THE PLOT TOGETHER YOURSELF, WELL, SORT OF
By Max Wyman
Theatre Critic

“Warning,” says the program.  “Live welding.  Please do not look at the flame.” With a set-up like that, any show that’ s less than riveting is going to be in big trouble.

REVIEW

The new Pink Ink Theatre production of The Cezanne Syndrome manages to hold you for its non-stop 90 minutes – though it’s up to you to weld the fragments of story into coherent form.

This co-production with the Vancouver Little Theatre is the English-language premiere of an award-winning play by Quebec writer Normand Canac-Marquis.

The flame of the acetylene torch is the first thing you see after the lights go down.  Then, “Is it over now?” a voice asks.

What the voice wants to be over is the anguish of guilt that besets the central character, Gilbert, as, sitting at his workbench, welding his engine-parts, he goes over and over the details leading up to a tragic road accident.

The story is presented to us in remembered, sometimes contradictory fragments (Gilbert, says the author, is experiencing “the martyrdom of a hallucinatory paranoia from sticking too closely to reality,” whatever that means).

Robert Garfat’s direction is taut and strongly visual; Rebekah Johnson’s set is wonderfully redolent of the claustrophobic workshop, and her light-plot helps it all cohere.

Stephen Bland, as the convincingly obsessive and self-lacerating Gilbert, and Sharon Heath (a touch over-emphatic in places) as Her, create an unnervingly plausible relationship that is disintegrating ungracefully.  Tim Healy is a smoothly unflappable detective.

Cezanne doesn’t impinge much except in a quote that may well be the key to the evening – what matters is not so much the object observed as the quality of the observing.

Too bad there’s not more to think about than the obsessive re-examinations of this undeniably riveting psycho-drama.

Assistant Director: Garry Davey
Set and Lighting Designer: Rebekah Johnson
Costume Designer: Jeanette Bijde-Vaate
Sound Designer: Rubert Lindsay
Stage Manager: Russell Martin
Assistant Stage Manager and Props: Sharlaine McIntyre
Photographer: Stephen Mitchell