A mysterious man appears at a police station one night with a meat hook around his neck and no way to explain himself—this is the premise of Nicolas Billon’s Butcher, a play which will open at the Great Canadian Theatre Company March 3.
Butcher tells the tale of Josef, a man whose past actions set a narrative of brutality and revenge in motion.
“I really wasn’t prepared for how upsetting some of the process was going to be,” said director Eric Coates. “I find myself in the middle of the day sometimes convinced that this story is actually unfolding in front of me in real life . . . The material here is so powerful you can’t help it sometimes.”
Coates and the actors in the production were careful when they talked about the plot—while it deals with the weighty topics of war criminals and genocide, Butcher is first and foremost a thriller they said, and they dared not reveal spoilers.
When Josef appears at the station he is non-communicative: he only speaks “Lavinian,” a language created for the play by two University of Toronto professors.
Coates said actor John Koensgen, who has played this role before, makes “absolute sense of this language that doesn’t exist as a vehicle to express himself . . . Even though I don’t understand the individual words, I can always tell what the character is driving at.”
Koensgen said he has to treat Lavinian like it’s real, memorizing each word so the other actors know their cues. He said he thinks Billon deliberately created ambiguity through the use of this fictional language, particularly in moments that are not translated.
He said Butcher is one of the best plays he’s done in 40 years of acting.
He said Mirvish Theatre in Toronto will be picking it up next year, and he thinks “it’s going to have a long life around the world . . . It has the breadth of a great Greek drama.”
However, a 2014 Globe and Mail review of Butcher raised a compelling question—should a play about genocide be so entertaining?
Coates said it’s an “ethical quandary.”
“It really turns the entertainment screw . . . and I find myself feeling kind of conflicted about that because the piece has such a quintessential thriller structure,” Coates said.
This entertainment can, if done right, spark emotional vulnerability which leads to introspection, Coates said. And the play itself is very appealing for audiences, he added.
“People have proven again and again in the world that although they claim to want nothing but light entertainment, they’re actually drawn very powerfully to work that scares them and upsets them, as long as they can maintain a sort of a safe distance from which to view it,” he said.
Coates said he is happy to be stepping back from the performance soon. While each of the characters inspires empathy at different moments in the play, he says their actions and agendas “disturb” him.
“I don’t identify personally with them, but boy, I dislike some of them intensely,” he admitted.
Bringing the story to the stage will be “a great relief,” he said. “I’ve actually rarely been so eager to open a play.”
