The ideal audience member for Nicolas Bisson’s Butcher is a clueless one.
That’s why it’s hard to write a review of the production, which is currently playing at the Great Canadian Theatre Company (GCTC).
Bisson’s story begins with familiarity and then steps slowly out of safety and into darkness. I experienced that progression knowing what was coming. I think it would have been even more effective if I’d gone in blind.
Hamilton Barnes enters the narrative blind. The bookish British lawyer, played by Jonathan Koensgen, is called to a Toronto police station on Christmas Eve. There he meets Detective Lamb, who explains the circumstances: A strange old man has arrived at the station with a butcher’s hook around his neck, and a Hamilton Barnes business card attached to the end of the hook.
The man only speaks Lavinian, an obscure Eastern European language. Written on the business card in Lavinian are the words “arrest me.”
I was drawn in early on not just by this premise, but by the humorous exchanges between Barnes and Detective Lamb (played by Sean Devine). At one point Lamb, an annoying but lovable family man, begs Barnes to pretend to be Santa in a phone conversation with his young daughter. Barnes finally agrees and it’s a charming moment: both actors became likeable sympathetic human beings—people I recognized in a story I knew.
This is how Butcher unsettles: through the slight banality of the setting and plot structure. The police station set at the GCTC looks worn and familiar. The thriller format is recognizable, as is the repartee between Barnes and Detective Lamb. That’s what makes it so disconcerting when things go awry.
They go awry when Elena the translator arrives at the station.
She’s Lavinian too, and becomes a window into a dark civil war past. She brings genocidal violence out of history and into the mundane Toronto police office. Samantha Madely stands out in this role: she is imposing and a bit terrifying.
Koensgen is also a highlight. He portrays the old Lavinian stranger as vulnerable, but also harsh and cruel. I couldn’t understand what he said, but he communicated tremendous meaning through tone and facial expression.
Effects are used sparingly in Butcher. The lighting is regular and even until moments of change. When Elena arrives, lights go down and music comes up.
From then on, changes in lighting and sound are only used to signal physical brutality within the narrative. Perhaps this was meant to dramatize moments of violence in order to make them more engrossing and impactful, but if that’s so, it had the opposite effect on me. “You are watching a play,” this effect seemed to remind me. “You are watching pain and violence become spectacle.”
In a play that deals with brutality and violence on a much wider scale, this sort of reminder is necessary.
At one point Elena speaks of living in a world not only indifferent to suffering but bored by it. This play makes a story of human suffering thrilling and engaging, but also quite uncomfortable to observe. I think that structurally the production could have gone even further to destabilize the audience. Then again, its purpose is first and foremost to entertain.
Would it be more truthful and realistic for stories about civil war and genocide to be dull, uncomfortable, and painful throughout? Perhaps. But if they were, would anyone even care to watch?
