My Granny the Goldfish: weirdness
What a weird play. My Granny the Goldfish by Anosh Irani is at turns laugh out loud funny, casually racist, treats alcoholism with as much respect as a Foster Brooks’ routine and descends into a predictable movie-of –the-week plot featuring unearned moments of character transcendence/revelation.
In this première production, currently on at the revamped and newly opened Arts Club Revue Stage*, Nico, a young UBC student from Mumbai, ends up in a Vancouver hospital when a orange-sized growth is found in his body. He forbids his family from visiting but his maternal Granny sneaks away and makes the trip, showing up unannounced at Nico’s bedside. The first half of the play is split between the sanitized white of a Vancouver hospital ward, where Nico and Granny hang out, and the garish, crowded apartment of Nico’s parents Farzeen and Dara. In Amir Ofek’s clever but awkward (the playing spaces are tiny) stage design, the Mumbai apartment sits above the Vancouver hospital space and the parents are positioned like distant gods speculating about what is happening on the other side of the world.
The humour in the first half is at times dazzlingly. Vibrant images and fresh ideas are embedded within the jokes, including world-weary dogs, imagining drowning cows as pets and the name Charlene being romantic. Yet, as original as they are, the jokes sit within the script as just that, jokes. Rarely do they flow through a natural exchange between the characters. The most obvious example that springs to mind is when Granny asks Nico what the national bird of Canada is and Nico answers “the common loon”. You just know that Granny has a witticism about, loons, common and Canada ready to launch. This is the most basic of joke set-up structure and it robs the play of any sense of grounded reality. Indeed, the extended joke telling gave the first half of the play the feel of a sketch comedy scene, albeit the funniest ever written, with no over-arching sense of purpose or, you know, story. If you found the jokes funny, as the audience did on opening night shouting down the house on occasion, then this was all great fun. The jokes are really, really funny.
The story, such as it is, arrives in the second half. Granny lies to Nico’s parents to get them to come to Canada (the lie is that Nico is about to marry a Chinese girl – more on this later) and then we have a big, life-changing reveal which I doubt surprised many in the audience. Granny and Nico also have monologues that are intended to give the characters depth but in the end feel unnatural (and therefore unearned) given the world that Irani has set them in. In particular, Nico’s decision to give up business studies (and, one assumes, his germ-phobic ways – his paranoia about germs is a major feature of the first act) and become a social worker in the streets of Mumbai’s red light district seems unlikely, although it does afford one of the best laughs, when Farzeen effectively says “what do you know, you’re a social worker”, only minutes after learning that her son was contemplating a change in studies.
This snappy line is a clue to the strength of My Granny the Goldfish: the women. Granny and Farzeen are fantastic creations and evocative mirrors of one another (I enjoyed that Farzeen is, if anything, nastier than her mother, a nice counterbalance to the stereotype of the irreverent grandparent that the Granny character stays this side of). Veena Sood as Farzeen is outstanding. Her ability to inhabit the character and her comic timing are both flawless. In her hands, Farzeen comes across as a compelling, self-absorbed smart-ass of the best sort. Granny is equally well written (although weakened by Irani’s need to soften her with her reveals – we get Farzeen without this stuff) but unfortunately Balinder Johal is not as strong a performer. While she’s very good on the deadpans, she hasn’t the range to create the nuance that the role demands. The two males are basically foils for the women (although both do have their moments of comedy, this is one witty family). David Adams is his usual standout self as the shady, bookie father and Shaker Paleja as Nico does some nice work in being the show’s narrator and, ultimately, straight man to his zany family.
Anyone who has sat through one of my plays (or indeed read my reviews) knows that I’ll never be accused of being politically correct so I’m about to sail into uncharted waters here but stay with me on this one. There is a line towards the end of first act that caused my jaw to drop (I mean, literally, my mouth was open). Farzeen says a variant on the Chinese having slitty eyes. This wasn’t the first Chinese joke but it was the topper (and appropriate, I guess, that it came just before intermission). Nico’s family indulge in open racism – it is the catalyst that gets the mother and father to come to Vancouver, “imagine our nice Indian boy marrying a Chinese”. I don’t have a problem with the racism as far as it goes in terms of illuminating character and while I’m sympathetic to the argument that it’s the character making the joke not the playwright, ultimately, it is Irani who is making the slitty-eyed comment and he is the one gaining comic capital from racist jokes. As a white playwright, I could never get away with this (not that I’d ever want to write a series of anti-Chinese jokes in the first place). Is it okay for Irani because he’s Indian? And, yes, I’m aware that he makes many jokes at the expense of Indians – but then we’re in the territory of equal-opportunity nastiness. But screw that. Any writer capable of making me laugh at the idea of cows in a flood is too clever to have to indulge in this crap.
If anything, I was even more uncomfortable about the alcoholism. The play treads a strange line on this topic. It gains a lot of laughs from jokes about drinking and being drunk – and I’m fine with those – but there seems to be a serious issue of alcoholism alluded to in the play (Granny wants Farzeen to stop drinking) but we see no evidence of the damage one might expect – and there must be problems because why would drunken Granny want drunken daughter to sober up. I am quite willing to believe that there is a family of hard-drinkers who suffer minimal emotional and psychological damage but I don’t think that’s what Irani is intent on illustrating here. The real problem the family seems to be suffering from is an inability to connect with one another – they are all emotionally blocked up – is the alcohol meant to be a symptom of that blockage or the cause or something in between? I have no idea. All I know is that at certain point as the drinking jokes mounted I started to feel squeamish.
Director Lois Anderson does a great job with the performers and there are some lovely touches throughout the evening (although I could have done without the montage of Nico flopping around on his hospital bed to the sound of a syrupy song – a scene we’ve experienced in thousands of Hollywood romantic comedies).
So, after all that, should you go and see this play? I’m thinking yes. The humour is great and Sood is outstanding. However, if you’re sensitive to racist humour or have had a family damaged by alcoholism you might want to stay away.
Like I said, weird play.
My Granny the Goldfish by Anosh Irani. directed by Lois Anderson. An Arts Club Theatre Company production on at the Revue Stage on Granville Island. The production continues until May 15 for more info have a drink here.
*Kudos to the Arts Club on their new space, it looks fantastic and is comfortable with lots of leg room. Also, best wishes to TheatreSports as they launch themselves in their new home.