Smile – a bit weakly – for the camera
Stephen Lowe’s play Smile did well at last year’s Momentum Festival in Nottingham, and I can see why Vancouver's My Theatre Company (the presenting company's frustratingly generic name) wanted to mount the piece. It’s the kind of story that draws you in slowly and then wallops you with a hit that's both emotional and intellectual.
At first everything seems innocuous. Summer's winding down. At the end of a pier, on the outskirts of a fairground, there’s a photo studio where you can walk in and have your picture taken in any outfit you choose. Then you’ll be superimposed onto the background scene of your choice, and you can send the resulting postcard to your family and friends: tropical beach shot, mansion, café in Paris – you name it.
From there we’re drawn into a seemingly innocent exchange between the photographer, Deborah, a heavy drinker, and an allegedly random passerby, Jan, who’s looking for a special picture to send home to his wife and child. Turns out Deborah (Mary Phan) was a war photographer for years; turns out Jan (Bryan Roach) is looking for a particular image of a murder, that he knows she took because she won awards for it.
The subject matter is compelling – what is the ethical position that war photography can, does, or should hold? In Deborah’s words – “show me a photograph that did any good in the world!”
On top of this, the script is intelligent and nuanced. Lowe is a seasoned writer and he is innovative with technology in a way that is both unusual and logical. The photo-editing software and the photographer’s manipulations of various digital images are described directly in the text and move the plot forward, so having the computer “desktop” screen projected onto the wall and watching Deborah “vanish” people from various scenes works well.
But you can see that I’m stalling. The problem with this production of Smile is that the acting doesn’t hold up the script. Each actor has a segment near the beginning where they have to narrate action and then perform the action. It’s a stylistic distancing device which is part of Lowe’s script and the timing needs to be formal. It’s hard to pull off; the night I saw it, the timing it didn’t quite work. For example, Deborah states – “She gets a drink” – then walks across the stage to get a bottle of gin – “She returns to her desk and begins to work at high speed” – she walks back to the desk and fumbles around with the mouse to click through Photoshop layers (but moves slowly, not quickly) – and I can’t tell what’s meant to be rhythm, what’s accidental pause. In other words, the pauses between description and action seemed too unpredictable, not deliberately paced, so it came across as messy instead of sculpted timing.
The story is compelling and I was willing to let the bumpy beginning go (Roach was also hard to hear in his opening narrative, and seemed shaky) until another realization began to sink in. According to many different descriptions and conversational exchanges in the play, Deborah is supposed to be bitter, stiff, post-menopausal, tense as hell, worldly-wise, hardened. Phan’s Deborah is frequently soft-spoken, and fumbles her lines several times. She sometimes strides quickly across the stage, but is otherwise not physically wound up. She is just too gentle, too nice, in her performance of this role, except for the very physical scenes near the end. I wasn’t convinced by her “it doesn’t matter, I don’t care anymore” words because they weren’t delivered with tension or bitterness. I’ll echo some comments coming through on reviews of this Fringe’s version of Yasmina Reza’s Art (here) – it doesn’t always make sense to cast across a big age gap. Here, a sweet young face isn't working as an embittered person at least 30 years her senior.
Roach brings a more consistent Jan to the stage. He handles the transition from “tourist” to war criminal well, but he too seems to lack conviction in some of his longer speeches. (And as for his age difference, the script barely describes Jan's physicality; Roach has a more powerful physical presence; he wears looser and more generic clothes; and he has that chromosomal advantage that male actors can "put on" a few years simply by letting a little stubble grow….)
Smile is worth seeing but overall, it really seemed there wasn’t enough rehearsal time behind this performance. Phan and Roach didn’t always seem to “sink in” to the fictional world they invited us to enter with them, and if you’re distracted on stage, I’ll be distracted with you.
I feel badly saying this because I walked out past Roach and saw that he was still sweating from the wrestling scene – it was clear that these two worked their asses off to get this show together. Two fourth-year SFU students walked out with me and we began chatting as we walked down the Academic Quad. One is in political science, one in English. They both loved this production of Smile, said they found the ideas compelling, thought the fumbled lines were deliberate stuttering meant to embody the characters’ nervousness. So there’s another opinion. However, I differentiate between a good script and a good performance. While this performance was clearly ambitious and heading in the right direction, it didn’t quite get there.
Written by: Stephen Lowe (UK)
Produced by: My Theatre Company (Vancouver)
Performed by: Mary Phan, Bryan Roach