Workshop Theatre, Spider's Web: Small Moments, Big Truths

Workshop Theatre is staging Agatha Christie’s Spider’s Web at the Pumphouse Theatre from the 17^th to the 25^th of October. The play lies in the comedy-thriller genre and is markedly different from Christie’s other work. There is intrigue, half-truths, outright lies and farcical duplicity, but it never descends into moral darkness. Though the characters embark on a journey that borders on questionable behavior, the drama never exteriorizes the Machiavellian elements of human psychology that Agatha Christie’s work is popularly known for. Christie’s work, when compared to more contemporary playwrights like Sam Shepard, can seem tepid in regards to disclosing the darker elements of the human mind. This is quite possibly because Christie’s darkest characters are equivalent to a Nietzschean (Frederick Nietzsche, German philosopher) characterization of man, i.e., the polished animal (man is a cruel species; he may be educated, but beneath all that education and cultural polish lurks an incredible capacity for malevolence and destruction); such a characterization exhibits a gentrified form of evil. Like Shakespeare’s Iago or Edmund, their evil reflects their serrated intelligence. This, in contemporary drama, has, of course, changed; we are now more interested in investigating the psycho-social basis of evil. Stanley Milgram’s (American Social Psychologist) psychological experiments on the nature of destructive obedience (people can assume fictional roles and subject people to torture if they start to believe in the symbolic power and potency of their roles) is reflective of this.

Christie’s work can be subjected to a psycho-social reading, and I have done it in a previous review, but that is not how she primarily personified evil in her work. Christie’s villains kill as if they were hosting a dinner party (they very often are!), and the act is underscored with incredible wit and diction. The evil is positively Nietzschean because it is gentrified cruelty. Contemporary theatre tears away the dinner tablecloth; evil isn’t plotted but oozes out of our socio-symbolic systems, it (evil) is everywhere precisely because the conditions for its expression are not sustained by malice but by the quiet routines of everyday life.

The philosophical presuppositions behind the nature of evil in Christie’s world and the world of more contemporary playwrights are markedly distinct; the former sees evil based on individual motives; hence it is containable, but for the latter it is systemic, something found in the everyday (institutional and semi-institutional) structures of human experience. This is possibly why we find her work, even the darker ones, comforting, not because we necessarily subscribe to the moral destructiveness of her characters, but because we are temporarily insulated from the broader recognition that real evil is diffuse, ambiguous, and punctuated by the absurd random-ness of everyday life. This, though, is not the real source of psycho-social comfort in her works; it is something deeper, is the belief that evil, justice and the world are intelligible.

Her plays, writ small, show us a cosmos where justice can maintain pace with evil; it (justice) always finds a way to outwit and outmaneuver evil. This is a form of mythic thinking – a cosmos where moral order, albeit strained, remains coherent. In Christie’s dramatic ecology, the detective is equivalent to a sort of secular priest, restoring order to the universe after it (order) has been breached by violence. That being said, in some of her darker works, Christie shows us what was termed the cruel radiance of what is by James Agee (American writer). The idea being that light can reveal incredible beauty and grace, there is something ethereal in seeing an object, or subject, illuminated by light – for example, seeing a performer under the stage lights. We see the human body floodlit into significance, and every contour is suddenly alive with meaning. Light, though, can also reveal too much, far too much; think of an actor having a difficult time on stage; the lights render the performer defenseless – every hesitation, indecision and fracture is laid bare. Also, for anyone who has spent time with someone who crosses the threshold from life to death, seeing the human body slowly sink into nothingness, knows that illumination can also be unbearable. The same light that embellishes life and nurtures it now bears witness to its erasure– the pale skin, the dimming eyes; in those moments, we encounter the cruel radiance of what is. Also, justice, not everyone gets it in this world, in many instances it - and our communal pledges towards care and grace - are out-sized by much of the darkness that defines the human experience.

Do Christie’s works have a cruel radiance? Yes, though her conception of evil remains moored to individual motive, the light both redeems and annihilates our trust in the world – yes, the moral equilibrium is always restored by the detective, but it is underpinned by a frank recognition of how utterly fragile and arbitrary human goodness can be.

In Christie’s work, not only Spider's Web, we have the immanent radiance of what is not. The play, situated in the country home of Clarissa Hailsham-Brown (diplomat’s wife), finds its characters embroiled in a sequence of events that are both dangerous and absurd. Clarissa has a capacious imagination, one that borders on fantastical story spinning and reverie, but her imagination meets its limit when she meets an unexpected visitor. In her orbit are her husband, Henry Hailsham-Brown, a practical but anxious diplomat, her stepdaughter, Pippa; her fiercely protective father-in-spirit Lawrence Delahaye, the affable Hugo Birch, and the charming Jeremy Warrender. Around these characters move the house help, Elgin, the understated but quirky Butler and the riotous gardener Mildred Peake. None of Christie’s plays is complete without representations of justice, and true to form, as events spiral, we see the entry of Inspector Lord & Constable Jones. As is usual with these reviews, the plot points of murder mysteries are never revealed, and in the temple of Agatha Christie, one must approach the altar of suspense with reverence and respect. What can be said, though, is that we see Clarissa’s friends rally around her; they fall headlong into the drama with her, the events of her life become their events, and they take ownership of the drama and the outcome. There is an interesting feminist reading to be had here. Without revealing too much, Clarissa decides to thrust herself into the drama because she has a moral choice to make, concerning the well-being of another. She then launches the entire weight of her imagination in trying to morally rewrite what could become a very bad situation. She quite literally does this in inventing ingenious narratives that her protector, Lawrence Delahaye, does not quite understand or, at first, agree with. This is a woman who is rewriting (through her imagination), on the fly, the collective’s conception of the truth. Apropos to this, is Helene Cixous’s (French Feminist) idea of the ecriture feminine (feminine writing), although she meant this in the context of women reclaiming the act of writing, it is directly relevant to understanding femininity as lived experience, which is the attempt to explore femininity outside of the historical logic that has constrained it. Clarissa authors reality in real time, and her improvisational confidence does not hinge entirely on external validation; it summons validation. Such a validation, though, is complemented by empathetic forms of masculinity in her world; the friends gathering around her do not exist for the sake of plot development. They exist to help give her imagination the wheels that it needs to move through the world.

This is a reversal of the usual dramaturgy where the imagination of women is punished. In this world, the feminine imagination keeps the harm in this world from hardening into fate. Her imagination is the pen, her world is the paper, and her community is the ink. She is rewriting her world through the creative agency of her mind and her body – this is the ecriture feminine. Such a reading would not be complete without understanding the complementary embodiment of masculinity in this dramatic ecology – the elder male characters, Lawrence & Hugo, beautifully exemplify Rainer Maria Rilke’s (Austrian poet) statement, “love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.” We can read love broadly here, not only erotic. This is a conception of masculinity that is relaxed and comfortable with their counterparts (women) writing their own stories, even the ones that hurt. We can both hold our spaces; we can both author our own stories and remain whole. This is what it means to meet at the border of two solitudes and to make that border luminous.

What is the immanent radiance of what is not? Simply put, it refers to the gentle luminosity which emanates from possibility – from the expression of human love, grace and kindness - such a luminosity illuminates not the cruelty of truth but the restorative potential of human relationships, ones that actively construct and re-construct the truth of things. This potential is never a given; just because it happens does not mean it will always happen, or that it will happen when it is most needed.  When Clarissa’s elders find out about her predicament, the conditions are created for the possibility of care, protection, and shelter. They do not flinch; they stand steadfast by her, and in the full embrace of that potential, they actualize dimensions of their personalities that refuse to accept how things are, but rather embrace how things could be. This is a radical form of empathetic authorship – the male characters in this play could prioritize self-interest over collective care, but they do not. Human goodness, no matter how improbable and no matter how stacked the odds are against its expression, always finds a way to appear. To appear when it is most desperately needed. The trust between Clarissa and Lawrence is deep in this play, but as stated above, such a trust must never be assumed to always exist. It has to be evidenced through clear and brave existential choices. Lawrence, for the sake of Clarissa, makes these decisions (he has to constantly devise analytical and deductive solutions to a host of growing problems) even when his world threatens to unravel in the face of absurd events, he shows us that the immanent radiance of what is not can hold, it can always hold, even when the center of things begins to give way. This is probably why Christie's work endures, her vision of the moral cosmos, suggests that evil, no matter what its source, can always be outwitted by the wit of human goodness. Spider's Web feels different though, here Christie wrote a play where light does not expose our cruelties but shelters our better selves, where the spider's web becomes, of sorts, a geometry of grace. Her philosophical certainty of the inevitability of the good endures in this work, but the compass that she uses to chart the destination is different. Spider's Web suggests that goodness survives not through inferential certainty or reason but through the spontaneous intelligence of care. In this sense, it is probably the most modern of Christie's plays, it abandons the certainty of rational resolution for the beauty of imaginative possibility. The play seems to accept that the world is no longer governed by absolute reason (hence the premium put on Clarissa's imagination, a moral faculty born of invention and not deduction), and in such a world the deductive clarity of reason is not enough - more is needed - it is imagination and grace. That is why this play is distinct, it heralds the anxieties of a world (1950's) that had grown suspicious of the grand narratives of rational certainty. This play, unlike her others, does not restore the moral order through declamatory certitudes but rather, allows the audience to find beauty and courage in disorder. Spiders Web interpreted only at the level of the 'dramatic facts' might seem whimsical and silly, but like all cultural artifacts it might philosophically gesture towards something deeper and something more profound. A surface reading of the historical context behind the play would stop at the facts; Christie wrote the play in response to a request made by Margaret Lockwood (British actress) - Lockwood wanted to play a comedic vehicle to express her talent, she enlisted the support of Producer Peter Saunders to convince Christie. This explanation is true, but stopping here would be incomplete - Christie was writing from within a Britain that was fatigued by the dissolution of a multi-continental empire. There is a hermeneutics of depth (art of interpretation) available to us here - looking at history as more than just 'facts' - an interpretive perspective that looks at the deeper patterns of social feeling and thought. Clarissa's world of half truths certainly expresses, at some level, the wild expanse of the feminine imagination in re-constructing our existential posture towards the world, but it also (potentially) expresses historical angst at comprehending meaning after the collapse of imperial constancy and traditional conceptions of what constitutes intellectual authority. In this way, Spider's Web anticipates the postmodern anxiety that would define the end of the century, such a world is one that can no longer only be held together by deductive certainty, such a world also requires the use of an omni-directional imagination to understand where we have been, where we are and where we might be moving. The fusion between Lawrence's analytical dexterity and Clarissa's imaginative courage is a cultural foresight of this, of the necessary union of both faculties in negotiating through a difficult world.

To the Production – This is an excellent and thoughtful production, solid in its preparation and presentation. The former can always be assumed from the depth of the presentation. For a Community theatre production, it is one of the top of the charts for me this year. The dramatic naturalism is very impressive, so impressive at times that I had to remind myself that this was community theatre. The performative standard is high, layered with a diverse range of character-centric idiosyncrasies that keep the drama on stage interesting and complex. The intentionality that the performers bring to the stage is excellent; one can tell that the inner lives and motives of the characters have been mapped out with diligence and patience. How so? By letting the characters inhabit the stage with sincerity, for example, during the interrogation scene, between Inspector Lord and Clarissa, there is a moment when she asks for a drink - that whole sequence - someone making her one and bringing it to her - takes close to half a minute. In the context of life outside of the stage, that is not a lot; in the context of life on stage, that is a lot. Nowhere during that moment are the characters made to rush; there is no inner panicking by the performers on stage, there is no grasping anxiously at the silence of that moment, there is just the patience to let the moment go where it must. I find these moments profoundly beautiful and enriching because in those moments, we are allowed to sit and exist with the character. Language, in those moments, is abdicated for the primordial silence of being. This will not have been an easy play to dramatize; it is not as dark as Christie’s other plays, and it is not a rambunctious farce; it sits either somewhere in between or somewhere else entirely. It is this somewhere-else-ness that I found very interesting – the house in the play embodies this somewhere-else-ness quite beautifully, with its secret passage (sorry, that’s the only spoiler), this is, of course, (for anyone interested in fleshing out thematic corollaries in a play) a symbolic representation of Clarissa’s imagination - exploratory, oblique and full of elliptical movements.

This production embraces this some-where-else genre with a healthy mix of character-driven work; none of the characters take on the rough contours of caricature-driven work. The synergy between the performers was excellent. If one takes a very pedantic view of what a great performance should stylistically look like, then yes, there will be minor passages in between the play where the synergy did not work. Here is the point, though: are we looking for stylistically great performances, or are we looking for performative originality? One that shows us the human depth beneath the performance. For me, it is the latter; it is always the latter. This is what makes a show memorable, one that tells us an authentic story and leaves us with enduring impressions.

Another example, towards the end of the play, we see some characters tidy up a room for the imminent arrival of some guests – the fluidity with which this was done was excellent, it is an example of the type of performative authenticity that makes a stage feel lived – the characters talk to each other, move things around the room, and try to figure out what to do. This is a very minor scene, compared to some other big scenes, but it is these small moments that relay to us quite emphatically that the performers (via their characters) have claimed absolute ownership of the stage. In the moments, performers, like Ali, project the inner contents of their mind onto the open space of the stage with an ease that feels very instinctive rather than rehearsed. Another example (last one, I promise), during the interrogation scenes between Inspector Lord & the other characters, we see Constable Jones observing the conversations with silent intent and scrutiny. The constable hardly says anything; he has no big moments in these scenes, but his presence anchors the stage. There is no performative anxiety around maintaining a stabilizing presence through silence, and it is this silence that creates a solid backdrop for the conversations between Inspector Lord and the interrogatees. There are many such examples of small but effective embellishments in this play; it is these moments that wrap the production in a quiet and lived-in authenticity. If anyone reads this and subsequently decides to see the play, look out for those moments – the pauses, glances, and the unspoken thoughts; these are the little threads that stitch the tapestry of this play together.

Some of the performances are excellent, top-tier work for this genre - Community theatre is not rated in the same way as professional productions on this blog, but rest assured, some of these performances could easily have found a home on a professional stage (if you are looking for performative authenticity and not tired preconceptions of what performative excellence should look like - if you prefer focusing on what is 'true' as opposed to what is 'good'). Luke Carruthers as Henry Hailsham was effective, playing with the sort of pensive bureaucratic energy that defines the modern civil servant. Ron Gregory as Inspector Lord was excellent – it takes a lot of creative energy and investment to play someone who leads interrogational dialogue on stage without looking predictable, and he does this with sharp acuity. He maintains a brilliant balance between suspicion and earnestness - he shifts between these states effortlessly . Gerald Matthews, as Lawrence Delahaye, was outstanding, embellishing his character with a methodical dose of naturalism and psychological fidelity, an excellent fusion where thought and gesture seem to arise from the same hidden wellspring. His chemistry with Ali Grams was excellent, moving between protectiveness, quiet exasperation, and befuddlement. I have said in a previous review (last year, I think) that Gerald is an actor’s actor; he inhabits the stage with the instinct of a pathfinder. Ray Dhaliwal, as Jeremy Warrender, was top notch - he was charismatic and funny, playing with a relaxed and comfortable energy. True to his character, he is never particularly rushed, and in those moments where he is, he does not look out of kilter with the action on stage. In fact, he lends to it with openness and affability. He infuses humor, charm and suave into his character. Ray D continues to impress with his professional versatility. Kennedy Ferguson, as Pippa Hailsham-Brown was good, playing with earnest energy, for a young actress, she played with poise and confidence. Ali Grams, as Clarissa Hailsham-Brown, was excellent. She exhibits a wonderful playfulness with this character, one that delicately straddles the borders between farce and moderate hysteria. She plays with a scalable performative energy, one right-sized to the dimensions of the stage and the theatre, moving easily between relatively large dramatic moments and comedic lightness. Rod McFadyen, as Elgin, played with an understated and uncanny energy; he was interesting to watch, assuming the stage with confidence and ease. Joseph Fernand, as Oliver Costello, was dependable, playing the character in an almost quiet way; this works for the context of this production, many would have been tempted to overplay and over dramatize it. His performative resistance towards that was excellent. Logan Lawrence, as Constable Jones, was excellent – his performance is an excellent case study in the expression that less is more. His stoic, quiet presence on stage (as stated above) is the canvas that allows for much of the dialogue to be etched on; in many ways, his character embodies the muteness of the audience, and in doing this, he becomes a conduit for the audience’s unspoken tension. Jennifer Maclean, as Mildred Peake, was excellent, playing with riotous and boisterous energy – the work never seems overdone or overbaked, it works perfectly in the context of this production, her larger-than-life energy emanates from sincerity to the character rather than mere theatrics. It is a good demonstration of maintaining balanced gregariousness in a genre like this. Ray Mordan, as Hugo Birch, was endearing, balancing between childlike earnestness and a stolid empathy. His chemistry with Gerald was excellent – the opening scene between them is an excellent demonstration of naturalistic acting at its community-level finest. Their characters seem to relish the small moments between them on stage with a playfulness that is delightful to watch.

I usually do not write about the performances this way, but when I do see good ensemble cohesion I make it a point to write about each individual performance - it feels only right to appreciate the dedication of each performer that sustains it. The point being that cohesion like this deserves to be rewarded more than individual brilliance, because theatre at its best makes stories feel alive rather than staged - They will always feel staged if only one of two actors look integrated, but if every one does, then the dramatic world on stage looks inhabited and rich.

The direction was excellent, embodying the less is more philosophy with aplomb - the text and the performances are given the space to find their rhythm, without being over-shaped. The action on stage is allowed to emerge and develop organically, and what results is a production that allows for an effective psychological fusion between the material and the performances. The production work was great – the lights, the sound, the set changes, the costumes, all very disciplined and diligent work for a community theatre production.

Final Rating – 8/10