The Cold War — Part One at VideoCabaret
I’d never seen a show at VideoCabaret before, so last night’s performance of The Cold War, itself a restaging of VideoCab’s 1995 production, served as my introduction to their signature style.
It’s a style both cinematic and theatrical: on the one hand, they isolate their actors with precise lighting shifts, so all we see is the actors floating in darkness, paralleling the precision of a cinematic cut; but, on the other hand, the actors are in whiteface, and speak directly to the audience: as they spookily stare us down, there is no doubt we are sitting in a theatre.
A lot of it reminded me of experimental Winnipegian filmmaker Guy Maddin — and, like Maddin, it seems like the people at VideoCab usually spend their time satirizing Canadian history. In The Cold War, they cover the years 1945-1963, and we make the acquaintance of an accordingly wide array of historical figures, including William Lyon Mackenzie King (Cliff Saunders), Louis St. Laurent (Valerie Buhagiar), C.D. Howe (Richard Alan Campbell), and John Diefenbaker (Richard Clarkin).
In addition to historical figures, The Cold War features some original characters, including, most prominently, a stereotypical 1950s nuclear family. We see this family develop over the play’s eighteen year timespan — when Mary Muffet (Aurora Browne)’s husband, Tom Muffet (Greg Campbell), returns from the war, they embrace romantically; but, as Tom climbs the ranks at Avro Arrow, he becomes more and more demanding about his wife’s housework. Eventually, the couple do have kids, but, as the children sit in front of the TV, entranced by commercials, they seem more like little demons than anything else (and the fact that they are played by adults does not help their case).
But the kids are not the only ones being brainwashed — over at the CIA headquarters, we see Dr. Ewen Cameron (Richard Alan Campbell, again) testing out new methods of psychological torture. And this focus on the manipulability of human perception — whether through torture or media brainwashing — takes on eerie resonances when communicated to us through VideoCab’s exacting style. After all, just as the Muffet’s children have no control over what they see on TV, in a VideoCab production, there’s not much choice over where to look — everything but the actors’ faces is shrouded in darkness. Similarly, because the show’s different vignettes are separated by blackouts, during which the actors can change costumes, when the lights come up and transport us to a new setting, there is no preparation: our minds are forcibly ripped to a new place and time.
And even as The Cold War objectively tells history very quickly, it doesn’t always feel that way: because each blackout-separated vignette is just a *little* further in time, from vignette-to-vignette, it doesn’t feel like time is moving forward as much as it is. But then you blink, and it’s 1955! It’s an odd feeling, to realize you’ve rushed through ten years of history — it’s not entirely unlike the moment when you realize a child you’ve seen every day has, under your very nose, become much older. And perhaps comparing The Cold War to a child isn’t so unfair, either; more than anything else, it gets its juice from the childlike freedom with which it approaches both Canadian history and theatrical performance tradition — things that can have a reputation of being dusty and rigid.
Finally, perhaps it’s needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway: the show is immaculately designed. If there was any worry over whether VideoCab would be able to pull off a show without their founder, Deanne Taylor, there need not have been: this is still some of the most ambitious theatrical design work being done in Toronto. The whole costuming/wigging/lighting team deserves props, no doubt, but I feel the need to shout out Richard Feren, who did the sound design and composed the music. For The Cold War, the sound design has the difficult job of having to carry the momentum of the entire piece — since the vignettes are separated by blackouts, there is no visual continuity between them, but there is auditory continuity: like a film, Feren’s haunting soundscape is constantly racing forward, and manages to make us feel like we’re always in a concretely defined space, even when, visually, we are evidently not.
Welcome back, VideoCab!