Bomb (Stage 4, MacEwan Fine Arts Walterdale Theatre)
By Liz Nicholls,
There’s a visceral absurdity about this clever, very dark multi-loaded stinger of a comedy that Pyretic Productions (well-named for its inflammatory proclivities), brings to the Fringe. And it’s detonated by a cast with major fire-power in the crackling production directed by Lianna Makuch.
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It’s 2017, and Dasha (the wonderful Mariya Khomutova), the human rights activist protagonist of Bomb, by the contemporary Ukrainian playwright Natalia Blok, is on a short fuse, so to speak. She’s up against it: acute anxiety, panic attacks, PTSD. She feels like she has a time bomb ticking inside her. And lo and behold….
Dasha has tried everything — pills, psychotherapy, tai chi, advice like “don’t work yourself up” from her sympathetic husband Phil, played with giddy comic charm by Geoffrey Simon Brown. Nothing works. Dasha’s life feels out of control, and it exhausts her.
Bomb, starring Mariya Khomutova. Pyretic Productions. Poster by Amelia Scott.
Her next stop, pushed by the perplexed and increasingly desperate Phil, is a new shrink/therapist, whose “medical” practice includes auras, “square breathing,” and salt water spray. And, played as an outrageous grotesque by James MacDonald, the doc discovers that Dasha does has an actual bomb inside her. “You and only you,” as he says, can wipe out Ukraine’s tumultuous and blood-stained past since the early ‘90s — a history of international betrayal and constant violence — if she detonates it. Guilt and a sense of responsibility for … everything are the trigger. The proposition? Save Ukraine by destroying Ukraine as a nation, the ultimate absurdity (ring a bell?). It goes Strangelove’s “how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb” one better.
Khomutova, who has stage presence for days, is compelling and funny as a woman torn between her activist tendencies, and a desire for a nice, ordinary, peaceful life with domestic perks like sex.
Makuch sets this highly unusual Fringe production in motion, using utilitarian hospital screens, old-school projection, shadowplay (designed by Stephanie Bahniuk). It’s funny. And it gives full weight to the dark comedy and absurdist provocations of a satire embedded with thoughts about the world, politics, and activism fatigue.
Don’t miss the explosion.
