REVIEW: Psychology and ideology collide in Necessary Angel’s austere Winter Solstice

When observing a group of people, onstage or off, I sometimes overlook how differently each individual is probably experiencing things, and instead start seeing them as a cohesive unit. Realist plays, with their unified visions of the world, don’t do much to dissuade this way of thinking. But the popular German dramatist Roland Schimmelpfennig foregrounds the mental distance between his characters by using narration to let us in on their thoughts. The effect is a symphonic one: beams of consciousness, ringing out in parallel, each reverberating at their own pitch.

To paint these interlocking portraits, Schimmelpfennig likes to spin sprawling, weblike narratives in which initially separate characters eventually cross paths. But his 2015 play Winter Solstice, which played in French at Théâtre français de Toronto in 2022, focuses its lens more tightly, transpiring in one apartment over Christmas Eve. Its world premiere at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater embraced this setting (as a trailer reveals), with the action seeming to take place around a large dining table. 

But Necessary Angel Theatre Company’s new staging of David Tushingham’s English translation, presented at the Berkeley Street Theatre in association with Canadian Stage and Birdland Theatre, involves no furniture. This highly abstract approach diffuses some of the script’s satirical energy; in exchange, Alan Dilworth’s 100-minute production becomes grimmer, more psychological.

From stage right, a docile narrator (Frank Cox-O’Connell) introduces a middle-class European couple: Albert (Cyrus Lane), a publisher, sociologist, and essayist, and Bettina (Kira Guloien), an emerging arthouse film director. In the bathroom is Corinna, Bettina’s lonesome mother (Nancy Palk), who’s spending the holidays with Albert and Bettina. All proves suitably ordinary until the entrance of Rudolph (Diego Matamoros), a dapper, white-beared fellow in a fedora and grey three-piece suit (costume design by Ming Wong). Corinna invited Rudolph over after meeting him earlier today on the train, finding his straight-laced manner awfully cute.

As the family gets to know Rudolph, the play’s form begins to mutate, with Cox-O’Connell entering the scene as Konrad, a young abstract painter. Time grows slippery, a few times hopping briefly backward or forward. And a couple scenes play out downstairs, in the apartment’s lobby — an echo of Schimmelpfennig’s plays Arabian Night and The Golden Dragon, which primarily unfold over different floors of a single apartment building.

Dilworth’s adroit staging leans into this unstable quality by navigating the playing space in a non-literal fashion. The blocking owes more to the characters’ mental states than location: In the beginning, for instance, when Rudolph has just entered and an aura of awkwardness suffuses the proceedings, the four partygoers remain upstage, static as a row of wax statues. But as the evening gets more lively, they begin to use more of the stage, sometimes even finding reason to move beyond the central playing space’s sleek, bench-like border, a large rectangle cut through with a door-width upstage gap (set and lighting design by Lorenzo Savoini).

Soulpepper Theatre founding members Matamoros and Palk are frequent presences on Toronto stages, and they seem particularly free to have fun with Winter Solstice’s unabashedly heightened text. Matamoros maps a striking metamorphosis, gradually shedding Rudolph’s benevolent exterior, while Palk remains amusingly smitten throughout (Corinna’s swooning reactions to Rudolph’s suave one-liners incited several meaty laughs on opening night). And Cox-O’Connell leads a seminar in juxtaposition: While his endearing Konrad is nervous and inarticulate, his narrator exudes supreme confidence, moving and speaking with preternatural lightness — a relaxing contrast to the tension permeating Albert and Bettina.

A program note entitled “fascism and the work of Roland Schimmelpfennig” prepped me for the show to eventually spiral toward the sinister. So when Rudolph first mentions he’s been living in Paraguay, I became sure he was a (neo-)Nazi on the run. Except that’s not entirely revealed: Albert, in a pill-induced delirium, picks up on similar hints and starts planning to kill Rudolph, but the others mostly remain charmed. 

So is the play satirizing how easily we welcome fascism into our homes? Or is it satirizing how we diagnose evil where there might be none? I spent most of Winter Solstice pretty sure it was the former, and less abstract productions may commit to this stance: Ramin Gray, director of the play’s 2017 U.K. premiere, said in an interview with the Guardian that the character is “a blatant Nazi… it’s so obvious” (Schimmelpfennig seems to agree, warning in the same article against treating Rudolph as literary cipher instead of credible threat). Either way, Dilworth’s penetrating production left me in a state of tension — pondering whether, in a similar situation, I’d be more likely to flirt with or kill a potentially evil man.

Winter Solstice runs at Canadian Stage until February 2. Tickets are available here.

Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Liam Donovan

Liam is Intermission’s senior editor. His writing has appeared in publications like Maisonneuve, This, and NEXT. He loves the original Super Mario game very much.

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