A Venus In Fur & A Dog Collar
Sunday, October 27, 2013
 |
| Lindsey Angell |
This past Saturday I went to a comfortable
matinee performance of David Ives’s Venus in Fur at the Art Club Theatre
Company’s Granville Island Stage.
I was up front so I was able to see
everything in detail and listen to every nuance of the dialogue of this two
person play, Lindsey Angell as Vanda and Vincent Gale as Thomas.
To make a short story short, Thomas is a
playwright (and adapter he calls himself) looking for a woman to play a sort of
dominatrix who happens to be a high patrician countess from Transylvania. A dumb blonde, Lindsey Angell crashes (late
in “it was a dark and stormy night”) the audition of a frustrated Thomas who
seems to be unable to find the right person for his play-in-progress. It is a play based on a 19th century novel by Austrian Leopold von Sacher-Masoch836–1895) most famous for his erotic novels.
The principal surprise is that the play and its actress do not
answer the question that anybody who is not an actor is in constant query – can actors act themselves? And if they can, can we ever know?
Suffice to say that Angell, is a dumb blonde
for a bit, then she becomes the sophisticated Transylvanian countess/dominatrix,
a spy, and ultimately a vengeful Greed goddess.
A few days later Lindsey Angell posed for
me. I was surprised to notice that she is shorter, more beautiful and older
(because she told me so) woman than the many I saw on stage on Saturday. In
this Fuji Instant snap I sort of think I may have caught the real Lindsey
Angell, but then I am not all that sure.
And a final note - Vincent Gale as Thomas,
plays the perfect nerdish adaptor of plays and allows Angell to pull through
with her tour de force so that the whole play made me feel I was spying through
a keyhole!
