Butcher at the Cultch - The Death of a Genocide
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
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| From left: Daryl Shuttleworth, sitting Peter Anderson, back standing Lindsey Angell & Noel Johansen, March 21 2018 |
Tonight Rosemary & I witnessed (this word is used correctly here) the opening of Nicolas Billon's play Butcher directed by Kevin McKendrick at the Cultch’s Historic Theatre.
Butcher is
a play in which nothing is what you think it is from the beginning to the
absolute end. This is an easy play for me to write about as I cannot (and will not) write much about it and I will not give you information that may be crucial and spoil your enjoyment.
I can say that
the excellent Don Peter Anderson who plays Josef and who usually has scintillatingly
perfect diction did say, "OK," and I understood that when he said it. He speaks (and others may) an
invented language called Lavinian created by Christina E. Kramer and Dragana
Obradovic. If you want to find out where this language comes from, consult
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus or, perhaps you might not have missed (I didn’t!)
Titus Bouffonius. It opened at the very same venue in November of last year and
happened to have Mr. Anderson in the cast.
After the play I was undecided if Don Peter Anderson was in need of a pedicure or not.
After the play I was undecided if Don Peter Anderson was in need of a pedicure or not.
The
invented language had one word that I recognized immediately because of its
root. The word sounded something like curvetnya. Anybody who has ever heard
Russians, Poles, Hungarians (curvaa!) use that word will know it means whore.
For those into details English writer Anthony Burgess wrote the Paleolithic language
for the 1981 film, Quest for Fire.
The play
also features an insufferable English lawyer called Hamilton Barnes, played
very well by Noel Johansen who later in the play reveals to have a sensitive
Achilles heel.
The midnight shift policeman (on Christmas Day) Inspector Lamb, Daryl Shuttleworth,
perhaps is stupid or perhaps not. He does not seem to know the difference between Latin
and Greek and his jokes (some are puns) are terrible. I have never ever seen a
cop as pleasant as this one. Is there something wrong here? My lips are sealed.
This leaves
me with Lindsey Angell who has played sultry sirens in her past. Here she is
not that in the least, but I would not venture to disagree with her that her
favourite colour is purple.
Without
revealing too much about this black comedy (or is it a comedy black?) I can say
that I have personal experience with some of the events that may be ancillary
to Butcher.
While a conscript
in the Argentine Navy in the mid 60s I met a beautiful (with a beauty spot on
his left cheek), blonde, blue-eyed young lieutenant, Alfredo Astiz who some years later when he was a commander
would transport political prisoners of the Argentine Dirty War in helicopters.
Over the River Plate he would slit their stomachs (so they would sink) and drop
them, alive.
I have never been able to reconcile the man with the pleasant voice that I met with the monster he became.
Only last
week this essay by the daughter of a disappeared and subsequently murdered
father wrote of her experience of finding the man leaving a house not far from
her own who was the culprit. General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez who died at age 90
in a comfortable military hospital.
Butcher is a brutal play. A play that most venues in our we-are-always-pleasant Vancouver would not present. It takes the guts of the East Vancouver Cultural Centre to bring us plays that are relevant to our disturbing times.
