Butcher at the Cultch - The Death of a Genocide

 

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.

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.