REVIEW: Psychology and ideology collide in Necessary Angel’s austere Winter Solstice
iPhoto caption: Photo by Dahlia Katz.
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-bearded 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.
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.
LEARN MOREComments
Leave a Comment
iPhoto caption: Adam Francis Proulx, Elm Reyes, Kay-Ann Ward in a Fringe promo photo by Joy Adeola.
REVIEWS: Toronto Fringe Festival 2025
This collection of Toronto Fringe Festival capsule reviews will be updated throughout the festival with writing from 20 different critics.
iPhoto caption: Masae Day, Landon Doak, and Michelle Fisk in 'The Wind Coming Over the Sea.' Photo by Lyon Smith.
REVIEW: A new Emma Donoghue musical takes root at the Blyth Festival
As a resident of southwestern Ontario, what struck me most is how deeply rooted in the region The Wind Coming Over the Sea feels. It's a lively reminder of the cultural inheritances that continue to shape the area today.
iPhoto caption: The cast of 'Major Barbara.' Photo by David Cooper.
REVIEW: Shaw Festival’s metatheatrical Major Barbara is sharp and subversive
Director Peter Hinton-Davis draws on a light smattering of Brechtian techniques — acknowledgements of artifice that enrich and vivify Major Barbara’s clash of morals.
iPhoto caption: The company of 'The Frogs.' Photo by Dahlia Katz.
Staged inches from the audience by director Griffin Hewitt, the show commendably captures the free-wheeling, anarchic spirit of the text. It’s a toad-ally great opportunity to see this rarity in the froggy flesh.
iPhoto caption: Jeff Lillico as Ralph with Yoshie Bancroft as Mitsue in 'Forgiveness.' Photo by David Hou.
REVIEW: Stratford Festival’s Forgiveness tells a deeply personal story on a sprawling scale
Presented in an increasingly tense political moment, Forgiveness resonates on a level that is part reflection, part warning.
iPhoto caption: Photo courtesy of Luminato Festival.
REVIEW: Is Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree worth seeing twice at Luminato?
Crouch tests the limits of theatrical representation, improvisation, and authorship. While I’m usually a sucker for exactly those types of experiments, I ultimately found An Oak Tree a bit underwhelming.
iPhoto caption: Adam Francis Proulx, Elm Reyes, Kay-Ann Ward in a Fringe promo photo by Joy Adeola.
REVIEWS: Toronto Fringe Festival 2025
This collection of Toronto Fringe Festival capsule reviews will be updated throughout the festival with writing from 20 different critics.
iPhoto caption: The company of 'The Comedy of Errors.' Photo by JVL Photography.
“It’s got to be my favourite [Shakespeare play] at this point,” says Abbey. “I don't understand why it's so rarely done. It’s listed as a ‘problem play,’ and I see that, but I have had such beautiful experiences with it throughout my life… I think it has the ability to unite audience and cast in a deeply human event.”
iPhoto caption: Logo by Sunyeong Han.
Let’s turn the page: Announcing a nationwide program for emerging performing arts critics
Do you like writing about the performing arts but wish you had more skills and contacts to help you advance in the field? Would you like to continue to build your writing and critical thinking skills? Are you IBPOC or from another equity-seeking background? There’s a new program for you.
iPhoto caption: The cast of 'Major Barbara.' Photo by David Cooper.
REVIEW: Shaw Festival’s metatheatrical Major Barbara is sharp and subversive
Director Peter Hinton-Davis draws on a light smattering of Brechtian techniques — acknowledgements of artifice that enrich and vivify Major Barbara’s clash of morals.
iPhoto caption: Jaime Lujan in 'Reina.' Photo by Eden Graham.
REVIEW: Documenting seven Toronto indie shows, from Factory Theatre to the Tranzac Club and beyond
I’ve started writing brief reviews of Toronto productions Intermission isn’t otherwise covering, and stowing them away until I collect enough to publish in a batch. And now here I am, with seven.
iPhoto caption: Members of the company in 'Annie.' Photo by David Hou.
Stratford Festival reviews: Macbeth, As You Like It, Annie, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
While the four productions I reviewed spanned different genres and styles, the presence of household-name director-designer Robert Lepage led me to reflect more broadly on the craft of directing, and how the demands of specific shows shift what’s entailed in that intense, wide-reaching job.
We thoroughly enjoyed this production of Winter Solstice, and I appreciate this reviewer’s background information on Schimmelpfennig and other stagings of this play. It seems that Dilworth chose to emphasize the Brechtian nature of the play in his production, both in his staging as well as the overall design. The use of a narrator — and the choice to have other characters assume that role — has an (appropriate) distancing effect that makes us watch and think rather than emphasize. The characters, too, are closer to archetypes than people, which also serves as a social critique of our world in which we all seem to be playing a role without understanding what play we’re actually in…something that leaves us all too open to the lure of the Ubermensch, the charismatic leader with the brilliant and also dark and dangerous vision. Corinna, who feels cheated by life, is all too ready to be recast by the stranger, Rudolph, as the prototypical Woman-as-Mother, despite the facts of her actual relationship to her daughter. One would think that the younger woman, a filmmaker, would rebel at Rudolph’s vision of/for womankind — but she is silent. Unlike Konrad, she has not made an impression on Rudolph as an Artist, to be molded into the suitably submissive role that Art must take when confronted by Power. Yet this is not because of her strength, but because Bettina is a fraud. Her “art” seems something separate from her, a pose merely, a way of avoiding the fact that she is unhappy both as wife and as mother. Albert alone sees Rudolph for what he is, but lacks the courage to stand in solitary opposition to the “charming” stranger, instead giving in to his fear by dosing it with medications. The action he finally takes against Rudolph turns out to have been a hallucination — and Albert seems relieved. He has not, after all, caused a scene. So is he paranoid? And do we delude ourselves when we sense the rise of fascism all around the world? Why do we dismiss our genuine misgivings? Why is it so hard for so many of us to see, let alone name, the evil around us?
The main problem with the play for me was the “ un-likeability “ of any of the characters.
The marital couple are engaged in their own little hell as the work begins ;the mother is an unwanted unloved Christmas visitor; the unseen daughter elicits no loving response from either parent; both marital partners are engaged in affairs with others; the father gets falling-down drunk; the painter slashes his own paintings.
At least the visitor initially brings something beautiful—the music of Bach and Chopin.
Nobody here has the character to defeat evil—if Rudolph represents it as a fascist threat. The rot within is scarier that the threat from outside.