Week of November 12, 2009, Issue #734
ARTS
HARVEST: Landlord's almanac
Harvest's cast turn out a solid comic crop
Paul Blinov / Paul@vueweekly.com
Ken Cameron's Harvest opens with aged farmer Allan (Glenn Nelson) surveying his land. "This farm is in my blood," he begins, and starts to elaborate ("I was born on this farm ... ") only to be cut off from the wings by his wife, Charlotte (Coralie Cairns), "You were born in a hospital!". And so they continue, throughout the scene and more or less the entire script, with the cute odd couple-y bickering, which works fine for Harvest: it's a golden age, salt-of-the-earth comedy about an older pair who sell the farm and rent the farmhouse out to a dubious tenant, and Shadow Theatre's production works a solid crop out of that setup.
Neither of our protagonists want to be nosy, but as they start to clue in to their new tenant's increasingly strange behaviour (having a roommate they never see, never leaving the house, suddenly gaining a vicious guard dog), they find themselves making little excuses to go check out the place.
Director John Hudson keeps the pacing up, but for a story about an old couple whose fears about a tenant are basically confirmed, it would be far less charming without this particular onstage pair: Nelson and Cairns both capture the genuine sincerity of their elderly characters, both the tender moments and the odd couple-y bickering. He's adept at old man bravado, both comical and serious; her usual cuss phrase is "Lord love a duck," and Cairns plays that old-fashioned sense of restrained dignity for all the comic potential it's worth.
They also play every other character they encounter, sometimes juggling the third character back and forth within a scene. It's a clever gimmick that's executed fluidly using articles of clothing (shades, a cop hat) for identification, with extra copies of each prop hidden on Hudson's simple cardboard set. The character switching gets to be a joke in itself, too: a gaggle of church ladies take to the stage via a means I won't give away, but it's a clever, well-knit way around getting multiple characters in a scene in a two-hander play.
The jokes are geared towards an audience which matches the characters onstage in age: there's one about Pierre Trudeau, another about keeping a treadmill in the basement, and really, it's pretty safe. But the Shadow players work the territory that Harvest set out for them well enough, and it yields an enjoyable little tale. V
Until Sun, Nov 22
Harvest
Written by Ken Cameron
Directed by John Hudson
Starring Coralie Cairns, Glenn Nelson
Varscona Theatre (10329 - 83 Ave),
$17 – $25
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