Last Night's Show - Patience
Michael Billington, The Guardian, 7 January 2005

Is there a pattern to our existence? Or are we all victims of the randomness of things? That is the question behind Jason Sherman’s Patience. And, although it’s a query Frayn and Stoppard have addressed, what gives this wry tragic-comedy added piquancy is that it hails from Canada: relatively unfamiliar theatrical territory in which only the Finborough shows a persistent interest.

Sherman’s hero, Reuben, is a man who, like David Mamet’s Edmond, finds his life in freefall. More or less simultaneously he is deserted by his wife, sacked from his job and confronted by the death of a brother. As Reuben reels around Toronto, everything conspires to point to the emptiness of his life: an old friend lectures him on the vanity of materialism, a showtune-singing rabbi exposes his lack of faith. And, even when salvation seems to come in the form of reunion with an old flame, it turns out to be chimera.

It sounds grim but Sherman lends the routing of Reuben a perverse theatrical gaiety. He plays ingenious tricks with time by constantly tracking back to the possible source of Reuben’s downfall. He also exhibits a light comic touch so that when asked by the showbiz rabbi, “Are you Jewish?”, Reuben inquires, “In what way?” And Sherman seeks to make sense of his hero accelerating misfortunes by constant references to chaos theory and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Once you accept that Reuben is an everyman at the mercy of a hapless universe, you know nothing can come right for him: that his old flame will go up in smoke and that his tentative love for a young pianist will end in tears. One if left wondering why some individuals seem marked for catastrophe.

Adam Barnard’s production keeps Sherman’s ideas afloat and there are some deft performances. Geoffrey Towers lends the racked Reuben a brooding self-adsorption. Sandy Walsh as the imagined love of his life displays an intelligent sensuality. Russell Bentley, as his sundry nemeses, shows that one man in his time plays many parts. It may not be Copenhagen or Arcadia but Patience shows that Canadian dramatists are as obsessed as our own with the mystery of things.

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