"a tremendously confident, good-looking and sophisticated production"
C. J. Sheridan, RoguesAndVagabonds.co.uk

The Canadian dramatist Jason Sherman’s award-winning play, given its British première in Activated Image’s intelligent and lucid production at the Finborough, is a long, eloquent journey to self-discovery of a complete shit. Sherman obviously knows human nature. He looks into the bleak heart of a successful middle-aged, middle-class, married man and observes every selfish, insensitive detail of his behavior. He surveys the life of his anti-hero Reuben in a series of elegantly constructed scenes, meticulously realized by Adam Barnard’s direction and Vicki Fifield’s design, whose arguments recall picaresque tales of moral education. His encounters along the way with family, lovers, colleagues and a ghost and a rabbi, gradually open his eyes to how others see him. It’s the only way a man who has never been introspective can learn to make moral judgments about himself.

The play is packed with modern philosophical arguments about human nature and in turn stimulates reflection on the same theme. Reuben is a man who has to lose his job and his wife before he learns to know himself. But what then? Is there redemption when you have no faith? He dislikes what he knows about himself, and his useless life, but how is anyone like that supposed to cope in the modern world if they are aware of the uselessness of words and the fraudulence of therapy? Being good isn’t the answer. There’s no point. Sherman observes the essential selfishness of people and how we are jealous of goodness in others, as it is a reproach of our own natures. Reuben does not change, and has to settle for what he is. The play is set in 1998 and before. Pertinent as this fable about middle-aged angst is, whenever it was written, it could not be set post 9/11/01. Our personal anxieties are inevitably affected by larger recent public tragedies and events. It is possible that if Reuben had reached a state of self-knowledge at the beginning of 2005, he would be feeling even worse about modern life as a whole than in 1998.

Activated Image evidently relish the opportunity offered by Sherman’s play to show that live theatre can be as visually varied and flexible in representation of time and location as film. It’s rich in sound, too, with music by the Company’s own resident composer, Peter Michaels. It’s a tremendously confident, good-looking and sophisticated production, palpably intelligent. You can see from the clarity of the performances that Barnard has assimilated every detail of the play. It opens with the theatrical excitement of a squash game, evoked by the actors synchronized miming to sound effects. The action on Vicki Fifield’s deceptively simple but fully functional blue space, shifts effortlessly backwards and forwards in time, from squash court to shower room to automobile to bar to street, to different homes in different places.

Several of the cast have to show equivalent versatility, doubling parts, and creating telling cameos. Russell Bentley, assigned seven parts in all, brings the sketch of a betrayed husband touchingly to life and makes a comic characterization out of a Fiddler on the Roof tune singing rabbi. Chris Andrew Mellon switches with total conviction from hostile business partner to Reuben’s sensitive physicist brother, going through his own mid-life crisis.

The women are less well served by the writing, seen too much as Reuben’s passive victims, rather than personalities in their own right. His wife herself explains how he smothered the person she once was. She only can fulfill herself without him.

From the outset, Reuben is unsentimentally presented as unlikable. He’s a self-satisfied, ruthless businessman, with no sympathy for others in the world in which lions have to eat deer in order to survive themselves. This is a tough and brave artistic decision, and a necessary adjunct to the play’s exploration of the modern moral character in the capitalist world, but it’s hard to emotionally engage with a man so blatantly charmless.

Following another success at the Finborough, Gates of Gold, it’s becoming too easy to take superb production values at this Fringe space for granted. These productions, by different companies, are good by any theatrical standards, not just better than usual Fringe. This production of Patience has so many virtues that any criticism is in danger of being mere caviling.

The moral lessons drawn in the play are presented in too predictable a manner to produce an emotional reaction in the audience. You recognize the truth of all that is said about life and living with yourself and you agree with it, but you are not moved or surprised. In the same way that Reuben and Phil discuss the difficulty of pinpointing where a life went wrong, it’s hard to discern the fault in this worthy and excellent production. It’s not that the play is just a wordy debate: Sherman lightens the burden of his great theme with theatrical allusions and effects — there are show-tunes, sharp one-liners, a dream sequence, and the music supposedly composed by Liz, the young student living with Reuben's brother. She is an ambiguous character, wittingly or innocently serving as temptress to Reuben. There is a moment when she seems to offer him redemption through thinking about someone else for once and through her own creativity, but Sherman’s Reuben remains true to himself and uses her in is own way, only now hating himself for it.

For Reuben, to know himself is to loathe himself. In the course of the play this unpleasant man discovers he is unpleasant, and that his only function in life is to damage other people. He knows it would be better for them if he stopped living, and considers throwing himself out of the window. One catches oneself thinking what a simple answer to life’s problems it would be if all selfish people volunteered to do the same. Of course he doesn’t go ahead. It’s not in his nature. He is irredeemable, and Sherman is determined to show it. You don’t suddenly stop being selfish. In this consciously well-balanced play, Sarah belatedly voices our thoughts about his self-indulgence when she tells him: "It’s not that easy". Reuben is left to live, hating himself, in the endless loop of his life, the new hell.

At the beginning of the play, the character of Reuben seemed familiar from certain iconic middle-aged, alienated men in recent American films, Michael Douglas in Falling Down, Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt, Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, but it’s hard to think of a contemporary stage treatment of this kind of male angst comparable in scope to Sherman’s. By the end, particularly seeing Reuben’s treatment of Liz, I was reminded of Chekhov’s cold, detached male characters, like Trigorin, also irrevocably selfish, and found myself comparing the apparent spontaneity of Chekhov’s art with Sherman’s sometimes over-stated, mono-themed play. It was very interesting to read that Jason Sherman has written a new version of The Cherry Orchard, to be produced in Ottawa later this year. He is evidently a writer of great moral sensibility and theatrical responsibility. It’s clear from their presentation that Activated Image share these ambitious values.

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