ARC’s bold new production of Martyr by German playwright Marius von Mayenburg and translated by Maja Zade takes a hard look at the darker side – and variegated nature – of faith and fanaticism in today’s secular western society. The play centers on Benjamin Sinclair (Nabil Traboulsi), an awkward high school student who has found – or, rather, has been consumed by – God.
His new voice is strident and stentorian: it weaponizes biblical scripture to pass judgment on the immorality he sees running rampant in his school, his family and the broader world. The fast-moving play traces the reactions – then the actions — of various constituencies facing Benjamin’s increasing demands and aggressive refusal to behave as expected:
- The parental community is represented by Benjamin’s sardonic mother (Deborah Drakeford), who initially hopes that drugs might be the true cause of Benjamin’s anti-social tendencies.
- The education community is represented by his energized, agitated science teacher Miss White (Aviva Armour-Ostroff) and her less deep-thinking colleague and boyfriend Marcus Dixon (Richard Lee).
- The administrative community is represented by the fast-talking, little-thinking principal Willy Belford (Ryan Allen).
- The religious community is represented by Ryan Hollyman’s smooth-talking and mercurial Vicar Dexter Menrath.
- Benjamin’s peers are represented by the alternately vicious and vulnerable Lydia Weber (Charlotte Dennis) and the ingenuous and infatuated George Hansen (Adriano Reis).
The minimalist staging seats the eight cast members in two sets of four chairs at opposite ends of the theatre. In between their seats rises the unadorned platform stage. Under Rob Kempson’s dynamic direction, the characters are like chess pieces at opposite ends of the board who – bound up in the power structures of their various constituencies — mount the stage for quick interactions, then descend to take a different seat until their next skirmish.
This chess is fluid and fast, and it’s not a team game. Each individual, including Benjamin, has a point of view about what’s really going on with him, and they’re happy to jump up on stage to share it – usually loudly. So the counterweight to that empty stage and the minimal props is talk. As the stakes rise and the plot progresses, the passionate and prolific verbiage of these characters fills the open stage more powerfully than any realistic set could.
In fact, the talk is so unrelenting that it almost drowns the possibility of audience thought. It may be Benjamin’s virtuoso recitation of long cruel lines of scripture (A fanatical Traboulsi delivers these with encyclopedic, visceral verve). It may be the pastor’s earnest assertions of Benjamin’s value. It may be the educators’ and administrators’ impassioned interpretations of Benjamin’s actions. Or it may be his mother’s by turns myopic, defensive and deflective assertions. But the bottom line is that everybody in Martyr talks. Quickly, and at great length.
And tangled up in their talky ‘takes’ are strains of arrogance, hubris and hierarchy, and unexamined assumptions about gender, sexual orientation, rationality, faith and youth. It’s only in the rare silent and near-silent moments that cracks in the characters’ toxic certainty emerge clearly, and we – and they — can pause to glimpse the turmoil, trauma or inscrutable opacity beneath.
Without doubt, Benjamin’s plot-catalyzing fanaticism is repellent. And seeking the source, meaning and effects of such radicalization might be a worthy quest.
But it’s a McGuffin that we’re never going to find in all this talk. Because what’s missing in Martyr’s chess players is curiosity. With very few exceptions, they want to be right – not to ask each other real questions, suspend judgment, listen and discuss.
So that job is left to us as an audience. When the play’s extreme final tableau plays out and everything fades to black, we’re left with a deafening curiosity.
Curiosity about just why all of this played out. Curiosity about who is the martyr – or martyrs – here, and who made them. Curiosity about what we take away from this intense 90-minute experience– and what we should call it. Is it satire? Social commentary? Allegory? Something else entirely?
In Martyr, a great cast marries all that talk with rapidly escalating plot action and minimalist staging to bring to life a suffocating and unforgettable experience. No single element of this tight production of wows above all others — but the collective experience is exactly what I expect from ARC theatre: a provocation to gnaw and fret worriedly at.
Careful, though: this one might draw blood.
ARC’s production of Martyr runs until January 29, 2023 at Aki Studio, Daniel’s Spectrum. Reserve tickets on nativeearth.ca.
©Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine, 2023
