Words matter.
Winter Solstice, by acclaimed German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig, explores the unsettling intrusion of extremist ideologies into everyday life. The play, which is currently captivating audiences at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre, emphasizes the importance of words – as not just a delivery mechanism, but as the primary vehicle for shaping – or warping – reality itself.
Schimmelpfennig, who is celebrated for his innovative narrative techniques and incisive social commentary, presents a narrative set on Christmas Eve. Filmmaker Bettina and her author husband Albert find their holiday gathering disrupted by Rudolph, a charismatic stranger whom Bettina’s mother, Corinna, has impulsively invited. As the evening unfolds, the smiling Rudolph’s seemingly benign discourse reveals a more sinister undercurrent, exposing the fragility of liberal complacency.
The play’s thematic focus on the insidious rise of the new right avoids overt didacticism. Instead, it uses a veneer of domestic normalcy—marital strains, infidelity, and familial tensions—to mirror societal vulnerabilities. Albert is involved with a younger colleague, while Bettina flirts with Albert’s painter friend Konrad. Corinna, meanwhile, has been smitten by Rudolph’s smooth-talking, old-world charm. They are preoccupied with their little dramas. And the play, which can be very funny, incisively burrows beneath their pretenses and predilections.
Director Alan Dilworth orchestrates this complex narrative with brilliance, creating a theatrical puzzle that wraps laughter and melodrama around a sinister, timely warning. Lorenzo Savoini’s minimalist staging—little more than four interlocking benches which mark the home’s boundaries like the boards of an outdoor hockey rink—thwarts any temptation we might have to lose ourselves in the characters’ entanglements, laugh with abandon, or feel smug superiority.
While the characters sit on these benches, stand among and occasionally on them, and interact while between them, they conjure with their words a physical world that we cannot see. From the non-existent dining table the group sit at, to the imaginary piano Rudolph “plays,” to Albert and Bettina’s invisible films and books, the absence of tangible props suggests that the physical world is mere abstraction — or distraction.
Likewise, many actions are narrated, rather than enacted – the most egregious example being a pivotal kiss, which is described through narration, while the ostensibly kissing actors remain motionless. This choice underscores a central thesis of the play: words hold substance and sway. They literally construct the world . . . more so than actions or objects or places. So we must at all times pay close attention to them.
Of course, the conduits for this play’s many words are the play’s stellar cast, who deliver performances of depth . . . and duality. The actors oscillate between subjectively inhabiting their own characters and objectively narrating the inner workings and emotions of other characters. Such telling (rather than showing) is a counter-theatrical narrative device, so it presents a special challenge for the actors being narrated about. They must embody the tensions between what they say and what their narrators say they truly feel . . . and between what they do, and what those actions really mean.
As the primary narrator, actor Frank Cox-O’Connell delivers a staggeringly high number of lines with wry precision and energy, before stepping nimbly into and out of the roles of Konrad and the unseen child Marie. Kira Guloien skilfully conjures a brittle Bettina, who is equal parts superiority and insecurity, love and contempt. Cyrus Lane’s portrayal of pill-addled Albert, who grapples with his own moral clarity amid personal chaos, is compelling and complex. And the scenes where Albert’s drug-filtered skepticism clashes with Rudolph’s polished charm crackle with unease. Finally, Nancy Palk’s Corinna, ensorcelled by Rudolph and hanging on his every flattering word, is marvellous: a wonderwork of unselfconscious and self-satisfied solipsism.
And what about the fascist who came to dinner? Suffice it to say that the twinkle-eyed Diego Matamoros seems born to play the mesmerizing Rudolph, who disorients three generations of the house’s occupants with his nostalgic dialogues — on art, motherhood, community, and even Corinna’s second name – laced with coded fascist rhetoric. Some of the referents will be harder to follow for Toronto audiences than those in Schimmelpfennig’s native Germany – but their insidious effect is unmistakable, and ingeniously punctuated by Savioni’s lighting design.
As Rudolph waxes eloquent about these ostensibly timeless values, he fuses them into each character’s unique vulnerabilities, frustrations and needs – in the process bending them to his will. Their quotidien preoccupations are the Trojan horse for delivering the seduction of fascism… or in the case of the skeptical Albert, the muzzle which prevents him from making his concerns understood.
The timeliness of this production cannot be overstated. After all, our neighbours to the south have just invited a different smiling salesman – with his own narratives of nostalgia for a mythical past – to sit at the head of their table, inside the construct that is their republic.
So treat Canadian Stage’s Winter Solstice as a creepily clever, deeply compelling warning to keep our Canadian eyes and ears truly open. To recognize that words alone ultimately define our world. And to resist the distractions — from outside and inside — that disguise their true meaning.
Necessary Angel Theatre Company’s English-language Canadian premiere of Winter Solstice, presented in association with Canadian Stage and BirdLand Theatre, continues until February 2, 2025. Visit canadianstage.com to reserve tickets.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine, 2025
