1986

Toronto Masterclass

Goldoni

The Mistress of the Inn

1991

Toronto Masterclass

Chekhov

Three Sisters

1991

Toronto Masterclass

Hampton

Les Liasons Dangerous

1999

Toronto

Molnár

The Play's the Thing

1999

Toronto Soulpepper

Chekhov

Platonov

1999

Ottawa Art Center

Molnár

The Play's the Thing

1991. CHEKHOV'S THREE SISTERS

“Chekhov comes crystal clear...The beast reason to see this show is that it so articulately explores the powerful and enduring themes in Anton Chekhov’s classic drama.”

The Toronto Star,
13 September, 1991, Vit Wagner

„...a vibrant production...
Three Sisters speaks to the heart of a distinctly modern sense of the tragic...”

The Globe and Mail,
13 September, 1991. Liam Lacey

„Marton successfully mines and refines the gently caustic humor at the play’s core and uses it to build up a head of steam that keeps the production humming until the final curtain falls. ... he’s created a production well worth seeing...”

Toronto Sun,
13 September, 1991, John Coulbourn

„Huges (Actor Stuart Huges, ed.) defines the director’s work as 'passionate as well as delicate and specific.”

Now,
1991, John Kaplan

„Marton has a solid international reputation as an inventive and insightful director, especially for his work on theatrical classics.”

The Globe And Mail,
12 September, 1991. H. J. Kirchhoff

„...triumphant...The production is masterfully staged, every visual and verbal joke precisely timed, on an economical splendiferous set.(...) the play is a feast."

THE PLAY’S THE THING - MOLNAR

National Post,
17 July, 1999, Robert Cushman

1999. CHEKHOV'S PLATONOV

„Working with Marton, who has a 14-year history with the prestigious theatre Louisville, is undeniably a coup for Soulpepper. Inevitably, being linked with such high-calibre directors as Marton and Phillips leads to comparisons with the mother of classical theatre up the road.”

National Post, September, 1999, Mira Friedlander

„It helps, of course, to be working with a director like Laszlo Marton. (...) The experience has been totally dreamy. Everybody is swooning over Laszlo. He’s like Chekhov’s best friend, he knows he knows him so well.”(Actress Liisa Repo-Martell  about Laszlo Marton)

The Sunday Sun,
22 August, 1999, John Coulbourn

„Marton is a cultural icon in Hungary...His productions are famous. They are cultural touch-stones in the way we hang on to the Canada-Russia hockey series or the Terry Fox run. (Albert Schultz, Soulpepper’s artistic director about Laszlo Marton)

The Toronto Star,
28 August, 1999. Robert Crew

„It’s like he’s carved this play out of the original...He’s like a jeweller who ‘s cut the right spots and angles, revealing this beauitiful gem.” (Actress Susan Coyne about Laszlo Marton)

Now,
2 September, 1999. Glenn Sumi

„A great modern play, brilliantly done. In and around Torontothis has been a glorious theatrical summer. (...) Soulpepper has had the stunning simple idea of putting good actors in good plays and placing both in the hands of good directors. It’s that last component that separates it from some well-intentioned actor’s collectives; and its association this year with Hungarian director Laszlo Marton has proved inspirational. His production of ”The Play’s the Thing”was a beautifully sustained exercise in high comedy; his version of Chekhov’s Platonov is that and much more.(...) I confess that up to a couple of years agoI would not have thought theatre of this quality existed in Canada. This is a show that can face the world.”

National Post,  9 September, 1999, Robert Cushman

Uncle Vanya
Anton Chekhov

Soulpepper troupe spices up Toronto


TORONTO -- Great cities are known for the theater companies they keep. Chicago has a wealth of hallmark troupes, presenting everything from the hallowed classics to new works by emerging artists; the reputations of these companies are furthered by tours and transfers to other cities. In Toronto, a city with many similarities to Chicago, the group to watch -- one that in its short four seasons has attracted critical attention and audience enthusiasm -- is Soulpepper Theatre Company.

Soulpepper, fancifully named at its founding by the young daughter of the company's artistic director, consists of several 30- to 40-something members who have had basic experience in such Canadian classic theater institutions as the Stratford and Shaw festivals.

Bring mom

Twelve actors in 1998 formed their own company with the mission of "presenting the greatest plays of the past with the finest artists of the present while investing in the artists of the future." Since then, Soulpepper has initiated an extensive outreach program for young audiences and artists and has annually presented a summer season of classics in two mid-size theaters that have been set up in Toronto's popular Harbourfront Center.

The company receives a small government subsidy, which accounts for about 10 percent of its revenue, but the bulk of the income for this not-for-profit venture comes from private-sector fundraising and ticket sales. Current sponsors, for example, include the Scotiabank Group and the Toronto Globe and Mail. The Clarica investment group also sponsors an innovative "Bring a Parent to the Theatre" program in which customers under 19 who call the box office and buy one student-priced ticket ($25 in Canadian dollars) receive an adult ticket ($43.50) free.

The 2001 season of Soulpepper contains productions of Noel Coward's "Present Laughter," Arthur Schnitzler's "La Ronde," a Eugene Ionesco double bill of "The Bald Soprano" and "The Lesson" and Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," translated by Canadian playwright John Murrell. A production of "A Christmas Carol" is set for the Christmas season.

"Vanya," on stage through Aug. 25 in the du Maurier Theatre Centre, has been staged by Laszlo Marton, the venturesome Budapest-based director familiar to Chicago audiences through his work at Court Theatre ("The School for Wives," "The Play's the Thing," "A Midsummer Night's Dream").

In both the 1999 and 2000 seasons, Marton and Soulpepper had a surprising hit in their adaptation of the very early Chekhov drama "Platonov." It did well at the box office and recently won the Dora award (Toronto's version of the Tonys) as best production of the year. This year, their revelatory "Vanya," which uses the same production designer, Michael Levine, and many of the same cast members of "Platonov," stands as a logical extension of their earlier work. Two company stalwarts, Diego Matamoros and artistic director Albert Schultz, portray the play's two principal male characters, Vanya and Dr. Astrov, respectively, and their portrayals are remarkable for the passion with which they invest the roles. It's clear here that both men, in their mid-40s, are once-exceptional individuals who have gone to seed. They drink too much, they stumble in their lassitude, they lurch about in their fumbling attempts at lovemaking. Yet they are unquestionably men who could have been -- and wanted to be -- better. Vanya, reduced to clerical work for the stepfather he despises, is an intelligent, observant man with a biting wit, and Astrov, for all his feelings of guilt and regret for the past, still yearns for a better world in a future time. And both men are still driven by sexual desires; both are desperately in love with the voluptuous wife (Kristen Thomson) of the petty professor (Robert Haley) Vanya scorns.

The dead-end futility, depression, boredom and odd humor of these lives has been accented in dozens of details by Marton and Levine. The setting of the play's moldering country estate is a patchwork of rugs, old furniture and odds and ends. Like the people who inhabit it, this house has seen better days and has now fallen on hard times. From an overhanging exposed wire hangs a bare light bulb, which is sometimes unscrewed and replaced in a table lamp, for economy's sake.

An ugly truth

It's oppressively hot in this summer of "Vanya," a condition that adds to the feeling of restlessness. Thunder rumbles and, in the end, a rainstorm, like a deluge of tears, creases the production's transparent curtain as it lowers on the scene of Vanya and his niece Sonya (Liisa Repo-Martell) doggedly going through the paperwork of maintaining the country estate.

Sonya, through Marton's direction and Repo-Martell's performance, is one of the most interesting characters in the drama. Often played as young and winsome, she is here portrayed as a palpably plain and ugly young woman, dressed in soiled work clothes and forever cleaning up after the other characters' carelessness and waste. Her love for Astrov is intense, but it's absolutely clear why he would have no interest in her.

Every detail of the production has been invested with meaning, and every character has been drawn with care.

This is "Vanya" of great emotional resonance and understanding, a passionate salute to the special genius of Chekhov drama, and a tribute to the craftsmanship and artistry of Marton and Soulpepper.

Chicago Tribune, August 12, 2001, Richard Christiansen

Dazzling performances drive familiar Chekov

When Soulpepper do Chekov, with László Marton directing, they are the best. This year’s Uncle Vanya may be even better than last’s year’s Platonov, even if it lacks the buccaneering appeal that comes from harnessing an unfamiliar monster of a play with sprawling action and a sprawling cast. Vanya is a far tighter work. It is also, obviously, a greater one – one of the most searching, least sentimental analyses of human failure ever written and also one of the most compassionate accounts of the things that, struggling, we do to ourselves and one another. Its emotional impact here is tremendous.

Its physical impact is remarkable, too. One image after another clings to the mind, beginning with the sight of rain streaming down an almost-transparent curtain before the action begins – a forecast of the storm that breaks out a whole act later and that seems second only among dramatic tempests to the one in King Lear.

		Once that curtain has risen, on a magnificently cluttered room on the Voynitsky family estate, miles from anywhere, people proceed to do amazing things. Sonya, the plain and devoted young woman who virtually runs the place, reaches out in friendship to Elena, her – by local standards – glamorous young stepmother. Elena flinches and takes a nervous swig from a wine bottle – “friend” not being a word that has figured much in her vocabulary. Uncle Vanya, more agonizingly conscious with every moment of how he has wasted his life and hopelessly in love with Elena, imagines himself comforting her during the storm, pick up a chair, soothes and caresses it. Astrov, the local doctor, the most eligible man in the district, a prey to vodka and self-disgust but an ecological visionary, stands on furniture and makes speeches, at once passionate and absurd, about the need for forest preservation. The professor – Sonya’s father and Elena’s husband – who selfishly and self-pityingly controls their lives, unveils his plan for selling the estate, to the fury of Vanya, who seizes the great man’s papers and hurls them into the air. They lie scattered all over the stage, and Vanya’s aged mother, who worships the professor, goes down on her knees and laboriously starts picking them up. When the professor finally departs, everyone – the whole cast – sits in silence for what seems like a minute waiting for him to make some great farewell pronouncement. It never comes. But we have had a hilarious moment of stillness to balance all the frenetic activity.

This kind of physicality is not what we expect in Chekov, thought it is a direct descendant of what Marton, a Hungarian, gave us in Platonov. I described that plays as “sprawling” and my abiding memory of it is of people spreading themselves out on sofas and on floors. They do the same here – Vanya recklessly, Elena with a kind of provocative decorum, everybody else in between – and though it seems excessive or untruthful. It also appears very convincingly Slavic. (Maybe that isn’t true. Maybe it’s a stereotype. But it is certainly wonderful theatrical.) These people, or most of them, live on the land and through their bodies, even though we meet them in a confined space. Michael Levine’s set, without walls but compressing all the material of several lifetimes, is brilliant.

Four dazzling performances, intricately roped together, command the stage. Albert Schultz does perhaps his finest work as Astrov, whose mind and heart have nowhere to go and who is drinking and talking his way into oblivion. He is momentarily stirred by a love for Elena that she somewhat returns and whose discovery drives Vanya further into distraction. Shultz’s Astrov has an open face (what we can see of it – no actor looks better in a Russian beard) and the remnants of a generous disposition that can close down with a slap you almost hear. All Chekov’s doctors drink, but Astrov seems to be the best at his job in the circumstances and a likely surrogate for his author.

Liisa Repo-Martell, always good at waits, seemed almost too obvious casting for Sonya, but she transcends type to create an emotional orphan, heartbreakingly businesslike, as sharp-tongued as anyone else on stage when her principles are challenged, but still the one who never lectures everyone else on how awful they and the rest of Russia are. Her speech at the end of hope deferred – always deferred – is as moving as we knew it would be. It is not helped by the intrusion of a Gregorian chant – the production’s one mistake – but it is counterpointed as it should be by the unheeding antlike activity of the rest of the household.

One of the many moments that is brought up shining new is the juxtaposition of Sonya’s resigned lament for her own plainness with the immediate entry of Elena, looking beautiful. In Kristen Thomson’s performance, Elena’s is a restrained prettiness that is afraid of itself; she hints, more meaningfully than any other I have heard, at damaging affairs in the past. (This may be the point at which to compliment John Murrell’s muscular translation, which is a gift both to its speakers and its hearers.) She seems to have married the professor not just for security but to get away from sex. She can be stirred into a semblance of love and certainly into charity, but she retreats in horror when the going gets rough. She also drinks, more daintily than the men but just as compulsively. This is the subtlest of the performances.

		Diego Matamoros’ Vanya is perhaps the most debatable, gone inordinately to seed, vociferously glorying in his own disintegration. All this is true, but there is little sign that Vanya could ever have amounted to anything at all; that, if not the Schopenhauer or Dostoevsky of his more fevered imaginings, he was at least a good farmer. Vanya is always catching himself out in his own pretensions, which is why he always goes to our hearts.

When Michael Redgrave played the part, he literally made you laugh and cry at the same time. Matamoros has you doing both, but singly. His tirades are superb, and his final, crumpled demeanour – hugging the threat of suicide like a fretful child – irresistible. It’s Astrov’s task at the end to pull him out of it, wearily, since he shares some of the same condition. The duet between the two men in the last act and the electrifying rapprochement between the two women in the second are high-water marks of Canadian acting.

Robert Haley makers rather a pallid professor, very soft-spoken; it’s a decently accurate performance but hardly arrogant enough to push Vanya persuasively over the edge. Michael Simpson’s Waffles, the ineffectual red-faced neighbour, is a touch cartooned but original in his vindictive pleasure at the fate of his long-absconded wife. Joyee Campion is a fine and unusually sharp-tongued nurse, and Chatmion King something of a relevation in the tiny role of Vanya’s mother; when she enters with her spectacles, her cigarette and her stock of pamphlets, she momentarily becomes the center of the action. William Webster, bent double, makes an amazing impact in the still smaller role of the family servant and night watchman, consistently crossing the stage like a piece of mobile scenery. (But when is this actor going to get a good part?)

I mentioned, as I always do given half a chance, Redgrave’s Vanya, the finest performance – of anything – I have ever seen and part of the finest production – of anything – I have ever seen (Oliver’s, at Chichester and the national Theatre). So if I call Soulpepper’s production the second’best Uncle Vanyaof my experience, I trust it’s clear that we are flying very high. At the end the rain-soaked scrim descends again, and we are left – as I imagine they are behind it – gasping and proud.

National Post,  August, 2001, Robert Cushman

Vanya's ripe remount

Uncle Vanya
Written by Anton Chekhov
Directed by Laszlo Marton
Starring Diego Matamoros, Liisa Repo-Martell, Kristen Thomson and Albert Schultz
At the du Maurier Theatre Centre in Toronto
Rating: ****

The rain-soaked plastic sheeting that serves as a stage curtain at Toronto's du Maurier Theatre Centre is rolled up once more and Soulpepper Theatre Company revives its gritty, clowning and deeply moving version of Uncle Vanya. If on opening night last year, I found that a certain emotional depth was lost to the more outlandish examples of physical humour in this production, the company has now filled in the corners of the script to offer an Uncle Vanya that can genuinely evoke both laughter and tears.

Outwardly, what distinguishes the production directed for Soulpepper by the Hungarian Laszlo Marton is its chaotic setting created by designer Michael Levine. The drawing room of the decaying estate which Vanya (Diego Matamoros) and his niece Sonya (Liisa Repo-Martell) struggle to manage for the rest of the family is no vision of Edwardian gentility.

Instead it features exposed wiring, oddly assorted furniture, mismatched crockery, stacks of books and papers, a food cupboard full of bottled vegetables, a samovar and a sink. Beneath the light of a single bulb, the inhabitants eat and drink continually, sleep in chairs, and kick off their muddy footwear at the door to wander about shoeless.

Here, Marton and Levine make physical the characters' continual complaint that the household routine has descended into anarchy ever since Sonya's father, the demanding professor Serebriakov (Robert Haley), and his young second wife Elena (Kristen Thomson) have come to stay.

Inwardly, what distinguishes it are the performances, richer now they have had some time to ripen. Matamoros propels his clowning and pathetic Vanya through an exploding minefield in which charges of comedy and tragedy burst out all around him.

There is a remarkable moment where, as Vanya lies on the floor fantasizing about what would have happened had he fallen in love with Elena before she made the mistake of marrying Serebriakov, Matamoros takes hold of a chair that has been knocked over and which lies beside him. As he clings to this piece of furniture as though it were Elena herself, we can only feel saddened for his unrealized dream of domestic bliss. But as he begins to hump the chair we can but laugh -- until he laughs at himself and then abruptly dismisses the moment, bringing us back to sorrow with the realization of his ridiculousness. Bold physical direction and acting have taken us through a great circle of emotions in the blink of an eye.

As Elena, Thomson maintains the mix of ripeness and anxiety that so illuminated this contradictory character last season. Repo-Martell, meanwhile, achieves a finer balance now in her squinting, darting Sonya, backing away from last year's vocal extremes. Her Sonya is still an almost repellent little thing, but Repo-Martell is now daring a performance of an excruciating awkwardness that makes an audience flinch with embarrassment.

The source of Sonya's embarrassment is her unrequited love for the local doctor Astrov. Albert Schultz reprises his fine work in that role, capturing not only the emotional warmth that the man reveals in everything from his humanitarian work and friendship with Vanya to his collapse towards Elena, but also the narrow coldness of his abstract speeches and inability to recognize Sonya's plight.

Amongst the cups of cold tea and the discarded shoes, Soulpepper has found the richness and complexity of life.

The Globe and Mail,  July 20, 2002, Kate Taylor

None so moving as this

To caricature, but not by much: Most productions of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya concern a group of perfectly sweet, civilizes people whose lives are wrecked by a selfish and pompous loudmouth, generally referred to as the Professor, who just happens to hold their fates his hands. In Laszlo Marton's triumphant Soulpepper production (revived from last season), both sides have been reappraised. Robert Haley's Professor, a much improved performance, never even shouts; ha may indeed be the quietest person onstage.

Chekhov doesn't let us get a good look at this character until the second of his play's four scenes. He is briefly glimpsed in the first, but our knowledge of him is largely dependent on the testimony of others, and especially that of Uncle Vanya himself. Vanya, who has devoted most of his life to managing the Professor's estates, resents him for many reasons: his first marriage to Vayna's beloved sister and his second to a beautiful younger woman desired by Vanya himself; his literary reputation; his overall personal and professional success, as painfully compared to Vanya's own personal ann professional lack of it. That's how Vanya sees it. When we get to spend some time with the Professor himself, we find he's a fretful hypochondriac, and as prone to self-pity as anyone else in the household. Certainly, he's selfish, and probably his books and articles (on "realism and naturalism and all that nonsense") are as useless and derivative as Vanya, once his blinkered fan, now declares them to be; but at least he's written them. For the first time in my experience, the Professor's plan for selling off the estate, thereby giving everybody some money and rest, sound rather sensible. This doesn't let him off the hook. It's still clear by the end of the play that he is the only character incapable of feeling other people's pain as well as his own. But at least he's allowed to have a case. It isn't all gain. Some humour goes, and so does a sense of controlling malevolence: His refusal, issued from off stage, to let his daughter Sonya and her stepmother, Elena, celebrate their new-found-relationship with some late-night piano-pounding does not come, as it has in other productions, like a blow in the face. But it does allow the other characters, all given flambovantly full-blooded performances, the dignity of responsibility for their own suffering: a sufferiung that, most cruelly, refuses to kill them.

The play's last act finds Diego Matamoro's Vanya, having failed - twice - to shoot the Professor, curled up. Fetus-like, refusing to surrender the morphine he has stolen from albert Schultz's Dr. Astrov: the man he suspects, groundlessly, of supplanting him in Elena's affections. (In fact, Astrov has merely got a little closer than his rival to first base.) The developing dialogue between these two actors has been one of the great achievements of Soulpepper's five year history, and this current duet is a summit.

Matamoros, heartbroken and heartbreaking, sinks into his sulks. He has already lost most of his dignity in attempting to assert it. (It's telling that the Professor runs from him, not like a man in fear for his life, but like a man hiding from the club bore.) Now he has to surrender the final remant along with the morphine. It liberates him a sense; he goes back to his old hard-working life. But that in itself is a sentence.

The awareness of failure is Checkov's constant subject, and he was to give it more complex symphonic treatment in The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, but in Uncle Vanya where the pain is distributes among a smaller domestic group, it hits harder. This is a play in which two adult characters, in a rapid succession, appeal to a parent for understanding, and are ignored. It seems here like the most moving - as opposed to depressing - play ever written.

Kristen Thomson deepens and widens her study of Elena as a woman who every tentative step forward takes several terrified steps back. Lisa Repo-Martell completes the central quartet as a notably unsaintly Sonya; all the characters in this play judge and blame one another and Sonya, for all her charity, can be as sharp-tongued as any. She may overdo the dowdiness; Sonya is in love with Astrov and, as American critic Eric Bentley once pointed out, we should feel that in turning her down he is, in very Chekhovian fashion, missing something. But she contributes greatly to the production's sense of place. This, in Michael Levine's superbly cluttered setting (which features a floor strewn with books, and a naked light bulb on a string), is a remote mud-caked Russia, in which people get desperately and uproariously drunk.

Marton, a Hungarian, gets us away from the genteel English-speaking Chekhovian tradition - and also, to be fair, from the genteel Russian-speaking Chekhovian tradition; the Moscow Arts Theatre, at least after the revolution, was a privileged museum of bourgeois pleasures. The physicality of this production may or may not be especially Slavic but it is certainly exhilarating. Think of Matamoros' love affair with furniture; he hides in it, and virtually makes love to a chair, caressing it as he fantasies about comforting Elena during a storm. Or think of Thomson, at her last moment, leaping into Schultz's arms, and him lifting her off the ground, when it's too late to do either of them good or harm. The supporting cast remains good, with Carolyn Hetherington, the only newcomer, an astringently understanding nurse.

National Post,  July 26. 2002, Robert Cushman

A rare peek behind the curtain

There are many things that are admirable about the Soulpepper Theatre Company's current production of Uncle Vanya playing at Toronto's Harbourtfront Centre - designer Michael Levine creates a timeless but emphatically Russian setting, director Laszlo Marton balances the elements of farce and tragedy in the play - but what's crucial to its success is the richness of its charaters. In the title role, Diego Matamoros reveals the pathos of Vayna's clowing and his compromises; as his awkward and ugly niece, the put-upon workhorse Sonya, Liisa Repo-Martell dares to create a figure who is utterly worthly yet almost repellent, while Kristen Thomson's Elena achieves the unusual combination of a woman who is both highly anxious and very sexy.

		It's rare that a critic gets to witness the process tha might produce such results -- directors don't often invite the press to rehearsals -- so when Soulpepper suggested I might like to eavesdrop on Marton as he conducted a master class for young actors, I welcomed the opportunity. His actors were not Soulpepper's seasoned crew but rather recent graduates of theatre programs at the University of Toronto and George Brown College. They would be doing scene work -- training sessions in which actors concentrate on a few scenes from the classics, rather than a whole play -- and the source would be Platonov.

It's an early and sprawling drama by Anton Chekhov about a disaffected young teacher who is casually cheating on his sweet young wife and drinking to excess: The playwright wrote it while still a medical student before he produced better-known dramas such as Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard. Marton, the Hungarian director whom Soulpepper has invited across the Atlantic on several occasions, staged a heavily abridged and highly successful version of Platonov with the company two years ago. He said he chose to revisit it both because the characters in their late 20s and 30s would be close to his students in age and because he's still interested in the script.

When I arrived at the ramshackle rehearsal space where they were working, the master-class students were deep into two scenes from the play, with different groups acting them out according to their own staging followed by comments from Marton.

In one scene the feckless Platonov is chastised by Sophia, his lover of three weeks standing, after ha has fallen asleep drunk and missed their secret renezvous.

In another, in the small hours of a night of partying, Platonov mercilessly teases the awkward Grekova, who turns on her date for evening, upbraiding him for his failure to defend her.

These people may be near to the young actors in age, but understanding the risk Sophia is taking with this affair, the depth of Grekova's humiliation or the nature of Platonov's depression takes work. It turns out that Marton uses what you might called modified method acting - he's not suggesting anyone drink themselves silly to perform these scenes, but asks his students to empathize with the characters, to be subtle enough to discover the nub of Platonov's problem in the words he pleadingly speaks to Sophia: "Bring me back to life!" or to be brave enough to deliver Grekova's insecurity and ugliness.

The results are fascinating to watch as he makes a pair of actors playing Grekova and her unfortunate date exit and start again, and exit and start again, and again, and again, beginning their battling before they have even entered the stage so they come on with the manic energy of a rowdy party going sour. As they go at it, their lines gradually sound less and less stagey and suddenly, in the midst of the cluttered backstage lounge they have chosen as their setting, a true fight seems wholly present and Grekova's tears are real. They are now close enough to the characters that their acting has become invisible.

Chekhov's plays once had the reputation of lugubrious dramas as determinedly depressive as their characters, but these actors benefit from living in the midst of a wonderful revival of interest in the notion that the plays the Russian writer often labeled comedies were exactly that. Marton's contribution to this revival, which in the English-speaking world was driven by the casual, contemporary drama of the 1994 Lous Mall film Vanya on 24nd Street, is an insistence on the rough Russioan setting.

"When they started to play these plays in white clothes, they couldn't get close to what was happening," Marton said, referring to the lawn dresses and linen suits in which the genteel English-language productions have tended to be staged. Marton stresses that actors and audiences should find in the characters people as familiar as one's Uncle Mike or old friend Susan. But getting close to the characters means not merely recognizing familiar figures as one might in any trendy contemporary drama - of, he should try Prozac - but actually seeing the complicated mechanisms of their joys and their sorrows at work.

When that happens, as it does in Marton's productions, ÍChekhov can emerge as the most vivd of the great 19th century playwrights, revealing living human dilemmas with none of Bernard Shaw's twisting intellectualizing nor Henrik Ibsen's baroque symbols.

It was 11 years ago that Marton first visited Canada to conduct a workshop of Chekhov's Three Sisters. Several of the eager young actors in that production are now the members of the Soulpepper trouple who have invited him back to direct them and teach the next generation, as the learning curve comes full circle.

The Globe and Mail,  August 15, 2002, Kate Taylor

Chekhov times five at master class Soulpepper
Platonov: Students guided and goaded by director Laszlo Marton

Robert Cushman
National Post, August 24, 2002

Five pairs of young actors are going in turn through the same scene. A married woman, planning to elope with the equally married hero, calls on him to discover why he failed to turn up for their assignation, and finds him still asleep. Have you ever, she demands, been on time for any of our meetings? His reply is "Rarely." But she perseveres, and by the end of the scene she at least has him out of bed. Sometimes -- the actors' interpretations vary -- she even gets him more or less dressed.

"It's wonderful" said Marton at the start of the presentation "to have such an old broken-down building. It has a life, it has a heart." He also quoted the great Italian director, Giorgio Strehler: "our work is about the memories of our desires, disappointments and defeats."

On the second day of the class, he had reminded the students that Chekhov had accounted himself a failure -- this despite his achievements as dramatist, fiction writer, doctor, womanizer and philanthropist that he packed into a fairly brief life. So, not even the greatest are immune.

The student actors also had to draw on their experiences and bring those memories into the characters. This is standard acting theory as expounded by Stanislavsky and adopted (and adapted) by the New York Actors' Studio, but Marton brings to it his own warmth, his own charm and his own passion for physical detail.

There's a party scene in Platonov and two of the groups elected to present it. (An actress in one of them surprised everybody by making her first entrance from a fridge.) "Acting this scene," said Marton, "is not about being old and Russian; it's about how you are at a party. You could be as knowledgeable about Russian literature as the British Museum itself; it still wouldn't help. Your body rhythm is very different, depending on what time of day it is, how long you're going to stay there, how many drinks you've had. It's difficult to have a conversation about your life at 8 or 9 in the evening; you need the magic of the night. A 1 a.m. line is not the same as an 8 o'clock line."

This sodden late-night feeling has come brilliantly to life in Marton's Chekhov productions for Soulpepper. Everybody who has seen Diego Matamoros in the current Uncle Vanya virtually make love to a chair while lamenting the life he never lived and the woman he never had must have wondered where the idea came from. Matamoros says it originated with him ("I thought I need to hold something") and was edited and encouraged by Marton, but it must have needed the climate of the production, and of a whole way of working, to bring it about.

Matamoros, one of the 12 founding members of Soulpepper, is an associate director of the company with responsibility for training programs; he is probably the Canadian actor to whom Marton is closest, personally and philosophically. ("Diego," says Marton, "is like my son.") Matamoros on that chair scene could be Marton on acting in general: "It increases the variety of the moments you can have with an audience. If you don't have an object, you can't do it."

It's also a method that communicates itself to young people as the master-class scenes showed. The insistent physicality may even, given what Matamoros describes as "the fearlessness of youth," be easier for them.

"You have" Marton told them "to make your own choices; that's how your work is going to be detailed and confessive." Matamoros echoes this: "You must make decisions, you can't be a director's pawn." Marton advises and reacts, but he doesn't dictate, and yet it's certain that the students were guided by what they had gleaned of his philosophy and his preferences. In other words, they wanted to please him.

The result was that each scene was recognisably a scene from a Chekhov play as it might be directed by Marton for Soulpepper, but all were different. Some moments were startlingly bold. I remember, from one of the party scenes, a shy young girl, first insulted and then kissed by Platonov, going into a state of visible meltdown. From an improvization near the beginning of the class I recall with delight the hunted hero burying himself under his mattress to escape the importunities of his mistress -- a picture that did not, alas, survive into the presentation. Criticism here is not the point, but my overall impression was that the women, given the more active roles, found it easier to connect with the play than did the men.

Marton has always claimed that he chose this play for Soulpepper, and subsequently for these students, because it's about what happens to young idealists. But, really to grapple with the terminal lassitude that afflicts Platonov and his companions, you need to be an older kind of young.

This is Soulpepper's fifth year. It is also the fifth year of its association with Marton, and its fifth year of running master classes. One of the most impressive things about the company is that it proclaimed an initial commitment to training and has stuck to it.

Robin Phillips, in addition to directing the two productions of the company's first year, somehow found time and energy to teach as well. Matamoros and Albert Schultz, Soulpepper's artistic director, have given "Shakespeare intensives," and Marton has taken young actors through Ibsen and Turgenev as well as Chekhov.

Nor have all the people who signed up been theatrical beginners: Alon Nashman, one of the most highly regarded young actors in Toronto, was one of last year's students and the experience, in Matamoros' estimate, led to his breakthrough performance in Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

An academy -- a postgraduate acting scheme for a dozen students a year -- is a vital part of the company's plans for a permanent home.

In reverse, seasoned Soulpepper actors such as Bill Webster and Martha Burns have been "reborn" by the experience of teaching in the company's Youth Outreach program, which gives "the experience of theatre" to teenagers who will not necessarily go into it professionally; Matamoros notes that the kid he is mentoring is "going into commerce, but it's a wonderful experience whatever you do." In effect, this scheme works in parallel with the acting classes, to teach audiences.

Soulpepper's academy scheme has some similarities to the four-year-old Conservatory at Stratford, whose graduates are already doing impressive things on the festival's main stages. It feels like a good time to be watching or working in classical theatre in Ontario. Marton certainly thinks so.

From October to June he runs his own theatre in Budapest, directing one production in a season of 12, and constantly teaching in the same academy in which he himself trained. In the summer he comes to his second home in Toronto.

"It's exciting for me, coming from a very small country, to think that this is really Canadian. These actors feel the work belongs to them -- they're not imitators of another culture."

He'd already worked with many of the Soulpepper actors on a famous production of Three Sisters -- for a group called Masterclass Theatre -- seen at Banff and in Toronto in 1991. So when those actors reunited, "I felt responsible for them." And what they've forged together -- Canadian Chekhov, paprika-flavoured -- is unique.
And, it seems, teachable.

The Wild Duck
Ibsen

Review by Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press Drama Critic

[…]Ibsen's classic play, directed in a clean, straightforward manner by Laszlo Marton, tells the story of one family torn apart by the truth.

"The Wild Duck" is a difficult play to pull off, often collapsing into hysteria. Not so here. Marton and company have given us a revival that genuinely takes flight.

*******

A cruelly effective Wild Duck Robert Cushman, National Post Theatre Critic Ibsen’s The Wild Duck is usually described as a play about two kinds of lies – the high sounding ones known as ideals, imposed from without and generally fatal, and the more mundane falsehoods that people tell themselves, and hope others will believe, just so their lives will be bearable. „The truth will set you free” goes up against „humankind cannot bear very much reality”, and loses. The description’s accurate but it sounds and is, schematic. Laszlo Marton is a director more interested in people than in abstractions, merciless in his eye for detail, charitable in his overall vision. In his production for Soulpepper, one of the finest things he or they have achieved, The Wild Duck is revealed as the most moving play ever to be written on a subject that’s painfully specific: cruelty to children, across two generations.

*******

Theatre Reviews

AWESOME IBSEN
By Kate Pedersen

Now | july 28 - august 3, 2005 | vol. 24 no. 48

I wonder that Henrik Ibsen's the Wild Duck isn't on every high school reading list. And I wonder that we don't learn better the history of passionate idealism, of feeling like life is based on nothing more than a slick web of deception and illusion.
[…]What better, more dynamic group than the good people at Soulpepper to show us the extent of these timeless themes?
After directing the piece recently in Ireland, Hungarian director László Marton chooses a staging that makes the most of Ibsen's psychological subtext.

*******

KEITH GAREBIAN - STAGE AND PAGE weBSITE
The Wild Duck

Thanks to Hungarian director Laszlo Marton and Soulpepper Theatre, Canada can finally know the true power and haunting anomalies of Ibsen. Marton does for Ibsen what he did earlier for Chekhov: he makes a venerated European playwright seem fresh, iconoclastic, and moving. He makes the old seem new—not necessarily all unassailable in mode, but certainly a form of presentation that challenges preconceptions or stereotypes. The first signs of change are in Csorsz Khell’s set and Kevin Lamotte’s lighting. The many screens on stage create a feeling of stuffiness, of air being cut off. Lamotte’s lighting is dim, allowing only for the black of the liveried servants, the gleaming crystal punchbowl and glasses, and the red of the punch itself. Nowhere is there rich upholstery, expensive furniture, or bric-a-brac. No candelabra, no fireplace--just a minimal elegance. Later, however, the design fails because the Ekdal home, though sparse in furnishings, is too big, too spacious for their class and condition, and the important loft or attic is turned into a lower depth or basement, perhaps because the director equates it with the depths of the ocean.

Photo: Guntar Kravis

Marton’s production shows that Ibsen can be as affecting as Chekhov, if not quite as tender. This Wild Duck is a mixture of dark and light elements, discomfiting gloom, chilling anxiety, wry farce. It is the best Ibsen ever done in Toronto, and it gives ample evidence that Soulpepper is the best ensemble in the country when it comes to drama. What other repertory company has succeeded the way Soulpepper has in its brief but invaluable history? It has its failures, of course, but these pale in the light of its successes, and this Wild Duck is a huge triumph, thanks to a radical director and an ensemble that illuminates a complex play superbly.

*******

„Ibsen lives caught in secrets grandly acted”

Last night
The Wild Duck

*******

Richard Ouzounian
theatre critic
Toronto Star

„Every now and then it takes Soulpepper to make us realize just what we have been missing at the theatre.
It’s really been too long since Toronto theatre goers have seen a great play, a superb cast and a production that did them both justice, but that situation just remedied last night with the opening of the Wild Duck.”

„Director László Marton is in sure control of the material from the very start. The Typical opening scene of exposition is delivered by two gossipy servants as they prepare a punch bowl at a party. We suddenly find ourselves listening closely to everything they say, a sensation that is duplicated many times during the evening. Yes, there are moments of of full throated passion, but it’s the whispered confidences, the barely uttered thoughts that you’ll remember.”

“Four Stars out of Four…”
”…a great play, a superb cast…with moments of full-throated passion…”
”Brent Carver brings an other-worldly chill to the meddling Gregers”
”Diego Matamoros delivers another fearless performance.”

„There’s also a touching portrait from Maggie Huculak of a wife who’ll do anything to keep her marriage together, holding everything and everyone a bit too tight.
The unimpeachable William Webster turns the alcoholic grandfather Ekdal into the most reasonable of men…
And Joseph Ziegler brings a fine rage to the proceedings as a failed physician who alone on the stage realizes man’s universal need for a lie to give meaning to his existence.
But perhaps finest of all is Martha MacIsaac as Hedvig one of the trickiest roles in world drama.”

„Don’t say that Toronto is lacking world-class theatre. Not while Soulpepper is around to give us shows like this.”

Three sisters who break your heart
Laszlo Marton's Soulpepper Production Tops Others By Bringing New Life To Chekhov

Robert Cushman
National Post

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Chekhov's Three Sisters yearn to go to Moscow. It's the one thing about them and their play that everybody knows. The first huge virtue of Laszlo Marton's Soulpepper production is that it rescues this premise from being a theatrical joke and makes it both fresh and forceful.
Listening to the play's opening speeches, we register the facts and the feelings as never before. We take in just how long Olga, Masha and Irina have been living in their provincial fastness, and how their lives are still dominated by the memory of their father the general who brought them here. Marton has staged this prelude formally, the cast lined up in chairs against the back wall. We seem to be suspended in time; there are even distant echoes, musical and visual, of the general's funeral. The sisterhood's initial hopefulness rings out clear; so do the mundane rumblings of the people around them that will eventually swallow them up. Five minutes into the play, your heart is already breaking.
Suddenly, it's raining, and we're firmly in present time, the sisters virtually dancing in anticipation of Irina's name-day party. Another of the production's signal achievements is that it makes us believe in them as siblings; they have all the closeness and all the shared jokes. It's typical, both of them and of the production, that in the traumas of the third act, with the town on fire, they break out into a pillow fight. Olga, the reluctant headmistress and more reluctant spinster, is often played as a wraith-like figure from a different generation altogether; d'bi.young.anitafrika gives her the family passion and the family warmth; confronted with Masha's infidelity to her husband (another teacher) she's torn, visibly and agonizingly, between sympathy and disapproval. Megan Follows' Masha, all nerves and irony, disintegrates before our eyes as she first yields to, then loses, the married officer Vershinin. Patricia Fagan's Irina is a radiant study in hopefulness continually lowering its sights, forced to compromise in love and in life, and losing even what she's settled for. The complexities of feeling that percolate within and around this family are brilliantly captured. Nicolas Billon's English version is exceptionally lucid.
There is, as usual in Marton's Chekhov productions, a physicality that is both exciting in itself and a huge release for the actors, whether they're playing joy or -- more frequently -- desperation; sometimes it's joy to stave off desperation. When Michael Simpson's drunken doctor, in his great aria of self-disgust, his belly protruding over his long-johns, washes himself off, he practically drowns himself in the basin. (He also -- a signature Marton motif -- has an intense relationship with a chair.) A role that is often sentimentalized here takes on a new leering identity, a stubborn refusal to take anything seriously that melts for a brief moment when he shouts at Andrei, the sisters' even more hapless brother, to get out of town fast. Kevin Mac-Donald gets electric in Andrei's most intense sequence of self-flagellation. It's typical of Chekhov that this should immediately be followed by a shrewish outburst from his wife, Natasha, typical of Marton that she should deliver it from a window immediately above him.
The stage is small, but Lorenzo Savoini's brick-backed set, with the onstage candles atmospherically realized in Kevin Lamotte's lighting, makes the room seem large. Characters huddle in corners or against walls in a frantic search for intimacy: Irina fending off the hopeful attentions of Mike Ross's kindly bearded Baron or Andrei making his spectacularly ill-fated (because successful) proposal to Natasha.
Sarah Wilson plays Natasha's initial shyness and later cruelty to the max, with one hysterical uncomprehending outburst that combines them. Stephen Guy-McGrath's Soliony, the play's other destructive outsider, has a mad spasm that's even more frightening. In general, the company's newer younger actors are good at the emotional extremes, less so at imposing themselves in between. The most relaxed performances come from Soulpepper's two middle-aged statesmen: Diego Matamoros embodies all the embarrassment and irritation of Masha's cuckolded husband, continually arriving just too late to find his wife in some kind of flagrante. Equally well-meaning and equally ineffectual -- indeed the two supposed rivals spend a surprising amount of convivial time together --is Albert Schultz's Vershinin, drifting in and out of his affair without quite knowing what's hit him or, especially, her. His famous philosophizing is perfectly genuine -- he's Russian, after all; it's also a mask for guilt. The lovers' farewell is triumphantly tragicomic: she jumping into his arms; he trying to disengage himself while she clings frantically to his coat, as if that might hold him.
Even the smallest parts are well played; the two aged retainers (Dawn Greenhalgh and Les Carlson) better than well. The junior officers (James Dallas Smith, Michael Blake) are amiable spectators; even the silent maid (Jennifer Villaverde) has a validating moment of terror. Irony cuts through the play like a knife, but this isn't one of those Chekhov productions that falls over itself to be funny; I laughed only once. Rather, it banishes gloom by giving pain its full weight and putting it in personal and historical perspective. It's comic in the largest sense, and brimming with life. There have been some very fine productions in and around Toronto this year, but this one tops them all.
- Three Sisters runs through Sept. 29 at the Young Centre. Call 16-866-8666 for more information.

robert.cushman@hotmail.com
© National Post 2007

It was the best, and now it's better
Robert Cushman, National Post
Published: Tuesday, June 10, 2008
UNCLE VANYA

Young Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto

Soulpepper's Uncle Vanya was a great production when we first saw it in 2001. It keeps getting better. Back for the third time, it now has a quartet of central performances that, fine individually, have reached a phenomenal level of contact. They also inhabit an external world that in Laszlo Marton's production is more clearly and starkly depicted than ever.

There's very little glamour in this account of Chekhov's world. Uncle Vanya himself, for all his pretentions to (and actual possession of ) wit and culture, is drudging his life away as an absentee landlord's estate manager. In Diego Matamoros' performance he begins both the first and the last acts curled invisibly in an armchair, like a figure out of Lewis Carroll: a victim of depression in the first case and despair in the second, having failed to shoot either himself or the exploiting Professor on whom he blames his own failure. In between, he has fallen hopelessly in love with the Professor's beautiful young wife and had to endure the humiliation of seeing the local doctor get closer to first base with her than he could ever manage. Matamoros roles all these disparate defeats into one ball of pain and frustration, without ever losing sight of the fact that the play is, in some sense, a comedy. As Sonya tells him, he will survive. That's the trouble.

Liisa Repo-Martell's Sonya is even more moving, and fiercely so. Any traces of waif-like fragility have long since departed this performance. She's a practical country girl, tormented by feeling unattractive. When she asks the doctor, whom she adores, if he could ever be interested in a "friend or sister" of hers, she curses her choice of words as soon as they're out of her mouth; though the cruellest irony is that he can't see through them, transparent as they are. Enlisting the matchmaking assistance of the beauteous Elena, she knows her doom before her friend can tell her of it, and she accepts it silently, but with tragic weight. Kristen Thomson shows more clearly than ever before how Elena clings to her own comesticized image as a way of keepingemotionalattachments at bay. Marton makes much of these characters' habits of rushing out -- from the room, the house, the district -- whenever a situation becomes painful or embarrassing. This applies even to the one supposed realist among them, Astrov, the doctor whom Albert Schultz plays as bone-weary. He has to come a long way -- on horseback, through the mud -- to make house calls, and Schultz, whose performance has become harder with the years (perhaps excessively so), is on a short fuse. He is violently impatient with the suicidal Vanya, but hardly less so with himself, for his professional foul-ups and for falling in love with Elena. Even his hymns of praise to forest preservation--his one great passion -- are subdued and hurried, as if he hardly expected anyone to be interested and has grown a shell to preempt other people's laughter.

Photo: www.soulpepper.ca

Apart from the occasional explosion (mainly from Matamoros) these people speak very quietly, because they know one another so well and can take their relationships for granted. So of course can the actors, who have played these roles since the production started. Even at the risk of some inaudibility (Michael Levine's set is less acoustically hospitable here than it was at Harbourfront), this deep sense of ensemble is as precious as it's rare. No one else in the cast has been able to put down such deep roots, with the possible exception of William Webster, who in the minute role of a bent-double servant functions, as I wrote before, as part of the scenery; he is the image of life going on, regardless. Michael Simpson the production's other survivor, brings little more to old Waffles than a voice and a wig. Among the newcomers, Joseph Ziegler's Professor gets the Professor's tetchiness and pomposity, plus a new and credible smoothness, but doesn't as yet get very far beneath them. Hazel Desbarats as Vanya's pedantically besotted Maman is a more blatant eccentric than was the late and wonderful Charmion King; Patricia Hamilton, though not the world's most obvious peasant-woman, doles out the right measures of Russian tea and sympathy as the family nurse.

The play is an exposition of the law of unintended consequences. At one level it's farce. The Professor's plan to sell the estate may well be self-interested but it could be sensible; however, it gets nowhere because Vanya and Sonya, the people most affected, have more tormenting things on their mind. Then Vanya tries his hand as a tragic hero with ludicrous, agonizing results. This climactic scene has lost something in clarity. But other wonderful moments remain: Vanya's making love to a chair in place of Elena, Elena leaping into Astrov's arms when it's too late to matter. The production's physical dynamics still match its emotional, with the rain pelting down before, after and halfway through the action. This is a hard world, lit by a single electric bulb that's carefully rationed; there is, what with Astrov's forestry schemes, a topical emphasis on conservation. This is Chekhov unsentimental but loving. It's as good as theatre gets. - Uncle Vanya runs to June 21. Visit www.soulpepper.ca for more information.

Theatre Reviews
Vanya victorious
Jordan Bimm
www.nowtoronto.com

With six members of their acclaimed 2001 production reprising their roles, it’s no surprise that Soulpepper’s remount of Uncle Vanya is a brilliantly nuanced affair.

Set in czarist Russia, the play unfolds on a country estate owned by retired Professor Serebraikov (Joseph Ziegler) but managed by his former wife’s neurotic and frustrated brother Vanya (Diego Matamoros). The aging Serebraikov and his new young wife, Elena (Kristen Thomson), pay the estate a rare visit that rouses long-repressed emotions in the permanent residents.