BUFFOON

Arts Club Granville Island Stage until December 6, 2020
Live performance from $39; digital stream from $19
604-687-1644/artsclub.com

Posted October 29, 2020

“All life is algebra”, says Smile, surrogate father to circus-born Felix. But wait. That’s ‘al-jabr’, from Arabic, meaning ‘reunion of broken parts’.

And that’s what Anosh Irani’s latest play BUFFOON is all about. Felix – like many – is broken, each of us in different ways. Life is about bringing all the jagged little bits back into place.

We know director Lois Anderson is going to take us on a strange and soul-searching ride when the lights first come up on a forced-perspective room/cell with a single light and a chair. Very Samuel Beckett. Enter chalk-faced Felix and he fixes us with his haunted eyes like two burning coals in a haggard white face. “I don’t know why you’re here”, he says, looking out at us. But we are and the going gets interesting. His story begins.

Born to trapeze artists The Flying Olga (“the darling of Leningrad”) and The Great Frank, Felix is delivered in a circus bathtub, unwanted and unloved. Olga has shit in the tub the moment before his birth and that sets the tone for Felix’s life thereafter. All he wants is, “some hint or clue she loves me.” “You’re AWOL,” says Smile, “Absent without love.”

Felix does find love at the age of seven with the circus seamstress’s daughter Aja but like everything else in his life, it goes badly. He suffers what Smile calls “Love-aria” and he feeds young Felix wine and dope to overcome it. But with the tent-maker’s son out of the picture when Aja gets chickenpox, love flourishes for a while.

But, “Everything wonderful is followed by something – else”, adult narrator Felix warns us.

For a play titled BUFFOON, it is remarkably dark. Responding to a stranger hollering “buffoon” at him, Felix thinks he might have found his calling. He becomes a circus clown (or stand-up comic), but he’s singularly unfunny and BUFFOON gets darker and darker. Indeed, in this part of the play, Irani – like Felix – appears to go sideways in an extended scene in which ‘bouffon’ Felix mimes a first kiss using a sock puppet a-la-Sesame Street. Briefly, energy drifts away.

BUFFOON is tough going but is rocketed to a starry realm by Andrew McNee’s performance. One of the funniest actors to grace our various stages, McNee shows us just how deep he’s prepared and able to go. There are his turns as The Flying Olga: sitting sideways, one leg crossed over the other, languidly dragging on her cigarette.  The Great Frank, dour and Scottish; Smile, slumped, English-accented, soft-spoken and wise; Aja, sweet, flicking her hair, head slightly inclined; and Felix – hopeful and awkward as a boy, increasingly lost and bewildered as a man.

McNee’s is a virtuosic performance, not to be missed. Every gesture, every word opens our hearts to born-in-a-bathtub Felix.  Billed as somewhere between hilarious and heartbreaking, I found it seldom funny, more often harrowing and, at times, obscure. But BUFFOON is extraordinarily and hauntingly realized by director Anderson, set designer Amir Ofek, lighting designer Itai Erdal and composer/sound designer Joelysa Pankanea. It is almost mesmerizing in its presentation.

“There are two important days in your life”, Smile tells Felix. “The day you are born and the day you find out why.” Perhaps Felix finds out why. But is it too late for al-jabr?

(The role of Felix alternates between Andrew McNee and Kayvon Khoshkam.)