Nov. 16, 2005 - Issue #526: Sex, Lust & Love

Go fish

Theatre Network's Girl in the Goldfish Bowl a surreal look at love and loss

It’s a sad, tragic day when you first realize that Santa doesn’t exist. But it’s not the material loss that we feel when we catch mom or dad putting the presents under the tree; it’s the loss of the magic. No more flying reindeer or carefully penned wishlists, no more hoping that Santa didn’t, somehow, catch you sticking gum under your chair, no more dreams of sugarplums. But Santa’s non-existence is only one of the major revelations signaling the end of childhood. And for Iris, the precocious main character of Theatre Network’s Girl in a Goldfish Bowl, it starts to happen when her goldfish Amahl dies just before her 11th birthday.

Now, it isn’t just that Iris’s (Caroline Livingstone) pet has died, but also that all these other weird things start to happen: it’s 1962, the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the closest the world has come to nuclear annihilation; she finds the mysterious Mr. Lawrence (Clinton Carew) lost on the beach and, convinced he is the reincarnation of her fish, brings him home; and her mother Sylvia (Cathy Derkach) makes an attempt to leave her father Owen (George Szilagyi), but the departure is postponed when Sylvia trips and breaks her wrist. In Iris’s 10-year-old mind, as she woefully wonders how the world will live without Amahl, the fish’s death is just the catalyst for all of these things and, ultimately, for her loss of innocence.

“As a kid, you’re in a hurry to grow up; you’re rushing to learn the things that your parents know,” says director Bradley Moss. “And without knowing it, there’s that minute or two that’s definitive—you can’t go back. You cross the line and now the magic of your childhood is gone. You’re in a land where it’s forever changed, and it’s a sad moment.”

And in capturing that time in Iris’s life, the Governor General Award-winning Girl in the Goldfish Bowl is probably playwright Morris Panych’s saddest play. It’s also likely his most accessible; true to Panych’s style, there are some very funny moments and surreal, absurd elements, but each of the characters have struggles that an audience can recognize, and their individual journeys are very much grounded in reality.

At the core is Iris, who sees her peaceful little world begin to crumble. But she’s gutsy and smart, and she’ll do anything she can to keep her parents from splitting. It’s a meaty and challenging role, not only because the script calls for Iris to be played by a grown woman, but also because she’s got a vocabulary that would make a Scrabble pro jealous, making her extremely cheeky.
“We’re just trying to really attend to where Iris is coming from,” Moss says. “Knowing that she’s our narrator, and she’s our window in, you’ve got to like the kid—or you’re hooped. We’ve been really attentive to that, to get behind Iris’s story, to want to follow her, to root for her, and to root for the family to be saved, so that she can be precocious and we can enjoy that.”

While Iris is wonderfully quirky, so are the people who make up her world, and the strangest of all of them is Mr. Lawrence—he’s simply not all there. His speech is stilted, he is socially inept and he can’t seem to grasp the simplest of concepts. And although nobody can figure out exactly where he came from, as the play progresses, his presence makes all of them realize what they need to about the nature of life and what it means to love and be loved. He also, in his own stuttering way, carries with him the message that, like our Santa Claus fantasies, nothing is what it may seem. V

Girl in the Goldfish Bowl
Directed by Bradley Moss • Written by Morris Panych • Starring Caroline Livingstone, George Szilagyi, Cathy Derkach, Linda Grass and Clinton Carew • The Roxy Theatre (10708-124 St) • Nov 17-Dec 4 • 453-2440

New comments for this entry have been turned off and any existing ones are hidden. We apologize for any inconvenience.