Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror opened on Thursday evening at 918 Bathurst in an ARC production directed by Tamara Vuckovic.  It’s a complex play with many levels and multiple places where the boundary between play and audience dissolve.  The first “framing device” has us as the audience for an “unlicensed” play which s being performed under the cover of a wedding.

The characters in the forbidden play are Director of Culture Celik; Adem, an ex-soldier and car mechanic with an extraordinary memory for dialogue and some aspirations as a playwright; Mei, another former soldier (female) now reassigned to the Ministry of Culture and Bax, a once successful playwright much broken down by drink and the death of his wife.

The setting is a Soviet style republic in a perpetual state of war with constant shortages of essential goods and terrible housing conditions.  Only the privileged, like Celik, lead tolerable lives and they do that only as long as their loyalty to party and state is unquestionable.  Despite this Celik thinks he can use his position to nurture and protect actual art and artists.  Adem is to be one of his protegés who will, with the help of Bax, be transformed into an acceptable official playwright. He has also taken a shine to Mei who intends to educate to be his assistant.

The trouble is that Adem has just the one skill; the ability to recall and reproduce what happened exactly which leads first to misunderstanding and then to tragedy.  Celik’s ego driven desire to be the country’s “cultural saviour” while staying firmly onside with the party cannot be reconciled with reality.  Nor can his infatuation with Mei coexist with Mei’s attraction to Adem.

This plays out in a series of scenes, mostly in Celik’s office interrupted by the occasional  reversion to the wedding as police sirens are heard.  There’s a hilarious scene where the players act out a really terrible play by Bax about a battle which both Mei and Adem were wounded in.  In Bax’ “heroic” play a captain defeats an entire enemy army armed with a sickle whereas in reality Adem and Mei were among the few survivors.  Adem’s play is, as we have come to expect, a word for word account of what actually happened.  Celik is furious.  But we are never allowed to forget that we are watching a play; there are cuts back to the wedding, a half naked Mei announces they are going to cut the sex scene and so on.

Finally Adem fatally compromises Celik who seeks revenge.  “Reality” intrudes on the “play within a play”.  We have to sort out who is playing who in whose play.  What is “fact”?  What is “fiction”?  And so, what is “true”?  And what is “art”?  On top of that, what is permissible?  And who gets to decide?  And in case we think this is ancient history the play closes with a montage of the 350 words and phrases the Trump administration has banned from official documents ranging from “abortion” to “women”.

It’s an intense high energy production with some terrific performances.  Nabil Traboulsi is electric, almost manic, as Celik.  He manages to capture the mien of a man who is at once egotistic, sincere and completely delusional and, in the last analysis, a coward.  Paul Smith plays Adem as a sort of Everyman with a certain naive optimism that slowly evaporates.  Craig Lauzon’s Bax is wonderfully depressing; a man of talent brought down by system and circumstances.  Jonelle Gunderson is quite complex as the not as naive as she first appears Mei.  Courtney Stevens plays a key role in the finale.

The direction and stagecraft is fast paced backed up by evocative lighting and sound design that mixes some quite dissonant effects with lyrical cello playing by Rita Dottor. It all makes for effective use of 918 Bathurst laid out like a church which further draws the audience into the action.

It’s a complex multi-level piece that kept me deeply engaged for two hours.  On one level it appears to look back to a past that is gone, though not so long ago, but it also raises questions about the future as we witness creeping censorship (and not just in the US) and the apparent reappearance of “forever wars”.  Disturbing but compelling theatre.

A Mirror runs at 918 Bathurst until March 28th.

Photo credit: Kendra Epik