Review by Lily Pepper
75 min | Solo, Storytelling | G
If there’s anything more uncomfortable than attending a play as a reviewer (particularly trying to discreetly take notes in the dark), it’s when the play you’re reviewing is a monologue about, in part, theatre criticism. As a failed playwright and successful critic, local actor and storyteller Robert Welch dismisses critics as “cunts and wankers,” and art criticism as a cheap way for a hack to assert power over talented people.
St. Nicholas is billed as the tale of a critic “drawn into a world of big-city vampires.” Before I saw the show, I wasn’t sure if these were going to be literal vampires or metaphorical vampires. Fear not, the vampires here are real.
However, any real vampire also does double duty as a metaphorical vampire. When I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula for an English class in college, they armed us with a critical edition that gave feminist, post-colonial and queer readings of the novel. The vampire, since he came into being, has been pulled into service to make a wide variety of rhetorical points, and acts as shorthand for a lot of our ideas about ourselves and other people.
St. Nicholas assumes that you’re familiar with all of this cultural baggage, that you have your own ideas about vampires. It gestures at the notions like the similarity of critics and vampires, but doesn’t beat you over the head with them. Instead, it is more of a wistful yarn about the charmed summer the hard-drinking protagonist spent as a fixer for vampires, going out to bars and luring groups of drunks home to eat, drink, and be preyed upon.
Playwright Conor McPherson portrays vampires as vain, selfish party people, indolent creatures of instinct, whose charm nevertheless makes the world align in their favour. In St. Nicholas, the vampires can go out at night, but they don’t because, as one explains, “It’s more convenient for us to live at night because at night, people are more willing to have a nice time”.
St. Nicholas is a thoughtful, amusing, slow burner of a production. Welch is convincingly cynical and louche as a dissolute critic looking back on his failures with wry bitterness. In the world of the play, things are both more and less than they seem. Supernatural creatures are real, but their faults and foibles are no more epic and magical than our own.
St. Nicholas by Conor McPherson is playing at BYOV I – St. Paul’s Eastern United Church on Friday June 21 at 7:00pm; Tuesday June 25 at 10:00pm; Thursday June 27 at 7:00pm; Friday June 28 at 5:30pm; Saturday, June 29 at 10:30pm. Tickets are $10.
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