Play: The Kreutzer Sonata

The Kreutzer Sonata (Art of Time Ensemble/Prairie Ocean Inc, Dir: Ted Dykstra)

SummerWorks Festival (Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace). Wednesday, August 12, 2010.

"What is music?"

So asks Yuri Pozdnyshev¹ at the outset of this one-man play, adapted from a Tolstoy story. As the house lights go down, Beethoven's sonata plays as an overture², launching Pozdnyshev into a lengthy discourse into the qualities of music as a catalyst capable of stirring up emotions more powerful than any narcotic.

From here, he launches into his own story, a tragedy of jealousy and passions, stirred up by his wife's undue "intimacy" with her musical partner while playing the sonata — a closeness that he cannot achieve. The patriarchal husband cannot bear the idea of his wife's infidelity, and tragedy ensues.³

As played by Ted Dykstra, Pozdnyshev doesn't have much of a character for us to identify with — besides his all-consuming jealousy, we glean little about his personality. This is one of the main factors that keep the play from being particularly emotionally involving. The plot isn't overly complicated, and where it's headed is easy enough to guess, so the art of the whole thing is in how the character gets us there. In this case, Pozdnyshev's internal battle between rationalism and rationalization can only take us so far.⁴

There's also the music, parts of which are played back at key junctures to underline his words, and that works well enough as far as that goes.⁵ On the whole, this was a reasonable performance, but not touching the sublimity of the music that motivated both the character and the author that created him.

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¹ The play's character refers to himself only as "Yuri" during the play, but he is known as Pozdnyshev in the adapted work.

² If you are unfamiliar with it, this is a piece of work worth sitting down and listening to — you can check out one version here.

³ There may also be a reading here that Pozdnyshev was filled with a suppressed queer lust for the violinist Trukachevsky, going on as he does about his womanly lips and delicate hands, but I'm not prepared to push that too far besides noting the possibility crossed my mind.

⁴ There are also a few sudden outbursts of profanity that distract as well. While I understand they are illustrating Pozdnyshev's profound rage, the very contemporary blue language is at odds with the rest of his manner of speech.

⁵ There was, though, a slightly heavy hand with the music cues — at several points, where the last note of a musical passage should have just drifted away like a memory drifting into the aether, there was that sudden digital-off of a pause button being pressed, which was jarring in a rather subtle way. A live musical accompaniment would have been ideal for this, but one recognizes the limitations of the possible, etc. etc.