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| The cast of Right Now Photo: Jodie Hutchinson |
Alice and Ben are settling into their new apartment when
their neighbours, the Gauches, invite themselves over to see what the couple
have done with the place.
Juliet, Gilles and son Francois live directly across the
hallway in an apartment that is the same, but the other way around. If Alice
and Ben turn left, the Gauches must turn right.
Ben is a doctor who works long hours and Alice spends a lot of
time at home, alone. And when she’s alone, she hears things. A cry in the dark
that begins to haunt her even when other people are around.
Catherine-Anne Toupin’s Right Now is a domestic psychological thriller that mines its tension for dramatic and comedic affect.
When the Gauches arrive as a family, they are framed in the
doorway like the perfect Gothic portrait of a haunted family. But once they
cross the threshold, they are harder to pin down.
Francois enters with a wide toothy grin – both goofy and deeply
unsettling. His relationship with his parents is complicated; his brother died
when he was very young, and he’s uncomfortably close with Juliet and Gilles,
though he’s sure he’s still not the favourite.
Gilles turns out to be an idol of Ben’s in the medical
field. Juliet tells Alice she reminds her a lot of herself. The neighbours are
like a fun-house mirror of Alice and Ben; a mirror on the wall of a haunted
house.
Alice and Ben are still settling into their new apartment,
but they are haunted by something in the past. This ideal place they have made
for themselves, comfortable and perfectly appointed, will not let them forget
where they have come from and the pain of their past is beginning to infect
their waking lives.
The play itself is slippery; it gives you signposts but then
turns them around. You may twig to what is happening to Alice early on, but then Toupin’s
work twists into more complicated shapes. And the characters shift and change
before our very eyes.
Katy Maudlin’s production ratchets up the tension with each glance
and maniacal laugh. Daniel Nixon’s sound design gets under your skin and
Richard Vabre’s lighting illuminates the characters and their shadows in
uncomfortable ways.
The acting ensemble is uniformly excellent. Christina O’Neill’s
Alice is opaque, but this makes her utterly compelling. What is going on inside
her mind? Is what is going on inside her mind playing out in front of us?
Mark Wilson’s Francois is superb for the way he evolves
throughout the play. As his character slowly encroaches on Alice’s life, he
turns from comic relief into something much more disturbing and finally transforms
into a much more complicated figure.
Dushan Phillips is compelling as Ben, who is pushed to
extremes by his and Alice’s trauma and by the many ways he cannot say no to the
far-too-friendly neighbours.
Rounding out the cast is Olga Makeeva and Joe Petruzzi as
Juliet and Gilles, whose relationship at times feels like Morticia and Gomez
Addams and at moments like they live in the same apartment building as Rosemary’s Baby.
Twenty-four hours after Right
Now, I’m still thinking about what happened and what didn’t happen and
which of those things matter the most. It’s the shadows of what’s not there that
leave the deepest impression.
Tense and twisted drama that you’ll wrestle with for a long
time after.
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