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Thursday July 4th, 2002

By GLENN SUMI

Diary of the first Fringe night...

Despite the heat, not a bad first day at the Fringe - or rather night, since shows didn't begin until 5:30 pm or so.

I got offered a free massage (which I turned down - guess I'm not stressed enough... yet), was ordered to smile at and hold hands with a fellow theatre critic (not a regular occurrence, believe me) and saw two good shows and one outstanding performance.

The hand-holding and massage offer happened at The Healer And The Hypochondriac, by Mark VanderHorst, who's sincere and well-meaning but not much of a playwright. The show consists of him talking about being a massage therapist, trying stand-up and surviving a troubled childhood that included living in a detention home. VanderHorst has a gritty voice and laid-back presence, and what he's preaching - basically, don't worry, be happy - feels painfully obvious. As profound as a Learning Annex seminar.

Luisa Durante is a Fringe favourite. She's shone in previous Fringe shows such as Pseudolus and A Midsummer Night's Dream. She's the best thing about Character Assassination, a look at a romance novelist's writer's block.

The Harlequin parody thing has been done to death. Look at last year's Fringe play Perfect On Paper. It's easy to make fun of bodice-ripper details - shafts, love pockets, etc. - but writer Annette McLeod manages to keep us amused by her language. The script isn't as clever as the author wants, though, and there's not enough subtext between what's happening in the romance writer's life and what she's writing.

What keeps the show hot is Durante's charged-up, growling and crazed performance.

The Tourist, by Jose Teadoro and inspired by Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Unconsoled, is a nightmarish, expressionistic work about a musician (Chris Stanton, given the Kafkaesque name Josef) trapped in a world full of intrigue and paranoia.

There's an intentionally vague sense of time and place in the show, but a strange Eastern European feel pervades both the script and production. Screens, masks and quasi-poetic details suggest a dream world, and there's even the suggestion that the anti-hero is dead. Not all the details pay off - performances are uneven - but it's recommended, if only to laugh at the opening lines about garbage collecting in the streets. You bet.

The best show of the night was a real surprise - Theatre Guillotine's production of Envy, written and directed by Christopher Behnisch and based on the life and writings of Russian writer Yuri Olesha.

Before the 85-minute show, I knew nothing about Olesha or Theatre Guillotine. I was also tired and cranky. Minutes into the show, I was rivetted. Behnisch has created an engrossing, imagistic world full of displaced Soviets navigating an absurd world - a place where sausage-making takes on symbolic import. There's not a single wasted gesture or image in the piece. Scenes are nicely shaped, past and present merge efficiently in seconds and the central argument about humanism and technology is disturbing and moving.

Stand-out performances include Christopher Goebel as Ivan, a foolish inventor with a thing for pillows, Jeffrey R. Smith as Babichev, a menacing sausage-maker whose feelings about the brotherhood of man are suspect, and James Gilpin, whose Olesha the writer seems soaked in vodka, drunk and trying to find his way through a nightmare world.

Behnisch has studied with Mump & Smoot, and there's some great clown work in the piece. It's tragicomic, literary and beautifully structured. In all, not to be missed.

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