Random Acts of Love
BY Meghan Harrison January 03, 2008 17:01
RANDOM ACTS OF LOVE
Featuring Bruce Gooch, Lynn Vogt. Written by Bruce Gooch. Directed by
Sanjay Talwar. Presented by new fangled stages. Jan 5, 9pm; Jan 6, 5pm;
Jan 7, 9pm; ?Jan 8, 9:15pm; Jan 10, 7pm; Jan 11, 5pm; Jan 12, 7pm; Jan
13, 3pm. $15; $12 mats; 4 plays pass $44; 8 play pass pass $88. Factory
Theatre, 125 Bathurst. Part of the Next Stage Theatre Festival.
www.nextstagefestival.com.
Drama / General Audience / Warning: language
Running time: 90 Minutes
Despite its talented leads and touching dramatic moments, Random Acts of Love isn’t quite convincing. It could be the unnatural dialogue, which forces Bruce Gooch and Lynn Vogt to keep up with a self-consciously stage-y, verbose battle of wits where writer Gooch has an inherent edge. It could be director Sanjay Talwar’s breakneck pacing, which doesn’t allow the characters’ relationship much room to genuinely blossom. It could be the nebulous background for their long-ago breakup. Whatever it is, it keeps a decent show from fulfilling its more significant potential.
Vogt plays Victoria Daniels, an aging actress just let go from her soap opera and looking to return to the stage with a Shakespeare-based show called The Seven Ages of Love. She happens to cast the eternally rumpled Russell Thomas (Gooch) opposite her, who she happened to have an affair with 15 years earlier while they were in A Streetcar Named Desire. Things mostly unfold as you would expect, but with more talk from Russell about artistic authenticity.
Though the script panders a little to theatre aficionados, it’s rare enough to see a tender and truly adult love story. Gooch does give both characters some great lines, and their alternations between insults and ego-boosting in early rehearsals are enjoyably ridiculous. Vogt’s performance is understated compared to Gooch’s bluster, but the change in her demeanour from the flashback scenes to the present perfectly suggests how brittle the pressures of the intervening years have made Victoria.
The Shakespeare scenes that do appear are impressive, and Gooch couching a crucial revelation in a speech from A Winter’s Tail is a nice touch. The emotionally satisfying conclusion a romantic-comedy inclined audience is looking for is certainly there, too. But the characters and their relationship seem more complex than Gooch’s script and story arc give them credit for, making the exercise seem a bit shallow — like Russell’s stage kisses, Random Acts of Love doesn’t use tongue.
625 Church St, 6th Floor, Toronto M4Y 2G1
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