Tideline: The Plot Goes Out with the Tide

The first act of Wajdi Mouawad's Tideline, a co-production of neworldtheatre and Touchstone Theatre currently playing at The Roundhouse, is undoubtedly some of the best theatre I have seen in Vancouver this year. At intermission, I waxed euphoric about the quality of the acting, the imaginative, almost dream-like prose matched with the manic pace of the script, the impossibly perfect set. When ushered back into the theatre for the start of Act II, I sat twitching in my chair until the lights dimmed.

By around minute 65 of the second act, however, I honestly felt as though I were watching a different play. And therein lies the problem with this truly remarkable script: Mouawad can't really decide what he wants to write, and we, the audience, appear to be his testing board. It's not a role I really mind filling, considering he's one of the best playwrights currently working in Canada, but at over three hours even my patience was strained. Thankfully, the combined talents of the directors (a joint effort of Camyar Chai and Katrina Dunn), cast, and designers inject enough spark into this epic to cobble together the disparate pieces and produce a beautifully chilling (if uneven) work about "war, exile, and the search for home."

Tideline tells the story of Wilfrid (Daniel Arnold), a disillusioned young man who receives a phone call at the climax of "the best fuck of his life" informing him that his estranged father (Zinaid Memisevic) has passed away. Wilfrid is left to put together the pieces of a man he never knew, aided by a suitcase of unsent letters his father wrote him, an imaginary film crew that follows him around to add poignancy and meaning to the events of his life ("More rain! He's depressed!"), and an armour-clad Arthurian Knight who serves as Wilfrid's moral compass.

Act I is essentially a series of vignettes tied together by a narrative thread in the form of Wilfrid's harried monologues to a judge, in the hopes of receiving authorization to take his father's body to his war-torn and unnamed homeland to be buried. This fractured narrative succeeds because of the electric energy the company maintains and the fluid space they are given to work with - cables suspended floor to ceiling, a track upon which inventively styled set pieces are wheeled quickly in and out. There is also a lot of irreverent humour, including a hysterically uncomfortable scene that finds Wilfrid sharing a peep-show booth with a fearlessly horny voyeur. The humour perfectly balances the touching moments between Wilfrid and his reincarnated father, as well as the lovely re-enactments of his parents' blossoming relationship.

And then we come to Act II, a darker, episodic 90+ minutes of Wilfrid's exhausting journey to find his father a final place of rest - difficult, since all the cemeteries here are full. On his way he attracts a band of broken spirits who each have their own horror story from the war. There are lots of big themes running around here and lots of tragic characters, and here's where Mouawad gets into trouble. Each tragedy piles itself on top of the other in an almost one-upping fashion: "Oh, so you accidentally killed your father? Well, get THIS..." and rather that being affecting, the repetitive despair is numbing. Gone is the magic realism that made Act I so moving without being trite or cliched. We're left with an unwieldy story and empty rhetoric.

Arnold carries the show (and his father's corpse) on his skinny shoulders, and is as earnestly affecting here as he was in Tuesdays and Sundays (at the Waterfront in August). The play is really an ensemble piece, however, and the actors work seamlessly as a unit, with Michael Scholar Jr. and Jonathon Young delivering particularly strong performances.

In lesser hands, Tideline could be a bit of a mess. Thankfully, neworld and Touchstone are two of Vancouver's best companies and possess the necessary guts to bite into this script and pull from it something bordering on magical. If Mouawad could just find himself a good editor, the script itself could reach the heights to which this production tries to take it.

Tideline runs at the Roundhouse Community Centre until November 24. Tomorrow, November 18 at 4pm, is a Pay What You Can performance - so you have no excuse not to go.