Reviews

A Walk in the Woods

Lee
Blessing
‘s 1985 play is based on the real life ‘walk-in-the-woods’
arms agreement that took place when US arms negotiator, Paul Nitze,
and his Soviet counterpart, Yuli Kvitsinsky, took to the forest
outside Geneva in an effort to resolve their nations’ nuclear
deadlock with informal talks. But while the drama takes the arms
negotiations as its context, A Walk in the Woods
avoids becoming bogged down by politics and is ultimately a play
about two people attempting to understand each other across an
ideological divide.

The
part of the American negotiator was originally written for a man, but
has been made into a female role for this production. Myriam Cyr is
delightfully awkward as the humourless Joan Honeyman, while Steven
Crossley
is simply masterful as Andrey Botvinnik. Indeed, such is
the strength of Crossley’s performance that Cyr occasionally appears
overly earnest in comparison. It is the only flaw in an otherwise
perfect dynamic.

What
is so refreshing here is the total absence of sex in this
relationship – one suspects that if the play had been written with
a woman in mind originally, the dramatic and comedic outcomes might
have been very different. As it is, we are witness to a negotiation
untrammelled by sexual politics, with very funny and revealing
results.

Blessing’s
characters unfold before us in unexpected ways, credit both to his
writing and Nicolas Kent‘s assured direction. Honeyman is
hard-edged and closed-off, yet idealistic, while Botvinnik is naughty
and charming, but utterly cynical about the task at hand.

The
play’s two metaphors, of the woods in which the pair walk to get away
from the stifled atmosphere of the negotiating table, and the vision
– clear or cloudy – of the negotiators themselves, hang over the
drama, reminding us of the grander political narrative. Polly
Sullivan
‘s design subtly evokes the violence of the era, while also
providing a pleasantly non-combative space for the action to take
place. The passing of the seasons – intimated by a handful of
autumn leaves here, a winter coat there – provides a tidy frame for
the narrative, the play’s four scenes giving a strong sense of the
frustrating pace of the negotiating process, as well as the
negotiators’ developing relationship.

The
other two plays in the Tricycle’s Nuclear Season may not now be
taking place until the new year due to a post-riots scheduling
shuffle, but if the success of A Walk in the Woods is anything to
go by, they will be worth the wait.