Cody Porter and Clarice Eckford in Being Norwegian, Trunk Theatre. Photo supplied.
Being Norwegian (Stage 22, The de Villars Jones LLP Stage at Holy Trinity Church
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
This little gem of a two-hander by star Scottish playwright David Greig is something rare: a perfectly formed 45-minute rom-com where the shangri-la is more modest, more tentative, and more elusive, than romance. It’s simple human connection for two people who have somehow gotten flung off the grid into solitude.
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It’s started, just before the play, in a pub. Sad-sack Sean (Cody Porter) has surprised himself by inviting lively Lisa (Clarice Eckford) back to his apartment for a drink, an impromptu decision that he now regrets. And the awkwardness of that encounter, conveyed in two beautifully calibrated performances in Amy DeFelice’s production of Being Norwegian, is comic, in an anxiety-making kind of way.
Lisa, who’s chipper and almost suspiciously game, admires the urban view from the window. Sean, who hasn’t unpacked the boxes in his apartment for a year, has an apparently practised ability to see the depressing lining in any cloud. The view, he assures Lisa, is “not so pretty in day time (desperate pause). Or when it’s raining.”
“It reminds me of Oslo” is not a conversational gambit Sean has any idea how to return. “I’ve got to go there some day,” he says, after another desperate pause. Nope, Sean is not slick. And Lisa, who says she’s Norwegian and references Norway at every pause, is resourceful, and unusually persistent under these circumstances. “I think talking is over-rated,” she says, an amusingly conciliatory response to Sean’s fumbling confession that’s not used to … talking to, well, you know, actual people.
She is oddly determined to be enchanted, and make the most of a moment, even when the fall-back position for “conversation” is discussing the dimmer on the light switch. Norwegians, she says, are comfortable with darkness. His resting position is sadness and, in company, the state of being non-plussed.
There’s mystery attached to both characters. And Porter and Eckford are impressively skilled at comic pauses, and not salting the anxiety into something spicier, or giving anything away too soon about characters who’ve evidently spent whole lives alone with their secrets. “Things like this don’t happen to me,” says Sean at last. “I’m not … entertaining.”
At a festival full of characters who are more than ready to entertain you at all hours of the day and night, here are two who are struggling to speak, much less sit next to each other the way strangers might do on a bus. And you really want them to find each other in the great dark that surrounds us all. Small victories are something to cheer. Highly recommended.