Breakout Performance of 2007
Fiona Reid in A Delicate Balance at The Stratford Festival
"I don't think you should frighten an audience, I think you should terrify them." - Edward Albee
Fiona Reid proved why she continues to be one of Canada’s finest leading ladies.
“I apologise that my nature is such to bring out in you the full force of your brutality.”
Reid was a full force tour de force as booze-addled accordion-playing Claire in Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance.
Dangling chain cigarette in one hand, anyproof libation in the other, the“injured” live-in spinster who loves to lie on the living room floor at the drop of a bottle, is a constant irritant to aging sibling Agnes and her husband Tobias – daily picking away at marital scars, and loving to make them bleed fresh for her dark amusement.
“I have never known whether to applaud or cry. Or rather, I never know which would be the more appreciated - expected,” she taunts.
Tobias and Agnes should be happy living out their twilight years. Instead, they’ve got the incessant presence of Claire, cynical fly on the wall of their marriage, and professional divorcée daughter Julia who has just announced she’s coming home again. To make matters worse, best friends and who-knows-how-long-they-will-stay guests Harry and Edna insinuate themselves into this familial mess because “they are frightened”. The already fragile household dynamic is immediately compromised.
In a production dedicated to the late William Hutt, Diana Leblanc’s taut direction of veteran ensemble players Martha Henry (Agnes) David Fox (Tobias) James Blendick (Harry) Michelle Giroux (Julia) Patricia Collins (Edna) and Fiona Reid as Claire made A Delicate Balance one of 2007’s finest productions.
Reid crafted the perfect melange of walking wounded and gleeful instigator through Albee’s cut throat arias and sold-out audiences at The Stratford’s Festival’s intimate Tom Patterson Theatre hungrily lapped it up.
Like Albee’s classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf , A Delicate Balance deals with extremes in human nature, how far can one’s comfort level be pushed or manipulated in a relationship, be it a marriage or a lifelong friendship.
Here’s the full glory of Albee’s playwright palette: selfishness, avoidance, denial, greed, paranoia, all masterfully depicted through the excesses of deliciously witty characters who drink, smoke, insult, irritate, infuriate, and impose to distraction.
Agnes is the perfectionist, Tobias is the infernally passive one, while Claire and Agnes are the antithesis of one another. Not quite like Virginia Woolf's acid George and Martha, Agnes and Tobias do have their pivotal emotional moments with Claire an eager catalyst. The daily household teeters dangerously as vintage secrets could spill any day.
Fiona Reid's performance brings the musicality of Albee’s stinging lyrics to life with lustre and zing.
Yeehah!
That’s the criteria for good old fashioned Terrifying Theatre.
