The Power of Imagination

Boiler Room Suite

by Rex Deverell
Directed by Andrea Emmerton and Walter Maskel

Presented by Gore Bay Theatre

at the QUONTA Drama Region Festival

It would be easy to dismiss Boiler Room Suite as just a depiction of the lives of street people, and I'm sure there are many who wouldn't bother coming to a staging of this play on that account.  Like Pete in the play, there are people who have fixed ideas about street life and that's that.  

They'd be making a huge mistake.  More so than many plays, Boiler Room Suite is about whatever each member of the audience sees and hears and thinks about while watching it.  By turns funny and touching, it's a script that invites that kind of personal reflection and interaction with the performance, and woe betide the director who tries to impose a strict interpretation on the piece.

That's because it's a play about dreamers, and for dreamers -- and that means everyone.  It's often been compared to Waiting for Godot, but for me that comparison is elusive.  The two main characters in Boiler Room Suite share a very rich inner life of vivid Technicolor dreams, imagining themselves as a wide assortment of different people.  For me, the reference points that spring to mind are Walter Mitty and Snoopy.

The scenario is simple enough.  Aggie invites Sprugg into her hideaway in the boiler room of the old Provincial Hotel to share a bottle, and as they drink they engage in a series of games, acting out their imaginary world with the aid of props and costumes from her assorted trove of street loot.  Pete, the janitor, comes in laughing and tries to force them out.  Although it seems at first that he will succeed in destroying their dreams, in the end it is Aggie and Sprugg who convince Pete to join them in an appreciation of the humanity that lies hidden in our imaginations.

The set was full of detailed chaos -- perhaps too full.  There were bottles and cans, heaps of worn clothing, and much more.  The one detail that grated on me was the heaps of crumpled up newspaper sheets.  They looked as if someone had just unpacked a box full of Christmas presents ten minutes earlier -- too much clutter, when a good deal less would have gotten the message across loud and clear.  The painting on the furnace was convincingly mottled with age and heat.  The floor was covered with enough dust to create a clear sense of the boiler room's age and state of disuse.

Lighting was effectively understated.  When the power in the hotel kept blinking off in the first scenes, there was still enough light to allow us to see the characters.  Sound effects were well-judged too, although the sound for the old furnace would have been more convincing if it were a much lower-pitched rumble.  At first hearing (at the beginning of the show) I thought it was a motorcycle starting up outside until the interior of the furnace lit up.  That moment was accompanied by a bright splash of flickering orange light on the back cyclorama, which worked really well.  Were those lights omitted when the furnace came on again during the action of the play, or were they too faint to be seen from my particular seat?

The costumes looked right for the characters, and the diversity of the costume pieces which were used as acting props for the role play scenes was a visual delight.

The directors chose to remove the intermission and present the play as a single act.  In some plays this works well, but with this script I felt this was both unnecessary and confusing.  There's a considerable passage of time between the first and second acts of the script, and the point at which it happens is clearly a complete, definite break in the action.  Because of the continuous performance, it took much of the second act before the audience could clearly grasp just how much time had passed since the first act.

Shannon McMullan as Aggie and John Hawke as Sprugg made a magnificent team.  The play is written like a beautifully-scored piece of music, a duet in which first one and then the other take the lead before they join together in their storytelling.  As soon as one began to sink into depression the other rose into a more upbeat mood.  Their sustained energy was very telling.  Of these two, Hawke made great use of a wider range of tones and colours in his voice, while McMullan shaped her performance with a wonderful assortment of facial expressions.  The musical metaphor is doubly apt because the language of the fantasy sequences often develops a kind of poetic or musical rhythm which both actors shaped carefully.  Both did great work in defining the physicality of their own characters, as well as the various people they portrayed in their role-plays.  Together they created imaginative worlds and characters for us to laugh with and delight in.

The dynamics of the play shifted completely when Pete, the janitor (John Robertson) appeared towards the end of the first act.  His one keynote of scorn for the street people was a startling contrast to the vivid fantasies of Aggie and Sprugg.  Equally startling was the obvious fear which they suddenly projected as they realized he intended to put them out.  

There were two moments that were, for me, very moving.  The first came when Aggie sank down onto her bed in despair, having lost all energy for the role playing games.  The second was when Pete climbed up the ladder and listened as Scrugg gradually opened him to the realities of other people's lives.  This was followed by the final scene where Pete shared his lunchbox contents, a touching reversal of his first appearance.

Boiler Room Suite is an imaginative, thought-provoking play on many levels, and Gore Bay Theatre's production served it very well indeed.