by Stephen King
Adapted by Simon Moore
Directed by David Storch
A Canadian Stage Company Presentation
at the Bluma Appel
May 5-31, 2008

   At first, Misery plays like a story of a woman (a former nurse) in Colorado who launches into what becomes a life-and-death struggle with a writer of romantic historical fiction whom she has rescued from a near-fatal car crash in the dead of winter. She gushes like a schoolgirl with a crush on award-winning Paul Sheldon as he lies in bed completely at her mercy. “I’m your number one fan!” she giggles. Annie Wilkes loves his lushly melodramatic novels about the Victorian heroine Misery Chastain, and she’s even named a sow after this heroine. Annie seems totally committed to nursing Sheldon back to full health, as well as to encouraging him to finish off his next novel. “Your creativity is all that matters,” she tells him, while also hinting that her apparent benevolence must be paid for in ways he doesn’t first suspect. “You owe me your life,” she remarks, before unmasking her demonic side that is rooted in a deprivation of love. When she discovers that he has killed off Misery, she becomes dangerously unpredictable, swinging from sheer exultation at having control over the object of her devotion to chastisement and torture of him. She dislikes the way he’s been writing Fast Cars (an ironic title, given the nature of his accident), and she castigates him for profanity even as she utters her own weirdly sexual euphemisms (“dirty birdy,” “cockadoody”). So, after giving him a wheelchair and an old typewriter, she suddenly explodes into demented violence, taking an axe to one of his legs.

   Annie Wilkes’ dangerous psyche is the real center of Stephen King’s fable. The horror elements are merely dressing for the dramatic situation. In a good production, her complex psychology would be the real focus rather than the power-struggle between her and Sheldon. However, David Storch (a good actor but a weak director) does not deliver the real goods, probably because he thinks the play is a lurid thriller. He does not allow Nicola Cavendish to shape her interpretation subtly, and he makes some incredibly bad technical choices for his misconceived production. There’s a bizarrely designed skeletal set by Bretta Gerecke (tall metal rods and a weird roof) and an excruciatingly awful sound design by James Fisher that takes the audience for retards at a B-grade horror movie. It’s a miracle that Tom McCamus and Ms. Cavendish get as far as they do in this woeful enterprise. Certainly, it isn’t because of Storch’s help. McCamus coasts on his ability to play almost roguish charm with ease, as well as the more unsettling aspects of his character. In a sense, he is a male Scheherezade, forced to spin out fiction that meets with Annie’s approval. As Annie, Nicola Cavendish is utterly brilliant, though her insight into the character is damaged by Storch’s awful direction. Her Annie has a very childlike innocence at times—something that Kathy Bates also suggested in her Oscar-winning performance in the 1990 film version—that is both touching yet unsettling because it depends on deep personal exposure. She is a woman who wants a pure world, a world in which she can find the love denied to her, but when she cannot achieve this world either in fact or in Sheldon’s fiction, her rage mounts and explodes. The wonder of Ms. Cavendish’s performance is that it combines black humour so expertly with chilling horror. The pity is that this performance becomes badly warped in a production that allows shlock to rule the stage.

photo: Cylla von Tiedemann


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