Watching Tarragon Theatre’s Girl in the Goldfish Bowl was a little like listening to my parents’ stories about when Kennedy was shot. Since I wasn’t there, it’s hard to relate to those stories, or to the Cuban missile crisis fears that form the background of the play.
Without knowing what it was like to live during those days, I was left with only the characters to keep me interested. The story, about a precocious young girl living with her feuding parents in the family’s boarding house, is not without its charms. It explores childhood very effectively, and ten-year old Iris’ conviction that strange new boarder Mr. Lawrence is in fact the re-incarnation of her recently deceased goldfish, returning from the dead to reunite her family, is very sweet. Unfortunately, despite good acting, I found myself checking my watch several times during the performance.
One of the most frustrating parts of the play was the many shining moments that, if fleshed out, could have made the entire production great. The set was beautiful, with a realism that is rarely felt in the theatre. The audience is given the opportunity to see both the inside and outside of the boarding house, giving an added sense of intimacy with the characters. One feels more like a guest than an audience member. Tanja Jacobs’ boozing and carousing Miss Rose and her attempt at a doped-up seduction was an inspired bit of physical comedy. The verbal swipes at the Catholic church from a child’s perspective were also amusing, especially after Toronto’s “Catholicism, Wow!” campaign (a.k.a. World Youth Day).
But these great moments were not enough to sustain an entire play. Iris (Kristina Nicoll), while an interesting character, was not a strong enough narrator. Since she is a child, with limited experience or knowledge of people, we are left without any understanding of the enigmatic Mr. Lawrence, the most fascinating character in the entire piece. He simply appears, then disappears without much explanation. Has he really hit his head and died? What happened in his past to make him the sad, fumbling man he is today?
It was a good idea to write a drama exploring how events can pile up and suddenly change a child’s life, forcing her to mature overnight. As we are shown many times, however, Iris is not an ordinary girl, and the events taking place around her are too sweeping and unusual to not be further explored. While we are allowed to view a mature Iris looking back at these events at the halfway point and the end of the play, we aren’t given any real insights into how these experiences affected her or her family.
Girl in the Goldfish Bowl has a lot of potential. But playwright Morris Panych seems to have wanted to create a mystery, a historical drama, and a family story all in one. He stretches things too thin, never developing any one side of the play enough for all the parts to make a truly coherent whole. Like the goldfish in the title, the play is here and gone just as we are starting to really care about it.
