Nancy Palk & Diego Matamoros in Winter Solstice | Photo by Dahlia Katz
A deft satire, Winter Solstice sneaks up on you. It wants you to feel safe before it reveals its true nature, much like the dubious figure of Rudolph (Diego Matamoros), who gently slithers into the lives of a middle-class family on Christmas Eve. In this Canadian English-language premiere (a translation by David Tushingham) of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s finely-tuned, troubling play (presented by Necessary Angel Theatre Company in association with Canadian Stage and Birdland Theatre), we laugh and shake our heads at family dysfunction and strained manners before realizing, too late, that we’ve let fascism into our collective home.
We open on a spousal fight between Bettina (Kira Guloien) and Albert (Cyrus Lane). Our narrator, Frank Cox-O’Connell (before he pops into the drama as Konrad), tells us this fight is routine. She’s a experimental filmmaker and he’s a writer fixated on Germany’s dark past. While raising their young daughter (who we never see), their mutual extramarital affairs are a banal open secret. This sordid dynamic is echoed in the strained relationship they have with Bettina’s mother, Corrina (Nancy Palk). They all sort of hate each other, but more appalling, everyone accepts this as normal—tolerance as love.
Into this atmosphere of resentful domesticity, Rudolph is hesitantly invited. An eccentric older man, he’s undeniably charming. The lonely Corrina, who met him on the train just that afternoon, has romantic designs on him. Most of the family seems quite taken with his old-fashioned talk of beauty, chivalry, order and decency. Matamoros is persuasive with his jovial, impassioned charisma, so we can understand how anyone could miss the sinister potential lurking in his cozy demeanour and intriguing comments. His suggestion—that some people, by not measuring up to aspirational ideals, have a diminished humanity—seems less pernicious, coming from such a soft-spoken, articulate and pleasant man.
Particularly compelling is a segment where Rudolph leads the family through a Romantic, grand opera of his own imagination. It is as stirring as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, and as treacherous. It’s only Albert, with his obsessive knowledge of Nazism, that is disconcerted by Rudolph’s constant references to Paraguay, a place for which he has great affinity, though he’s guarded about the specifics. Albert feels a need to remove this vaguely vexing intruder; but alas, he’s too polite and losing his senses to the pills and wine he keeps ingesting to calm his growing anxiety.
Though it takes a while for the unnerving implications of Rudolph’s acceptance into this Liberal home to fully sink in, Schimmelpfennig does prime us to be vigilant. Albert’s increasing delirium is echoed in the play’s lurching structure, the characters often removing themselves from scenes to provide narration, then getting re-absorbed into the action. It jumps back and forth in time, some moments repeated, inviting us to scrutinize them, as if this is all playing out in haunted memory. In retrospect, an early shattering of glass is an eerie portent.
Except for one brief flash of history, of the real menace Rudolph symbolizes, there isn’t any violence, yet we do sense a mounting danger, especially disturbing because of its oblique trajectory. The entire cast maintain a deceptive facade of civility, allowing us to understand it as a socialized barricade against simmering tension.
Informed by the text, director Alan Dilworth’s staging is highly stylized. In the vast, cavernous space, designer Lorenzo Savoini encloses the playing area with an illuminated ledge, corralling the characters and making the unfolding events feel dramatically inevitable. Much is left up to our imaginations, though there are key props that help ground us in some tangible reality.
Of the many strengths of this—the material and execution—is how consistently it draws me in towards characters I actively dislike, making their humanity ring true regardless of my attitude. The finale—a deceptively tranquil tapering to a murky and ominous focal point, then darkness—is quietly chilling.
Winter Solstice
running January 14 to February 2, 2025
Berkeley Street Theatre (26 Berkeley Street)
running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes (no intermission)
The cast of Winter Solstice | Photo by Dahlia Katz