Theatre review: Laptop detectives discover what's really at stake in Cipher
Credit to Author: Shawn Conner| Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2020 19:24:25 +0000
When: until March 7
Where: Granville Island Stage
Tickets: from $29 at artsclub.com
Occam’s razor states that the simplest solution is also the most likely. In our fascination with true crime and cold cases, this sometimes gets lost in the noise.
This is the premise — or one of the premises — behind Cipher, a new co-production between Arts Club and Calgary’s Vertigo Theatre.
Vertigo specializes in producing mysteries, usually already part of the theatre canon, but has in recent years opened up to original creations. Cipher, by Calgary-based writers/actors Ellen Close and Braden Griffiths, is such a piece. Both Close and Griffiths also perform in Cipher.
In their play, a toxicology professor, Grace Godard (Close) and an IT worker, Aqeel Saleemi (Praneet Akilla), begin investigating a 63-year-old cold case involving a dead man found on a beach near Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park. The more they investigate, and the closer they get to solving the mystery, the more trouble they bring upon themselves — and the more closely their relationship begins to mirror that of the people at the heart of the decades-old case.
This latter aspect is one of the most engaging and successful of the production. With coaching from Vancouver choreographer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, the actors at times move about the stage in a combination of mime and dance.
Director Craig Hall (who also directed the 2015 Arts Club/Vertigo neo-noir, Farewell, My Lovely) and the cast — including Vancouver’s Delia Brett and Arash Khakpour — use the movement and film noir tropes to both reflect and add more mystery to the main story. At one point the movement borders on slapstick, as Khakpour (playing the mysterious dead man at the centre of the cold case) mimes the possible ways he might have died while Grace describes the theories behind his death.
There is humour too in the second act, when co-writer Griffiths appears as Clive, a suspiciously friendly government agent. “I hate memes,” he says. “Why can’t things just be funny once?” Telling Grace that “I get it, we’ve all made mistakes,” he admits: “I once owned a puka shell necklace.”
Close and Akilla spark onstage as Grace and Aqeel. One of the many pleasures of Cipher is their chemistry, and the (spoiler alert) romance that develops. Both are believable as the flinty prof and the charming (as he keeps informing Grace) man 10 years her junior who succeeds in winning her over.
The choreographed movement is not the only creative storytelling device in this multi-layered mystery. The set (by Narda McCarroll) is mostly composed of hanging panels, which act as screens for projections (by Arts Club projection designer Jamie Nesbitt). Sometimes these set the scene, such the oceanside or a bar, at other times they dramatize the internet rabbit hole into which the protagonists launch themselves. Sound designer/composer Torquil Campbell employs bursts of glitchy digital noise as Grace and Aqeel approach the danger zone.
Scenes with characters in front of a laptop are often dramatically inert, but it’s a credit to Close and Griffiths’ work that they are able to keep these interesting on a character level as well.
Cipher is a tightly scripted, smart (it was the 2018 Grand Prize Winner of the Alberta Playwriting Competition) and very cool play that reveals itself to be more about emotion than logic. Grace would have done well to heed the advice she gives her students at the top of Cipher: often, the simplest solution is the right one.
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