Powerplay by Cally Phillips

‘Man’ says one of the characters in Cally Phillips’s extraordinary stage play, Powerplay, ‘it’s just hockey.’ To which Canadian, Tom, responds, ‘Just hockey. And life’s just breathing. Hockey isn’t just a game, Jamie, it’s a complex set of rituals. Tactics and rituals. Like life. It’s how you live your life.’

Tom’s observation lies at the very heart of this complex, accomplished and highly original drama, which parallels the interaction of the central characters with a game of ice hockey, observing just how many relationships between men and women, men and men, have the imposition of power at their heart.

The characters are four men and two women, as well as the ‘Ref’ who cleverly comments on the action in hockey terms. ‘He is, at the same time, of the game and apart from the game. He’s like God if you will,’ as the playwright explains right from the start. Far from obscuring the action, this commentary illuminates each of a succession of small scenes, the interactions between the various characters, and throws them into high relief as a kind of ritual battle, like the complex set of ‘tactics and rituals’ which lie at the heart of ice hockey – or, indeed, of any game which is deeply embedded in a country or a community.

To understand something of this, you have to know that ice hockey is to the US, but even more so to Canada as, for example, football is to Scotland. Baseball plays a similar role in the US. All of these are so much more than ‘just a game’ no matter how much detractors might wish it were otherwise. We’re not talking about success or failure here, so much as the traditional rooting of a game in a community, so that when the Scottish media – or your average Scottish male – talk about ‘sports’ what they really mean, like it or not, is football. Such games take on the characteristics of an idea and an ideal which overrides everything else – remember Field of Dreams which was about the nature of the game itself, and its place in the American psyche, quite as much as it was about Ray Kinsella’s ‘dream’?

Powerplay explores that idea, bringing the rules of life and love into hockey and the deeper significance of hockey into the lives of the characters. The play is structured around a typical hockey game with all the accompanying razzmatazz and music, with the Ref’s commentary entirely accurate in hockey terms. But his commentary cleverly illuminates the emotional powerplay which is also at work, the interactions: moving, vicious, exciting, humorous, between the various characters. The skill in matching this authentic hockey commentary to the action is one of the great joys of this playscript.

The play makes good reading, perhaps even more so if you have some knowledge of the supreme excitement generated by a hockey – or indeed any team game – but it would be even better to see it in performance. The playwright specifies music and video projections all the way through, which take the audience through the game in parallel to the emotional games which are being played out on stage (or, better still, on a rink!)

Finally – although ice hockey involves a swift and constant interchange of players, there can only be five players plus a netminder, per team, on the ice at any one time. A team is ‘on the powerplay’ when at least one member of the opposing team is in the penalty box (‘sin bin’ as it’s generally known) which means that their on-ice numbers are temporarily reduced to four, and occasionally three, plus netminder, giving the other team a distinct and often deadly advantage. Goals are frequently scored ‘on the powerplay’. But of course ‘penalties are part of the game’ says one of the characters – in life as in hockey – and ‘you’ve got to keep moving your feet or you’re history.’ Indeed.

Reviewed by Catherine Czerkawska

Powerplay is available in Kindle and ePub formats

Chasing Waves by Cally Philips

Review by Bill Kirton

This book consists of two relatively short plays, Chasing Waves and Benito Boccanegra’s Big Break and the author’s notes on each. In those notes, she suggests that the latter investigates areas that she refined and developed in the former, so it seems logical to approach them from that perspective. They both belong very clearly to the Theatre of the Absurd, a movement that people tend to date back to the middle of the last century (or even earlier) but which persists today.

Benito Boccanegra’s Big Break (which, from now on I’ll call 4B) is ambitious. The action switches between the present, Italy in the 1920s, Italy and Paris in the mid-late 19^th century, and 14^th century Genoa, but these disparate periods are tightly linked through the characters. Joe Green (a name which, except for one vowel, translates into Italian as Giuseppe Verdi) is a student researching the operas of the real Verdi, who wrote an opera about Simone Boccanegra, Il Doge de Genova. And the fourth main character is the fictional  Benito Boccanegra of the title, a circus ringmaster who’s beaten to his goal of establishing fascism in Italy by another Benito – Il Duce.

In the words of the author, these characters in their separate time periods and their separate ways, explore ‘the relationships between fiction and reality, tragedy, history and heroism, audience and character’. Each of them is seeking to understand something about himself, to explain some aspect of his dilemma. It’s entertaining but challenging. The scenes and the action move quickly and the overall dramatic pace never drops. It’s an experimental play but one which is built on firm stage conventions.

I enjoyed reading it but, having read Chasing Waves first, I felt that the complexities of the personalities and their different involvements in 4B were so absorbing in themselves that they partly obscured the play's underlying ‘message’. On the other hand, they brought together eras and associations which extended its scope.

Chasing Waves has only two characters, but they’re called Wittgenstein and Schrodinger, so we know what to expect right from the start. Except that, while it’s a play about thought, knowledge, understanding and meaning (in short, philosophy), it’s also funny, thought-provoking, involving and entertaining. It has clear echoes of Waiting for Godot, both in the repetitious and questioning nature of some of the exchanges and in their frequent, direct acknowledgements of the presence of an audience. It also references the Stoppard of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Their only props are a black or white board, 2 photographs of the ‘real’ Wittgenstein and Schrodinger, and a box – the famous box, of course, which contained (or didn’t contain) a cat, which was alive or dead or both. But the theatrical dynamic is in the single debate they pursue through the play, the scientist stressing the importance of knowledge, the philosopher insisting that the goal is understanding. This is making it sound dry and academic – it isn’t. Ideas, especially about the fundamentals of how we perceive things and the consequent nature of the ‘reality’ we construct from those perceptions and observations are stimulating and even fun. The two actors who call themselves Wittgenstein and Schrodinger share the slow desperation of Vladimir and Estragon and sometimes become frustrated at the apparent lack of progress or the occasional stalemate. They discuss levels of ‘truth’, the need to make choices and the ‘evidence’ we need to make such choices.

And the members of the audience are also participants in the debate. They watch the action expecting to ‘learn’ something, to ‘know’ something as a result, but Wittgenstein rejects knowledge as unreliable and, instead, seeks understanding. Knowing what someone means isn’t the same as understanding them. ‘Mind invests meaning in language’ says Wittgenstein and, of course, the unreliability of language is one of the basic themes always exploited by Absurdist drama.

The central philosophical question is ‘What’s in the box?’ But it’s also used as a running gag and an excuse for some good and bad miming from the actors and some strictly theatrical effects. They talk of starts and endings, insist on the importance of ‘now’ and recognise that all we ever have is the moment.

The author, in her notes, suggests that the audience must have ‘open, enquiring minds’. Well, yes, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean a po-faced notion of the elevated nature of philosophical discourse. There are light touches of wit and humour that make this much more than a ‘thought-play’. On top of that, the author’s ‘Extras’, i.e. notes on the production and for the enlightenment of her actors, offer the clearest exposition of quantum theory I’ve ever read (and as I write that, it’s important to know that, as a non-scientist, I’ve read countless books which claim to ‘popularise’ science and which have left me as ignorant as when I began).

Altogether, this was an entertaining but also an instructive read. I not only ‘know’ what physicists ‘mean’ when they talk of such things, for the moment at least, I ‘understand’ them.