The Return of Corporal Mazenet
By Nick Carpenter
Directed by David Jansen
Presented by Service Industry
Music: Nick Carpenter / Patricia Summersett
Set & Costume Design: Anna Treusch
Lighting Design: Andrew Smith
Sound Design: Richard Feren
Featuring Andrew Moodie, Hugh Portman, Kaitlyn Riordan, Gord Bolan, Patricia Summersett
Runs until August 14 @ The Theatre Centre
By Jen Handley
Although early on in The Return of Corporal Mazenet, a character points out, a tad unnecessarily, that the war in Afghanistan is “a very complex issue,” the play doesn’t concern itself much with the political questions surrounding the nine-year effort. Instead, it focuses on the experiences of one veteran and how he enters the lives around him.
Playwright Nick Carpenter adds a layer of complexity to the story by building himself into it as a character. The play begins with an awkward silence, which leads into the first in along series on interviews between Carpenter (Andrew Moodie) and Private Deutsch (Hugh Portman), a 21-year old veteran of the Afghan war, upon whose experiences Carpenter plans to base a new album. There seems to be an implication here that what we are seeing is the portrayal of a true story, and the tension between what we’re seeing and what really happened, the extent to which we can take this as documentary, is part of what makes the play interesting. Especially when supernatural stuff starts happening. The play itself is largely about a traumatized young man trying to honestly communicate a highly subjective experience, and I get the impression that Carpenter is trying to do the same thing here.
The one-act play has only two and a half songs, with one and a half song’s worth of lyrics, and isn’t really what I’d call a musical. The songs are fine, but they’re not played for their own sake like something from a traditional Broadway musical; they’re too deeply embedded in the context of the play. They’re simply expressions of the characters’ feelings and experiences, much like a monologue would be, and the showmanship is kept to a minimum, for the most part.
Moodie’s portrayal of the smart and socially adept but deeply insecure Carpenter was nuanced enough to keep us thinking of him as the “real” one, and Portman full of barely-controlled twitches and overcompensated self-assurance gives us a portrayal of a shell-shocked young man desperate for understanding, and it doesn’t look half-assed or forced.
The most interesting scene involves Moodie reacting not to a scene partner, but a recording of what we eventually realize is the end of a scene that was just cut short. Carpenter-the-character’s use of a recording program (“because I have a bad, bad memory” he explains to a hostile Sergeant) allows Carpenter-the-playwright to explore the way in which our memories follow us around and play tricks on us. Not unlike the mysterious Corporal Mazenet.
