A Canadian Bartender at Butlin's
T.J. Dawe’s combination of personal stage charm and deftness of presentation could be called slick, but it isn’t, because sitting down to one of his adventures has the feel of sitting and having a beer with a friend, who just happens to have a weird life.
His stories have a surreal quality, whether it's talking about a job at Shopper's Drug Mart ( The Slip Knot ) or being a Canadian trapped in a world where English is spoken, but is incomprehensible, as in this year's opus of madness, Canadian Bartender at Butlin's.
The play is a slice-of-life adventure of a summer Dawe spent in England, when he was 18 or 19, working at Butlin's Holiday Camp in Bognor Regis - organized fun in a setting Dawe describes as looking like the set for the Great Escape, all for the princely sum of 66 pounds a week.
As bartender in the piano bar, Dawe comes into close contact with John Q. Public, or John Bull, front and centre. Even more hilarious is his interaction with co-workers, Yorkshire men and Liverpudlians who treat him like the exotic animal at the zoo: "say something, where are you from," and the practical jokes played in the staff quarters.
The story of the subsidized staff bar on pay day has a certain, dissolute glee about it. The simple story of a visit to a cabin in winter, where he discovers he's forgotten the key, becomes an apocalyptic tragedy in the making, and then morphs into a bit of a ghost story. And it's great to listen as he ties Canada in winter to a tacky tourist trap in England's green and pleasant land.
Each moment is invested with a certain drama - how can so much happen to one person?
In Dawe's hands, these episodes, while hilarious in themselves, take on a different tone because they're peppered with observations. Restaurant forks. How many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of mouths have they been in? The Freudian symbolism of the Heimlich Manoevre. A trip to mom and dad's Vancouver Island cabin. All these tie in with his story.
The threads are skillfully and ingeniously knitted together at the end.
Dawe is a shrewd, or at least very astute, observer of the human race, and he's got a sure grip on the idiosyncrasies of personality and language.
What I especially loved about this production is the way the opening montage of images - fire, falling, a large man, the taste of a good strawberry - all actually make dramatic sense by the end of the story.
Eva Marie Clark
CBC Edmonton
August 2003
