Finborough Theatre

Losing his job is enough. Reuben built that firm. But losing his wife and his brother the same night? Someone’s playing roulette with Reuben’s life. An extraordinary new play by the enfant terrible of Canadian theatre. Explosively written, brutally funny and crackling with theatrical energy, Patience crawls beneath the skin of modern life to meet the big questions head-on. Who are we? And what are we doing here? As Reuben journeys through the shattered remnants of his life, he struggles to decipher what remains now that everything he was taught to value has been taken away.

Particularly known for championing Canadian drama, the Finborough Theatre opens its 25th anniversary year with another UK premiere of an award-winning Canadian play. Winner of the Governor General’s Award and twice winner of the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award, Jason Sherman is one of Canada’s most successful contemporary dramatists. His work has been produced throughout Canada and the USA, and is now seen in the UK for the very first time.

Activated Image comes to the Finborough following six acclaimed productions across the UK including Stephen Fry's Latin! and The Principle of Motion. Activated Image has been hailed as "a truly outstanding young theatre company" (Evening Standard) and "one of the best new companies around" (Edinburgh Evening News). “Up-and-coming young director Adam Barnard” (The Observer) directs - fresh from two productions at the Orange Tree Theatre including his much-admired production of The Little Years: "a thrilling piece of Canadian theatre" (What's On).

CANADIAN PRESS ACCLAIM FOR PATIENCE
Patience confirms that Sherman is one of the most sophisticated voices in Canadian theatre The Globe and Mail.
His plays stretch beyond the borders of conventional drama, and are carrying Sherman’s reputation beyond the borders of his native country. Time
... Bright dialogue, sharp comedy and bitter drama ... Dark, complex morality play packed with jokes. The Globe and Mail
... A fiercely anguished inner journey doused with theatrical aplomb ... Variety

The Press on Patience
“Chaos reigns in fringe triumph...What a wonderful way to inaugurate a fresh year of fringe theatre... Activated Image, long one of the most promising young companies around, reaches maturity with a sophisticated and thought-provoking piece from an award winning playwright inexplicably unknown this side of the Atlantic.
Writer Jason Sherman allows us no time to settle comfortably into our seats. Instead, we are transported instantly, with the assistance of Adam Barnard’s pacy, assured direction and Vicki Fifield’s utilitarian design, into the pulsing action of a hard-fought squash match between old friends. Successful, middle-aged Reuben, we learn, does this every week.
A chance encounter with a doom mongering old acquaintance later that night puts him in a philosophical mood and has him proclaiming: I love my life. But, in precipitous succession, Reuben proceeds to lose his wife, job, best friend and brother. Things appear to be turning out exactly as bold pal Paul had predicted. The only trouble is that Paul has been dead for over a year.
Eliding time frames with élan to enrich the narrative and moving the action backwards and forwards from a pivotal party 10 years previously, Sherman is in total and joyous control of his material.
The drama is powered by the principle of chaos theory, of insignificant events with world wide consequences, and reaches sobering conclusions about man’s seemingly limitless capacity to repeat the same sorry mistakes.
The hardworking cast of six doubles and triples up roles with confidence; commendations to Mufrida Hayes and Sandy Walsh for their thoughtful portrayals of the longsuffering women in Reuben’s life. Geoffrey Towers aptly makes his ever-present Reuben a hollow, disengaged shell of a man. Let us hope that 2005 brings more of this company and this writer."
Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard

"Is there a pattern to our existence? Or are we all victims of the randomness of things? That is the question behind Jason Sherman’s Patience. And, although it’s a query Frayn and Stoppard have addressed, what gives this wry tragic comedy added piquancy is that it hails from Canada: relatively unfamiliar theatrical territory in which only the Finborough shows a persistent interest.
Sherman’s hero, Reuben, is a man who, like David Mamet’s Edmond, finds his life in freefall. More or less simultaneously he is deserted by his wife, sacked from his job and confronted by the death of a brother. As Reuben reels around Toronto, everything conspires to point to the emptiness of his life: an old friend lectures him on the vanity of materialism, a show tune singing rabbi exposes his lack of faith. And, even when salvation seems to come in the form of reunion with an old flame, it turns out to be chimera.
It sounds grim but Sherman lends the routing of Reuben a perverse theatrical gaiety. He plays ingenious tricks with time by constantly tracking back to the possible source of Reuben’s downfall. He also exhibits a light comic touch so that when asked by the showbiz rabbi, ‘Are you Jewish?’ Reuben inquires, ‘In what way?’ And Sherman seeks to make sense of his hero’s accelerating misfortunes by constant references to chaos theory and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. . .
Adam Barnard’s production keeps Sherman’s ideas afloat and there are some deft performances. Geoffrey Towers lends the racked Reuben a brooding self-adsorption. Sandy Walsh as the imagined love of his life displays an intelligent sensuality. Russell Bentley, as his sundry nemeses, shows that one man in his time plays many parts. It may not be Copenhagen or Arcadia but Patience shows that Canadian dramatists are as obsessed as our own with the mystery of things.
Michael Billington, The Guardian
The Canadian dramatist Jason Sherman’s award inning play, given its British premiere in Activated Image’s intelligent and lucid production at the Finborough, is a long, eloquent journey to self discovery of a complete shit. Sherman obviously knows human nature. He looks into the bleak heart of a successful middle-aged, middle-class, married man and observes every selfish, insensitive detail of his behaviour. He surveys the life of his anti-hero Reuben in a series of elegantly constructed scenes, meticulously realized by Adam Barnard’s direction and Vicki Fifield’s design, whose arguments recall picaresque tales of moral education. His encounters along the way with family, lovers, colleagues and a ghost and a rabbi, gradually open his eyes to how others see him. It’s the only way a man who has never been introspective can learn to make moral judgments about himself…Activated Image evidently relish the opportunity offered by Sherman’s play to show that live theatre can be as visually varied and flexible in representation of time and location as film. It’s rich in sound, too, with music by the Company’s own resident composer, Peter Michaels. It’s a tremendously confident, good looking and sophisticated production, palpably intelligent. You can see from the clarity of the performances that Barnard has assimilated every detail of the play. It opens with the theatrical excitement of a squash game . . .
Several of the cast have to show equivalent versatility, doubling parts, and creating telling cameos. Russell Bentley, assigned seven parts in all, brings the sketch of a betrayed husband touchingly to life and makes a comic characterization out of a Fiddler on the Roof tune singing rabbi. Chris Andrew Mellon switches with total conviction from hostile business partner to Reuben’s sensitive physicist brother, going through his own midlife crisis. . . Following another success at the Finborough, Gates of Gold, it’s becoming too easy to take superb production values at this Fringe space for granted. These productions, by different companies, are good by any theatrical standards, not just better than usual Fringe. . .
At the beginning of the play, the character of Reuben seemed familiar from certain iconic middle-aged, alienated men in recent American films, Michael Douglas in “Falling Down”, Jack Nicholson in “About Schmidt”, Kevin Spacey in “American Beauty”, but it’s hard to think of a contemporary stage treatment of this kind of male angst comparable in scope to Sherman’s. . .
It was very interesting to read that Jason Sherman has written a new version of “The Cherry Orchard”, to be produced in Ottawa later this year. He is evidently a writer of great moral sensibility and theatrical responsibility. It’s clear from their presentation that Activated Image share these ambitious values."
Colley Sheridan, Rogues and Vagabonds”

"If you lost everything tomorrow, could you cope? This UK debut from Canadian writer Jason Sherman may seem a trifle long and complicated but it hammers home this question with such ferocity that it is impossible to watch without questioning your priorities. Businessman Reuben loses his job, wife and home in one day and then learns his younger brother is dying. As the play moves backwards and forwards in time to examine his past mistakes and their consequences: particularly a fling with an ex-girlfriend (Sandy Walsh), he is soon wondering whether he is the author of his own misfortunes.
But older brother Phil, played by Chris Andrew Mellon, a physics lecturer who’s left his wife for a 19 year old student and is big on chaos theory, believes life is completely random. Certainly, chance plays a part in Reuben’s story too: cruelly killing someone as they fly to Hollywood to follow their dreams yet offering his ex-wife an unexpected opportunity for happiness.
Barnard’s confident, well paced direction ensures a witty, engrossing debate between these two points of view and Towers makes the unlikeable Reuben as sympathetic as possible. Russell Bentley also impresses as a wisecracking Rabbi and a scene in which his ex-wife Donna, played by Mufrida Hayes, berates his selfishness is also powerful.
However, as Reuben’s problems eventually force him to examine his behaviour, this modern take on the story of Job suggests that suffering which leads to greater self knowledge is a blessing in disguise."
Colin Shearman, The Stage

"When we meet Reuben, the protagonist of Jason Sherman’s play, he’s cheerfully cheating his way to triumph in a squash game, boasting of the cell-phone company he helped to found, driving with carefree abandon through a Toronto whose smelliest streets represent a city going forward and generally exuding modern bonhomie and when we leave him he’s lonely, bitter and talking like the sort of Beckett man who sums up existence in such epigrams as birth was the death of him.
Sherman is a young Canadian author with something in common with the David Mamet of “Edmond”, which is about the journey to disaster of an American Everyman, and something with his fellow countryman Brad Fraser, who chronicled urban ennui brilliantly in plays such as “Unidentified Human Remains and The True Nature of Love”. But he’s more ambitious than either, since Reuben’s search is for what you, I and Monty Python would call the Meaning of Life.
That is refreshing in itself, and speaks well for Activated Image, the enterprising and able company that is introducing Sherman to London. It also produces plenty of short, vivid, Fraser-style scenes as Geoffrey Towers initially bouncy, eventually forlorn Reuben is rejected and (later) venomously denounced for his oppressive selfishness by his wife (Mufrida Hayes), gets fired from his job, and is clearly doomed to lose the onetime love object he has rediscovered in middle age. What went wrong? Was there a point: an unwise kiss, for instance, that started this destructive chain of events? Can malign events be retrospectively fixed, can people change? Is there free will, fate, God? The questions that pile up aren’t pretentiously or ponderously put, though the references to chaos theory, uncertainty principles and the butterfly whose wings cause far-off disasters do begin to pall. And, as the director Adam Barnard suggests in the programme, the confusion: there are flashbacks, doublings and treblings of roles, even a ghost comes to ask big, challenging questions of Reuben: does express the messiness of life as Sherman sees it."
Benedict Nightingale, The Times”

"Canada provides an impressive start to the Finborough’s year. Science is in the theatrical air these days. Canadian playwright Jason Sherman hauls into his story of love and infidelity not only Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (explored in Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen”) but Chaos Theory too. . .Sherman has the ability, shared by fellow Canadian playwright Brad Fraser, to imbue his filmically swift scenes with a texture rich enough for theatre. And he gives a fine sense of a familiar world grown suddenly eerie, as in a bar where the conversations all around reflect on Reuben’s thoughts, or where an unconventional Rabbi draws him into a Kaddish leading to a meet with his old flame. Adam Barnard’s production uses the Finborough’s intimacy to intensify the sense of strangeness. It is well acted around Geoffrey Towers’ fine portrait of a perplexed, troubled and confused Reuben.
Timothy Ramsden, Reviewsgate.com

"Gripping journey into the mind of a man who has lost it all. When was the moment when it all went wrong? If you could just put your finger on it, maybe somehow you could go back there and put things right. So muses Reuben, a successful businessman with a great job, wife and kids after he loses them all.
But then, argues his brother Phil, it is muddled thinking to search for causes and effects. Life is governed by the chaos theory, where small events can have enormous consequences that cannot be known in advance. We do not shape our destiny, but we can make choices. A disaster merely offers us the chance to begin again.
The possibility of returning to the fork in the road and choosing the way not taken before haunts Jason Sherman’s Patience literally. The spirit of a dead friend appears at Reuben’s table in a Chinese restaurant. Paul, seemingly still living, tells him that he had always wanted to make films, and now he has given up everything to pursue his youthful ambition. He is working on a screenplay about a man who loses it all and discovers that he should never have had it in the first place. We have all we need, but do we need all we have? The film’s hero becomes his true self and is happy.
Alas, while it may be easy for ghosts to talk about being happy or to write it into a film script, achieving contentment is more elusive. Even Phil, who abandons the family home for the wonders of sweaty sex with a 19 year old neurotic student, misses the maturity of his wife’s conversation. Reuben cannot find peace anywhere. He journeys back to take that other fork, finding the woman he should have been with a decade ago. But that was then and this is now. He succeeds in finding his true self, but it is loathsome and destructive. He fears that in any new relationship, he will recreate rather than escape his past.
Sherman’s dialogue is authentic and highly entertaining. He keeps a firm grip on our attention for two and a half hours. . .
Patience performs unannounced time shifts, and they work well. The actors made minimal changes to their appearance to indicate that we had jumped back ten years to a fateful party. If there was a moment when it all came unstuck, the same moment when our characters should have wrenched themselves away from their routines and embraced uncertainty, it was then. The play also lurches in and out of fantasy, and that is another of its successes. Reuben complains that he is living with a hotel full of uninvited guests in his mind, and we are drawn with him into delusions that are hard to distinguish from reality.
Reuben is a curious and well observed villain. He is full of bonhomie. He likes a game of squash, a meal and a drink. He regards himself as perfectly happy. He never utters a hostile word. But evidently he is without feeling. He has no idea that throughout his marriage he has been crushing his wife. Such is his selfish obsession that he sucks the life out of any room full of people, requiring it all for himself. It has never occurred to him that his work colleagues hate him. Reuben is inert. He takes few initiatives: things just happen to him. So the vituperation heaped on him by his wife and his associates bemuses him.
Geoffrey Towers handles those complexities well. His Reuben seems likeable enough to us, and tells a good joke. We see two women fall for him. Yet we do not for a moment doubt that his passivity makes him detestable. He wins our sympathy because, by the end, he cannot escape his own flaws. He is cleverer than Phil, and half baked philosophising about uncertainty principles offers him no hiding place from self awareness.
Six actors cover a dozen roles and they are all good. Chris Andrew Mellon is excellent as both Reuben’s aggressive workmate and the dreamy Phil. Patience deserves a bigger audience than can be fitted into the Finborough Theatre. . . The director, Adam Barnard, and designer, Vicki Fifield, fit the action well into a clever set, which hints in turns at a squash court, shower room, restaurant and car interior.
The Canadian writer, Jason Sherman, is well established in his home country, and Patience won the Chalmers Award for Canadian Plays. Its performance in London marks Sherman’s UK debut. We should wholeheartedly look forward to the plays graduation to the West End, and to seeing more of his witty and thoughtful material…"
Michael Portillo, The New Statesman

"Uproariously funny. . . sterling performances . . . Reuben meets a rabbi (Russell Bentley) while on a nocturnal stroll . . . This scene is worth the price of admission alone. On the telephone to God, imitating Fagin from the musical Oliver and indulging in the uniquely caustic brand of New York Jewish humour, Russell Bentley delivers a real tour de force. . . waspish humour."
Glenn Baker, The Morning Star

"Activated Image’s production is sharp and accomplished, allowing the audience room to think amid the chaos . . . Russell Bentley is particularly impressive in his multiple roles . . . A tense and deeply engaging experience"
Dolan Cummings, Culture Wars

"What does fate hold in store for you in 2005? There are any number of horoscopes to turn to at this time of year, but it’s a fair bet that none of them will predict that you are about to lose everything. Behind every astrological forecast lies the assumption that people can steer their lives in some measure; the painful reality is that we are often powerless to avert personal catastrophe.

In Patience, by Jason Sherman: an established Canadian playwright getting his belated first exposure over here at the tiny Finborough Theatre in Earls Court; a Toronto businessman called Reuben experiences a reversal of fortune as rapid as it is calamitous: his wife leaves him, he’s ejected from his own firm in a boardroom putsch, and his younger brother dies. Reuben can hardly be accounted a blameless innocent like Job, but the scale and systematic nature of his loss is out of proportion to his ordinary, haphazard failings. Rather than punishing the audience with the lamentations of a middle aged loser, Sherman combines a recognisable, if accentuated, domestic crisis with an unusually broadminded intellectual inquiry, as Reuben takes meditative stock of his situation. Perhaps, as his physicist brother Phil observes, there’s no point trying to trace unhappiness to its source, to look for patterns after the event; life is chaotic, best to embrace its flux. Then again, as a passing rabbi points out, aren’t men who turn their backs on the divine mystery destined to be humbled by forces beyond their control? Reuben ruminates and oscillates, at first believing he can redeem his loveless marriage in the arms of the woman he should have left his wife for 10 years earlier, before arriving at a despairing interpretation of the Buddhist principle of non attachment.

"It’s refreshing to see such an intellectually ambitious piece of writing on the fringe, grappling with life’s big questions. Adam Barnard’s compact production copes adroitly with Sherman’s televisually rapid shifts of time and place. . . One of the few cast members not required to assume multiple roles, a hang-dog-faced Geoffrey Towers brings a perfect measure of understatement to the part of Reuben, showing us a man swiftly chastened by experience and gradually withdrawing into his shell. The scene in which his former wife (a superbly spiky Mufrida Hayes) lists his failings for a full five minutes is enough to pierce the heart. A sad tales best for winter, wrote Shakespeare. Well, they don’t come much sadder than this."
Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph

"Suppose your life suddenly fell apart. Would you be able to think back and pinpoint a moment when it all started to go wrong; and, if so, would that help you to patch things up? This somewhat naive notion becomes an obsession for Reuben, the middle aged hero of Patience, a ruefully funny, dark comedy by the Canadian dramatist Jason Sherman. Thought provoking and cunningly constructed, the play wonders whether there is a meaningful causal pattern to existence or just a randomness that would drive us mad if we did not superimpose some sense of form upon it.

Reuben, sympathetically played by Geoffrey Towers in a performance that brings out his hollowness and his humanity, is the chief executive of a mobile phone company that is on the brink of signing a big deal with Korea. He is the kind of guy who would rather spend an evening playing squash and having a beer with a colleague than going home to his family. In a Chinese restaurant, he has an unsettling chance encounter with an old friend, Paul (Russell Bentley), whom he hasn’t seen for a decade. On his way to a new career in the movie industry, Paul poses perplexingly subversive questions, as though wanting to undermine Reuben’s professed content in a life of routine and increasing marital happiness. You have everything you need, but do you need everything you have? asks this figure, who is apparently working on a screenplay about a man who loses everything.

Reuben has good reason to brood on this meeting. Not only does he later discover that Paul died a year ago in an air crash, but directly afterwards, his own world starts to unravel. In swift succession, he is kicked out by his wife (who has found some old love letters from an abortive extramarital fling), is given the boot by his company and just misses the chance to make amends with an estranged sibling. The title of the play presumably alludes to the patience of Job, which is a neat irony, for Reuben is not in the least uncomplaining, and his sufferings are largely self inflicted.

The drama keeps returning to the scene of an arguably fateful party 10 years earlier, where he relinquished the possibility of a love affair with Paul’s wife, Sarah (Sandy Walsh). But would his life have been better if it hadn’t taken that wrong turning? The tragicomic mess he makes of a second chance with Sarah now suggests otherwise.

Meanwhile, his physicist brother, Phil (amusingly portrayed by Chris Andrew Mellon), isn’t much of an advertisement for the philosophy, which pointedly contrasts with Reuben’s emotional determinism, of embracing uncertainty. His supposedly ecstatic relationship with a teenage prodigy looks to be about as much of a joy as a punishing fitness routine.

The play’s structural intricacies are skillfully handled in Adam Barnard’s engaging production. Philosophically agnostic, the drama ends with Paul’s speech at the bygone party about how we are particles illuminated by dust and light and should simply relish the fact that we are here at all. It would sound uplifting, if it weren’t for the fact this oration is an emotionally blackmailing attempt to prolong a bad marriage."
Paul Taylor, The Independent

"Here’s a question: is your life perfect and about to be ruined, or ruined and about to be perfect, and can you ever tell the difference? The young Canadian playwright Jason Sherman has created a thoroughly absorbing story involving the ebb and flow of fortunes and relationships back and forth in time; it is very cleverly crafted and with energetic and focused direction by Adam Barnard keeps an air of anticipation throughout. Patience is the first of Sherman’s plays that have been put on in the UK. Let’s hope there are many more to come. . This is a stunning play incorporating some fascinating ideas, and although the play is fairly long, the time passes like a shot from a gun."
Julia Hickman, Theatreworld Internet Magazine