by AMY BARRATT

What ever happened to good old catharsis? That purging of emotions that drama, especially tragedy, is supposed to inspire. Playwrights don't do Oedipus, or even Death of a Salesman anymore. The closest most of them seem to be able to come is the tearjerker.

Nothing wrong with that, necessarily. I like to have my tears jerked as much as the next sloppy sentimentalist. The trouble comes when the play, or the production, can't get the job done. Such is the case with Burnt Piano, now playing at the Centaur.

Written by Australian Justin Fleming and directed by Simon Phillips, artistic director of the Melbourne Theatre Company, Burnt Piano is two plays, really. It's the story of a family trying to recover from the death of a child, and it's the story of a woman obsessed with Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot.

Karen Idlewild (Mary Harvey) has discovered that her birth coincided with the first performance of Godot in Paris (January 3, 1953, a date which, for what it's worth, is also the playwright's birthday). Consequently, she has taken the play as her "star sign," meaning presumably that it holds somewhere within it the meaning of her life. The fact that it's Godot gives an intellectual veneer to what, when you think about it, is a deeply wing-nuttish idea. Anyway, Karen has been sending letters to Beckett for years and none have ever reached him. Finally, she has travelled to Paris with her young son and ageing father determined to come face to face with the great man (the play is set in 1989, when Beckett was still alive).

I'm puzzled as to why Gordon McCall chose to program this play immediately following Anna in the Tropics, another play intimately entwined with a great work of literature. Perhaps he did it deliberately, thinking it would be interesting to compare how the two playwrights approached the challenge. But the risk is that the audience starts to wonder if anyone can just write a play anymore, without leaning on a Beckett or a Tolstoy.

Of course artists are inspired by other artists all the time, and its effect can be both intellectually and emotionally satisfying. When this technique works is when the well-known work becomes a vessel to hold the powerful emotions of the playwright's story.

I find myself comparing Burnt Piano not just to Anna but to The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, the English season's most successful production so far. While that infinitheatre show wasn't inspired by a work of art, it did have a lot of intellectual structure that was made to seem absolutely indispensable to the telling of a heartbreaking story. I didn't get the same sense with Burnt Piano, that we needed Beckett in order to tell the story of the Idlewild family. He seemed almost like a gimmick to me, a way to get lots of debate going - mainly between Karen and her father - about what is important in art, but essentially unrelated to the family's tragedy.

The play is supposed to build to a final cathartic spilling of secrets and emotions. But in Phillips' hands, the play just goes along; there is no build. And the actors, try as they may to portray the big emotions, are hung out to dry by the production. Lest you think it's just a crusty old critic who couldn't squeeze out a tear, I listened and didn't hear one tell-tale sniff among the opening night crowd.

Burnt Piano runs until Dec. 5 at the Centaur
(453 St-François-Xavier), 288-3161

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