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very_improbableOkay, I have a question about Frank and Cyril. (I'll put it under a cut since there's a bit of incidental information from Season 2, but nothing truly spoilery.)
Note: I have not yet seen Season 3, so if the answer is "Oh, they explain that in Season 3," please do go ahead and say that. And, you know, say only that. :)
In the first scene of "Madness in Great Ones", Cyril (Graham Harley) tells Frank (Michael Polley) about The Night Geoffrey Went Crazy. Frank does not appear to have heard the story in any form before, although he does know, as anyone who so much as skimmed the Arts & Leisure secion in any Toronto paper in the week that Geoffrey came on as Artistic Director would know, that Geoffrey has been institutionalized.
It is to the S&A team's great credit that it was only last night, seeing this scene for what must have been the fourth time, that I realized that this does not make a lick of sense.
One's general impression of Frank and Cyril over the first two seasons is that they are fixtures at the Festival--after all, stage actors their age have probably settled down in a permanent home, and beyond the logistical considerations, they just give off the impression that they've been there, and been working together, forever-ish. (On the S2 DVD extras, an interviewer even assumes that Harley and Polley have been working together forever, based on their screen chemistry.) They always seem to be in the Festival's flagship productions, if always in tertiary roles (and they're in the new play workshop in S2 with Ellen and Jerry). They're generally archetypal Stately Old Theatre Homos, with a delicious story for every occasion.
Obviously, however, Frank has not been at the Festival continuously or even frequently in the past decade, or he'd have witnessed Geoffrey's breakdown himself or heard about it. Here, then, are the options:
1) Frank has known Cyril for ages, perhaps, but has himself been at New Burbage on and off--maybe he was working in England for ten years or so and came back sometime between the Hamlet Incident and the beginning of Season 1. This is quite plausible on a practical level, but assumes that Cyril, upon Frank's return, did not tell him the story of the night Geoffrey went crazy in the middle of a show and the subject hasn't come up until now. Problematic.
2) Frank has actually only been with the Festival for a few years, and gets plenty of work because he's had a relatively good career thus far wherever else he was, and/or because he's their go-to elderly character actor--as (selectively?) deaf and confused as he may sometimes seem offstage, he appears to be quite sharp in his work, and not every 73-year-old stage actor can say that. Cyril hasn't told him about the Hamlet Incident because they're not as close as they appear; they have a sparkling rapport at the theatre and in the bar, but they're not actually the kind of friends who hang out when they're not acting together, and it just never happened to come up.
Theory 2 works just fine in S1 (we've all seen people who seem to have a fabulous connection in some special context but barely know each other), but if we are to give their interaction in S2, particularly "Let's go home" in 201 and "He's like the son we'll never have" in 206, any canonical weight at all, Frank and Cyril are in fact not only a couple but cohabitating at the end of Geoffrey's first season as AD. So this is also problematic.
3) Frank is in fact brand new to the Festival in Oliver's final season, and as he and Cyril are still getting to know each other when Dream goes up, it happens that the Hamlet Incident has not yet come up in Cyril's repertoire of theatrical gossip. Sometime while we were all looking elsewhere, they had a whirlwind romance and shacked up before Hamlet closed. This solves the continuity issue at hand (though I suspect that there are specific references made elsewhere by Frank to his prior years at New Burbage, which would cancel this theory out), but I imagine it is not quite what Coyne, Martin et al had in mind. Which leads me to:
4) Exposition is hard.
Thoughts?
Note: I have not yet seen Season 3, so if the answer is "Oh, they explain that in Season 3," please do go ahead and say that. And, you know, say only that. :)
In the first scene of "Madness in Great Ones", Cyril (Graham Harley) tells Frank (Michael Polley) about The Night Geoffrey Went Crazy. Frank does not appear to have heard the story in any form before, although he does know, as anyone who so much as skimmed the Arts & Leisure secion in any Toronto paper in the week that Geoffrey came on as Artistic Director would know, that Geoffrey has been institutionalized.
It is to the S&A team's great credit that it was only last night, seeing this scene for what must have been the fourth time, that I realized that this does not make a lick of sense.
One's general impression of Frank and Cyril over the first two seasons is that they are fixtures at the Festival--after all, stage actors their age have probably settled down in a permanent home, and beyond the logistical considerations, they just give off the impression that they've been there, and been working together, forever-ish. (On the S2 DVD extras, an interviewer even assumes that Harley and Polley have been working together forever, based on their screen chemistry.) They always seem to be in the Festival's flagship productions, if always in tertiary roles (and they're in the new play workshop in S2 with Ellen and Jerry). They're generally archetypal Stately Old Theatre Homos, with a delicious story for every occasion.
Obviously, however, Frank has not been at the Festival continuously or even frequently in the past decade, or he'd have witnessed Geoffrey's breakdown himself or heard about it. Here, then, are the options:
1) Frank has known Cyril for ages, perhaps, but has himself been at New Burbage on and off--maybe he was working in England for ten years or so and came back sometime between the Hamlet Incident and the beginning of Season 1. This is quite plausible on a practical level, but assumes that Cyril, upon Frank's return, did not tell him the story of the night Geoffrey went crazy in the middle of a show and the subject hasn't come up until now. Problematic.
2) Frank has actually only been with the Festival for a few years, and gets plenty of work because he's had a relatively good career thus far wherever else he was, and/or because he's their go-to elderly character actor--as (selectively?) deaf and confused as he may sometimes seem offstage, he appears to be quite sharp in his work, and not every 73-year-old stage actor can say that. Cyril hasn't told him about the Hamlet Incident because they're not as close as they appear; they have a sparkling rapport at the theatre and in the bar, but they're not actually the kind of friends who hang out when they're not acting together, and it just never happened to come up.
Theory 2 works just fine in S1 (we've all seen people who seem to have a fabulous connection in some special context but barely know each other), but if we are to give their interaction in S2, particularly "Let's go home" in 201 and "He's like the son we'll never have" in 206, any canonical weight at all, Frank and Cyril are in fact not only a couple but cohabitating at the end of Geoffrey's first season as AD. So this is also problematic.
3) Frank is in fact brand new to the Festival in Oliver's final season, and as he and Cyril are still getting to know each other when Dream goes up, it happens that the Hamlet Incident has not yet come up in Cyril's repertoire of theatrical gossip. Sometime while we were all looking elsewhere, they had a whirlwind romance and shacked up before Hamlet closed. This solves the continuity issue at hand (though I suspect that there are specific references made elsewhere by Frank to his prior years at New Burbage, which would cancel this theory out), but I imagine it is not quite what Coyne, Martin et al had in mind. Which leads me to:
4) Exposition is hard.
Thoughts?