The Cryptogram: 11-year-old actor shines in Mamet play

Jenny Young and Mitch Kummen in "The Cryptogram" by David Mamet

A teapot is broken, a blanket is torn, a letter is found on the staircase and a knife is exchanged between a man and a boy. These are the markers of a seismic occurrence in a pre-adolescent's life that will force him into adulthood well before his time.

Daniel MacIvor directs David Mamet's three-hander The Cryptogram at Victoria's Belfry Theatre, torquing the tension between what is being said and what is being concealed by two adults navigating a storm of emotions in front of a boy.

MacIvor was brought to Victoria to direct the play following the illness and death late last year of the celebrated director Gina Wilkinson, who was 50 years old. A director of his own complex plays but not usually of others', MacIvor often mines the territory between character and performing persona, the running inner monologue against the outward presentation.

Words are weapons in this 80-minute, three-act play. An ill-chosen (or well-chosen) word can detonate a rush of contained feelings. The Cryptogram is a play best appreciated in its final moments, when Mamet's foreshadowing resonates with double meaning.

Eleven-year-old Mitch H. Kummen plays John, a boy who can't get to sleep because he is so keyed up about a camping trip his father is to take him on the next day. John wants to stay awake until his dad, Robert, comes home from work - but he won't. Del (Vincent Gale) is a family friend who assumes the role of advising young John in the ways of the adult world (of the 1950s). Kummen shows immense control of a part in which 11-year-old innocence and fears run smack up against adult cruelty and betrayal. A childhood is about to be shattered.

"I'm speaking to you as an adult," says Del, engaging the boy in a chat about insomnia. But John is not an adult; he's just an excited lad. As for his mother Donny (Jenny Young), she is tired and sends her sleepless son to the attic, where she has been rummaging, to tidy up.

"It's such a mystery," she says of some missing object, oblivious to the deeper quandary she is about to fall into. "The older I get the less I know." While for John, the older he gets, the less he wants to know about the adult world.

After he's sent upstairs, John returns with a blanket he thinks he has torn. He says he's staying up to see what the third misfortune will be. Trouble comes in threes; his mother dropped a teapot in the play's opening, John doesn't want to miss what will happen after the teapot and the blanket. We are well-primed for the disaster that comes with the discovery of a letter addressed to Donny.

"This trip has a meaning for him," says Del, as he puzzles over a photo Donny has found in the attic of the three friends, Del, Donny and Bob, in their younger days at a lake. But words obscure meaning here - hence the cryptogram reference.

Mamet's rapid-fire dialogue, with lines overlapping and cutting off other speakers, is difficult to perform. It is a wonder to watch Kummen, who is the axis of the play, master it. Gale and Young are a little less convincing as Mametian characters, but with time they could achieve the dramatic tension that is meant to be generated.

The Cryptogram