The Bakelite Masterpiece: We’re here, Vermeer, get used to it

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Like film, theatre has its double-barrelled coincidences. Instead of two asteroid movies or two Truman Capote biopics in a row, however, we now have two new Canadian plays about life in Holland in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War – a society torn part, trying to knit itself back together.

After the sweeping landscape of Liberation Days painted by David van Belle at Theatre Calgary, now comes the interior scene of The Bakelite Masterpiece at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto.

Playwright Kate Cayley has taken inspiration from Han van Meegeren, a Dutch artist who was charged with war crimes after selling a previously unknown Vermeer to the Nazis during the occupation. He later became a folk hero after claiming it was a forgery – and that he had, in fact, made idiots out of the occupiers.

Cayley's Han van Meegeren (played by a lusciously louche Geordie Johnson) is, fittingly, a forgery of the real-life figure – a few key details are factual, but his character is mostly fictional.

We meet van Meegeren as he sits in jail on charges of collaboration for having sold a canvas called Christ and the Women Taken in Adultery, purportedly painted by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) during his rumoured biblical period, to Hermann Göring.

An art historian who is now a captain with the Commission to Investigate Appropriated Art, Geert Piller (a stoic Irene Poole) cried in front of the van Meegeren's Vermeer, and has no doubt that it was a real, rediscovered masterpiece. She is his judge and jury – and hopes to to be his executioner. Her job is to find the clearest collaborators to be executed publicly to sate the anger of starving, brutalized Dutch citizens who are threatened to turn on one another in the street. But van Meegeren offers her a better story that will bring Dutch society together in laughter, rather than revenge. The only way to prove it, however, is for him to paint another Vermeer.

The Bakelite Masterpiece begins rivetingly. Johnson is strong as the central charismatic, self-justifying villain, a little reminiscent of the (similarly skewed from real-life) Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. This van Meegeren is a painter with talent, but no authentic inner self to transmute into art, who has turned to morphine pills, gin, forgery and fascism to deal with his shortcomings. His greatest gift seems to be for the gab and Cayley has him say all sorts of appealing aperçus, such as: "The forger is so in sympathy with the desires of the present, that he creates exactly what his time would like to believe about the past."

As for Piller, Poole has less to work with, but she is a still life you can look at for ages, discovering layers upon layers of meaning in her silences.

Director Richard Rose's production takes its cue from the subject matter and is intensely painterly, with a blank canvas of a set by Charlotte Dean that is lit like a Dutch master by André du Toit.

Ultimately, however, The Bakelite Masterpiece is the product of a talent who has the opposite skill set from Han van Meegeren; Cayley has created a work of art that does not lack for inspiration and is full of dazzling dialogue, but the underlying craft is unsatisfying. She delivers a tantalizing situation that never fully evolves into a drama. The characters end up feeling flat despite the vivid performances, while all the intellectual philosophizing flies off in all directions without a clear focus. The Bakelite Masterpiece drifts onwards to its ending, looking beautiful all the while.

The Bakelite Masterpiece continues to November 30. Visit www.tarragontheatre.com for for information.