Ted Dykstra's Kreutzer Sonata: a song of male paranoia

Ted Dykstra performs monologue as jealous husband Yuri in The Kreutzer Sonata.

Misogyny is in this year at Soulpepper, it seems. The Toronto theatre company's winter season kicked off with David Mamet's masterpiece of male paranoia Oleanna, and now the summer brings an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's equally alarmed 1889 novella The Kreutzer Sonata crafted into a solo show.

Both works are cautionary - written almost exactly a century apart - about women gaining new powers and abusing them to the detriment of men.

Dykstra plays Yuri, a man confused and then consumed by jealous rage for his own wife. It all began, he tells us, when his wife started practising birth control - an unspecified early form of it. Her doctor had cautioned her not to have any more children for health reasons, but Yuri only allowed her to use such "prostitute's methods" with extreme reluctance.

The divorce of sex from children frightens Yuri, and plants the seeds of jealousy in him. Its shoots emerge as his wife grows in health and happiness, and increases in attractiveness. Its green-eyed flower blooms when a musician friend arrives in town and begins to instruct Yuri's wife in a duet on Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata.

In his monologue, delivered without ever standing up from the soft belly of a red chair, Yuri tells us his toe-curling tale with enough even-minded calm that we are willing to hear him out, even when he leans to extremes. He condemns music, for instance, as a kind of hypnotism that implants inorganic emotions in the listener. (Much of what Yuri says is as a stand-in for Tolstoy, who, in an epilogue to his novella, outlines similarly reactionary views. Later in life, he converted to chastity-espousing Christianity.)

Ironically, it's Yuri's - that is, Dykstra's - artful storytelling that induces a near-hypnotic state in the audience and tightens a hundred stomachs along with his. The tension builds and builds without relief, while Dykstra stays bottled up in that chair and trapped in a shaft of light by designer Lorenzo Savoini.

Dykstra originally adapted Tolstoy's story for a performance with pianist and conductor Andrew Burashko's Art of Time Ensemble, with the titular piece by Beethoven played by live musicians. Here, as with Dykstra's performance of the monologue at last year's SummerWorks Festival, the music emanates from loudspeakers.

Just as Laszlo Marton's production of Oleanna allowed us to cast a skeptical eye on that skewed play while still enjoying it splendidly, Dykstra's skillfully shaped adaptation of The Kreutzer Sonata both grips and appalls.

The Kreutzer Sonata