Diego Matamoros is a founding member of Soulpepper Theatre Company and has been involved in many of our signature productions such as Uncle Vanya, Don Carlos, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (for which he won a Dora Award for Outstanding Male Lead Actor).

Michael Murphy (MM)

What excited you about the possibility of doing Oleanna?

Diego Matamoros (DM)

The play seems to transcend its contemporary topic, raising ageless questions about how we (human beings) perceive each other, about our intellect, our fears, our misunderstandings, and the role that human aggression plays in all this. The audience will want to side with one or the other of the characters at different points in the play and this perhaps is what the playwright David Mamet intended.

MM

You've worked with director László Marton before, usually within the modernist period (Chekhov, Ibsen). How has that relationship shifted, if at all, working on a contemporary classic like Oleanna?

DM

Our relationship goes back some twenty-five years now and we work together as always to address the questions and challenges which arise during the rehearsal period. We've worked almost exclusively on Chekhov and Ibsen together and these of course are translated texts from their original language. With Mamet we have the advantage of having the original text before us though László had a Hungarian translation made for him back home in Budapest before coming here to start rehearsals. The work on this play has been, as with all my other projects with László, engrossing and very rewarding.

MM

I've had a glimpse of the set that Teresa Przybylski designed for Oleanna. But the first thing the audiences will notice is that it's askew, with a forced perspective. Were there discussions about how the design creates a kind of stylized environment?

DM

What Teresa has so insightfully designed is a set which forces you, at first sight, to question the world of the action you are about to witness. It helps the audience to understand that we are in a theatrical universe more than anywhere else where the metaphor of space works to elucidate the multiple meanings inherent in the play. The set is there to help you to think in a larger context than just the immediate one. It is a disturbing and "edgy" space. Mamet once said (I'm paraphrasing here): "I don't tend to write nice stories about nice people; they don't tend to make for good theatre..." Oleanna is good theatre, from the first glimpse of the set to the despairing actions of its two (convicted) characters at the end of the play. No doubt about it.

Diego Matamoros talks about the creation process of The Aleph, the first of Soulpepper's Lab Series productions. The purpose of the Lab Series is to give our artists and our audience a chance to share the creative process by experiencing together various approaches to theatrical storytelling.

Q: You and Daniel Brooks have worked together many times over the years, Endgame and Betrayal at Soulpepper, and John Mighton's Half Life. How did you decide to collaborate on The Aleph?

Diego: I brought it up with Michael Levine and Daniel Brooks, I asked them: How do you transfer a story that is not a dramatic piece to the stage? There was one character we especially liked - in our version he's a director, in the original he was a writer - a very pompous author who thinks a lot of himself, a sort of clownish character but also a bit demonic and frightening.

I've known Borges' story for 20 years and when I thought about adapting it for the stage I thought: Nobody could design this except Michael Levine. This project has been in development for five years. The first part of the project's evolution was a series of meetings with Daniel Brooks and Michael Levine.

We're all friends - Daniel and I have worked together often and I've also known Michael for years. There is mutual respect on all sides. Michael had designed Platonov and Uncle Vanya and so there was a relationship with Soulpepper. I sent him this short story and said, 'Read this and tell me what you think. Are you interested in doing something with it?' I asked him: 'How do you go about transferring it to the stage?' We took a long time discussing the idea, starting as far back as 2005.

The idea interested all three of us. One night at Michael's studio we brought a group together and read a number of stories out loud - a few Canadian stories and then Borges' 'The Aleph.' We all agreed there was something special about 'The Aleph.'

Q: What were the next steps in adapting it to the stage?

Diego: I took a trip across Canada after Half Life and out of those six days travelling I created this huge, ridiculous, sprawling draft. Soulpepper gave us a couple of workshops, most recently for three weeks last year. By that point Kevin Lamotte was on board doing the lights and we had found sound designer Jean Sebastien Cote. We thought to form an interesting team of people to help us figure out what might be at the core of this intriguing story.

It's the longest process I've ever been a part of, moving steadily as it has from inception to production.

Q: What was the draw to tackle creating a new work?

Diego: At Soulpepper, we work essentially with classics, by classics I mean proven texts that have already been successfully produced. They have that magic kernel already in them. People have already had all those different thoughts and debated as to how the play should best come together. Starting from scratch is a more terrifying challenge because there is no proof that this is ever going to get off the ground. So your terror is different - it's all a question of, 'Can we make a show starting from scratch?' How do we create it?

Q: The Aleph is said to be the point in the universe that encompasses all points, was it a conscious decision to parallel that and have only one actor encompass all characters?

Diego: It's one person's experience, it's storytelling - one person's story about an event that happened to them. The story is about one guy who has this story in his head and tells it to us from his point of view - the whole thing. And within that one person's story there is the story of the Aleph, which is the story of the universe. This one guy tells a story about seeing one thing that contains all things. You're also playing with the singleness of that person, and the fact that actors play roles, and multiply their identity.

To me that's the magic of theatre, especially theatre now. What's exciting is the relationship between actor and audience. To simplify it down to one actor to say, 'At the centre of it all is just this little mechanism of human illusion. That mechanism can be everything. You can have a full experience, a full realization - a lot can happen without using too many theatrical tricks. It's a paradox that you're not supposed to do a play about everything. That's what a young writer does, he tries to write about everything and it's just a mess. So when you actually have to do a play about everything, how do you do it? Keep your eye on what the story is telling you to keep your eye on.