Tolkien themes ring true in no time

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/01/2003 (8411 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DON’T have enough patience to read all 1,000 pages of Lord Of The Rings?

Not a problem. This epic fantasy trilogy flies by in nine frenetic minutes as three hilarious plays within a Tolkien-themed play called Into The Ring.

Created and performed by Fringe Festival veteran Rick Miller — yes, the MacHomer dude — and Seattle playwright Dawson Nichols, Into The Ring is a meditation on the themes pervading Tolkien’s most famous novel.

Normally, such philosophical subject matter would bore the intended audience of teens and young adults to death. But Miller and Nichols turn their moralistic tale about corruption and redemption into a fast-paced modern update of one of those old, after-school TV specials — complete with video-game screen captures, live camera feeds, clever visual tricks and almost a dozen colourful characters.

While Into The Ring has enough layers to make Atom Egoyan happy, the main story deals with two brothers trying to make a documentary about J.R.R. Tolkien.

Phil is a cell phone-toting caricature of a yuppie producer who couldn’t care less about hobbits or wizards. But when the opportunity comes to cash in on the success of the Lord Of The Rings movies, he enlists earnest, Tolkien-obsessed brother Graham to gather the content.

Immediately, Graham lines up a bunch of interviews with stuffy academics, whose dissertations serve the purpose of delivering subtext directly to the audience. They also bore the heck out of Phil as well as Graham’s disaffected son, who’d rather slay pixellated monsters than hear or read about them.

Eventually, the brothers turn to a pair of teenage stand-up comics who call themselves Tolkien Geeks.com. Their three-minute summaries of each volume of Lord Of The Rings serve as the comedic centrepieces of the play, although you might have to be a bit of a geek yourself to catch all the Tolkien references.

The dramatic highlight, however, is not the main plot, which unfolds the way you would expect from a modern morality play. Rather, it comes from a series of short, wordless vignettes interspersed throughout the play that depict Tolkien himself — as a melancholy man eventually consumed by the literary process of working out his demons.

The late author, who always claimed he hated allegory, likely would have despised this multi-layered treatment of his life and work. But Miller and Nichols deserve no end of praise for embedding so much meaning — from geek humour to philosophy — inside what could have been another sappy play about brotherly and fatherly love.

Commissioned by the Manitoba Theatre for Young People, Into The Ring’s 10-day run at The Forks marks its world premiere. Miller will return to Winnipeg in April for another premiere, Bigger Than Jesus, a one-man show slated for the MTC Warehouse.