【Naked Poison II (2002)】

To Speed 2,Naked Poison II (2002) or not to Speed 2? That was the question, and Keanu Reeves knew his answer.

Reeves turned down $11 million to do the sequel, and went to play Hamlet in Winnipeg, as planned before Speedbecame of the box office hits of 1994. 25 years ago this week, one of the biggest movie stars in the world sold out in the good way night after night as the tortured prince, packing the Manitoba theatre to the rafters every night of the run. Whether he was good almost didn’t matter.

This Hollywood invasion of a serious Canadian stage inspires an early storyline in Slings & Arrows, a gorgeously written Canadian series from the beginning of this millennium. Earnest, sexy, and nourishing, it is easily one of the best pieces of fiction ever created about the messy intersections of art and commerce and the beauty of creative collaboration. Think the behind-the-scenes chaos and corporate machinations of 30 Rockor Mozart in the Jungle— but about theatre rather than sketch comedy or classical music, Canadian as heck, and with a British cult classic’s knack for never outstaying its welcome.

Three seasons of six episodes each make it easily bingeable on a miserably cold or wet weekend, and whether you’re a theatre nerd, English major, or just someone burnt out on bleak prestige TV, there is literally no better way you could spend 13 and a half hours.

Set at a prestigious but creatively stagnant theatre company known best for its traditional Shakespeare productions, Slingsfollows the return of former wunderkind Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross, Tales of the City)after years in the artistic and emotional wilderness following an onstage nervous breakdown.

He’s actively haunted by the ghost (or hallucination) of his former mentor Oliver — the embittered creative director whose demise beneath the wheels of a ham truck (get it?) ends the first episode — and despises the necessary commercial concerns and gift shop frippery both drowning and sustaining his beloved art form.

Slingswas an early home for some of present-day film and TV's best Canadian imports. Luke Kirby, who’s now finally got some love as The Marvelous Mrs Maisel’s Lenny Bruce, is the “huge in Japan” Hollywood action import not known for his actual chops, who breezes in and quickly discovers how badly he actually wants to do the real work. A luminous pre-NotebookRachel McAdams plays Kate, a young understudy stuck playing Midsummerfairies while her diva roommate (a proto-Jenna Maroney unburdened by charisma or talent) butchers Shakespeare’s iconic ingenues.

Filmmaker Sarah Polley is a young lead in the bittersweet third and final season. Superstore’s Mark McKinney, who co-created the series years after his time on Kids In The Hall andSaturday Night Live, plays a hapless suit who is repeatedly sucked in by a series of fast-talking charlatans and cynics — including an intensely quotable Colm Feore as the “visionary” head of a New Age marketing firm named Froghammer that’s a spiritual predecessor to so many absurd fictional startups. And Gross and his real-life wife Martha Burns play the warring, brilliant, prickly stage veterans whose romance has real pain at its heart.

It’s too-real, hyper-verbal catnip for theatre kids, both recovering and perennial, because it captures the energy so perfectly. Recognisable oddball characters whose egos and personalities could only survive inside a theatre, slipping Shakespeare quotes into conversation as readily as most of us would Simpsonsreferences. The long-suffering stage manager holding everything together with zero thanks. And best of all, the surreal intimacy built over the course of endless rehearsals, constant intense proximity, and repeatedly acting out the peaks of human emotion.

The defining scenes of the show, something I've never seen captured so well, are the ones where the misanthropic, erratic Geoffrey drops the tortured-genius schtick and really directs: popping the hood of an actor’s interiority, tinkering instructively and patiently with the parts that power both them and their characters, and then handing them the keys. It’s glorious when you watch the actors, and the actors playing them, build those performances, and the scenes linger on them to draw you in.

But the best is when Geoffrey draws one of those performances out of an accountant on a corporate team-building day. He turns a timid man into a grieving Macbeth who gives an affecting "sound and fury" monologue from a plastic chair, and then feels that thrill of having channelled something bigger, tapped into something he thought wasn't for ordinary people, made some good art and understood something about himself and other. “Fuck, I love this,” the actor says to himself.

Let's see Speed 2do that.

Slings & Arrows is available to stream on Acorn TV, available as a free trial through Amazon Prime Video.