Winnipeg theatre scores a win with Theo Fleury story

For a nation as obsessed as we are with hockey, Canadians haven’t written an awful lot of great plays about the national pastime (Rick Salutin’s Les Canadiens being the exception that immediately stands out).

• Theo Fleury play comes to Winnipeg's Praire Theatre Exchange

Playing with Fire: The Theo Fleury Story could be added to that short list, except that calling it a play about hockey would be incredibly reductive. Rather, it’s a play about a guy who happens to play pro hockey — and has a lot of demons to wrestle with. And it all makes for captivating drama in Prairie Theatre Exchange’s co-production with Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre.

Kirstie McLellan Day’s 2012 script is based on the book of the same name, which she co-wrote with Fleury, the Manitoba-raised “kid from Russell” who went on to a stellar NHL career, but struggled with addiction and the scars of sexual abuse throughout his life.

It’s a harrowing enough story to be compelling on its own. But it becomes great theatre thanks to Ron Jenkins’ whip-smart direction, and a heroic solo performance by Shaun Smyth, who plays Fleury — and performs the entirety of the one-man, two-hour show on skates, zooming around a stage turned into an artificial rink.

Smyth’s exuberant performance is what ultimately sells the show. It’s relentlessly physical — besides the skating, he hits the boards hard, fires on the nets at either end of the stage confidently, and skates like he was born on blades (even managing to pull off a bit of line dancing on ice at one point).

But it’s also entirely convincing, no mean feat given the range Fleury’s life story calls for. He swears like a sailor, parties hard, and fully enjoys the excesses of being a star athlete. There’s a lot of humour in all of that, and Smyth lands every opportunity for a laugh, like his dry observation about why the audience has come to the show (“You’re curious about a sports superstar behaving very, very badly”).

At the same time, he has to delve into the torment of substance abuse and what he refers to as “the molestation part” — and he does the latter in a wrenchingly matter-of-fact way. It’s smart writing on McLellan Day’s part, and Smyth plays it with an understated grace.

His despair and pain in the throes of addiction is palpable and tough to watch, but impossible to turn away from. It’s a “leave it all on the ice/stage” performance that earned Smyth a fully deserved standing ovation from the opening night crowd.

He gets help, though, from Jenkins nuanced and cleverly designed production. There are all kinds of nice flourishes here — from having Stacey Nattrass come out to sing the national anthem pre-show, to using goal lights to double as the lights of an ambulance, to the ingenious way he depicts a bench-clearing brawl with only one actor on stage.

And it’s all given plenty of visual flair by an appealingly realistic hockey rink set from designer David Fraser, and effectively employed video and projections by Corwin Ferguson and Andy Thompson.

You might come for the hockey history, or to see “a sports superstar behaving very, very badly.” But Playing with Fire scores much, much more.

Playing with Fire: The Theo Fleury Story runs at the Prairie Theatre Exchange until Mar. 15.