THE PIANO TUNER | LIFELINE THEATRE
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Set in 1886, the novel depicts the intertwining of two men’s destinies. Mason describes the piano-tuner protagonist, Edgar Drake, as a “man whose life is defined by creating order so that others may make beauty.” Cordial but diffident, straightforward but socially awkward, Drake begins with just two passions in life: pianos and his wife, Katherine. All that changes when he receives a request from the British War Office to leave London and travel to Burma’s rebellious eastern Shan states to tune a rare piano. Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll has transported it to the outpost he’s established there, but the humidity has rendered it unplayable. Carroll is the only Brit who’s managed to work within the intricate network of Shan warlords and princes, and he uses that as leverage to get his way. “It is much easier to deliver a man than a piano,” he notes in his request.
Grote’s two acts echo the halves of Mason’s novel. The first depicts Drake’s decision to leave England–a decision supported by Katherine, who urges him to pack his dress tails in case he’s asked to play the piano, though Drake protests he’s merely a tuner. On his journey he encounters a man who claims he went deaf after hearing an otherworldly tune from a mysterious woman. Soldiers on a steamship tell him that the Kurtz-like Carroll stopped marauding bandits by playing a Shan love song on his flute. Eventually Drake realizes that these tales are “less what each soldier knew was true than what he needed to believe.” For young men occupying a hostile land, the notion that music alone might turn hearts is powerful. And at least one scene–soldiers hunting tigers kill a Burmese boy–suggests the novel’s anticolonial underpinnings.
