Review: ‘Romeo Initiative’ offers romance Cold War-style

Boy meets girl, they fall in love, boy loses girl then wins her back, and boy and girl get married.

All of us recognize the formula for a romantic comedy. But what if nothing is as it seems? What if there’s another story going on behind the scenes, hidden from us by deliberate deception and selective memory?

That’s what the Sudbury Theatre Centre’s production of Trina Davies’ The Romeo Initiative is all about. If you go to the show unprepared, you’ll reach the intermission thinking you’ve just seen a simple love story like so many others, although with a shocking occurrence at the end.

Then the second act will replay many of the same scenes from a different point of view, and unravel everything you think you’ve just learned.

Lonely secretary Karin Maynard meets charming businessman Markus Richter by accident on a beach. He’s a foreign aid worker whose noble cause awakens admiration in Karin and, eventually, a desire to help him with his work.

Of course, there’s another desire involved, too, and Karin suffers a lot of of heartache as she tries to resist a love affair too good to be true while enduring pain and doubt during Markus’s long absences. Adding to her confusion is her boss’s manipulative mistress, Lena. We’d call Lena a “frenemy” in today’s parlance.

Act One shows us Karin’s recollection of the story — Act Two provides the very different perspective of Markus, including what Karin didn’t know or chose to overlook.

This production marks the STC acting debut of Artistic Director Caleb Marshall, and Marshall very effectively delivers Markus’s nice guy appeal, as well as the cold cynicism his true undertaking requires. Caitlin Stewart plays Karin as an intelligent woman handicapped by her need for love, evoking the audience’s compassion without coming across as simply another naïve romantic. Shaina Silver-Baird brings just the right amount of needy seductiveness to the role of the dangerously volatile Lena.

The many scene changes are a challenge to the pace of the show, but they work better in the second half, and the costumes, lighting and music capture the flavour of the 1970s while underscoring the fluctuating mood of the story.

The Romeo Initiative is a true story, in a way — not that its characters actually lived, but its plot was played out many dozens of times in various forms during the years of the Cold War, especially in Germany, thanks to a devious program of the East German intelligence service known as the Stasi. As part romantic comedy, part spy thriller, part history lesson, this is a unique piece of theatre that’s well worth seeing.

The Romeo Initiative runs until March 13 at the Sudbury Theatre Centre. The box office number is 705-674-8381 or purchase your tickets online here.

Scott Overton is the author of the thriller Dead Air. He writes theatre reviews for Northern Life.