New York Times 7/26/92
SUNDAY VIEW; Picturesque May Be Pleasant, But Is It Drama?
By DAVID RICHARDS
Published: July 26, 1992
IN THE SHAW SHOP, THE OFFICIAL gift and souvenir boutique of the Shaw Festival, you can purchase the usual assortment of coffee mugs, T-shirts, trinkets and posters. I'm not against this. In these days of penury, a theater troupe needs every source of revenue it can get. You can also buy postcards depicting scenes from past productions. And I guess I shouldn't be against that, either.
But after seeing six of the nine offerings that make up the 31st season, I somehow find the postcards indicative of a worrisome development. The picturesque seems to have gained the upper hand in the three theaters the festival operates in this admittedly picturesque town on the no less picturesque shores of Lake Ontario. Little that's troublesome or unsavory makes its way onto the stages here.
No one says so, of course. The official line of the festival -- which runs through Nov. 1 -- holds that this is the only company in the world specializing in plays about "the beginning of the modern world." Shaw himself is the patron saint, and who upset more apple carts and peered under more rocks than he? Yet there's something well bred and tidy about the productions that robs even Shaw's works of their revolutionary zeal. If the playwright insists on raising nettlesome questions about the social and moral order, you can be fairly certain that his characters, at least, will be elegantly costumed and they will inhabit handsome dwellings. The furniture they sit on will be tasteful and the silver tea set will elicit covetous glances from audience members, who, at intermission, will repair to the lobby to take tea themselves.
The liveliest production I saw was probably the most negligible -- a 45-minute one act, "Overruled," which Shaw wrote in 1912 and which is presented as lunchtime fare in the Royal George Theater. It's no more than a riff on marriage and adultery, but it is quick and impudent. Mr. and Mrs. Juno, having decided to take separate vacations, are traveling around the world in opposite directions. So are Mr. and Mrs. Lunn. By the time they all meet up by chance in the lounge of a seaside hotel, Mr. Lunn is well along in his seduction of Mrs. Juno, while Mr. Juno is closing in fast on Mrs. Lunn.
A precursor of Noel Coward's "Private Lives" in many ways (there's even a balcony overlooking the ocean), "Overruled" permits Shaw to stand conventional moral principles on their heads and argue mischievously for a little faithlessness in conjugal life. What makes the undertaking hilarious, however, are two explosive performers: Mary Haney, looking, as Mrs. Juno, like a kewpie doll's older, marginally wiser, sister; and Peter Hutt, as Mr. Juno, oozing all the charm of a lesser reptile. "I'm her prospective husband: you're only her actual one. I'm the anticipation: you're the disappointment," Mr. Hutt proclaims at one point to his rival. As he does, delight courses the length of his body, setting everything a-quiver -- toenail, mustache, pinkie. Ms. Haney invests equal energy in bold starts of indignation. Even as her eyes are popping open, she is pursing her bee-stung lips, which thereby risk disappearing altogether. Nothing else I caught was half so bold or entertaining.
Certainly not Shaw's "Pygmalion," which comes across in the Festival Theater, the company's flagship playhouse, as a perfectly genteel, although scarcely audacious, entertainment. If you think about it, however, Professor Higgins is not far removed from those mad scientists in old Hollywood films who were always trying to create life in a test tube or graft the head of a man onto the body of a wolf. Higgins's experiment, which happens to involve phonetics and a caterwauling Cockney flower girl, is no less transforming, and he puts Eliza Doolittle through all sorts of hell before she finally claims her remade self and walks out the door.
Andrew Gillies is pretty much a standard-issue Higgins -- rumpled, self-absorbed, arrogant, but not unlikable. He has nice spells of distraction, and a particularly telling moment at the end of the play, when, after cackling derisively over his pupil's impending marriage to another man, he grows pensive and regretful. You can see by his clouded brow that he's asking himself if the grand experiment was really such a wise idea after all. As Eliza, Seana McKenna is possessed of a certain sharpness, which she never entirely sheds, probably because it extends to her features. I know it's wrong to expect flashes of love between these two characters. (If you want romance, you have to look to "My Fair Lady.") Something warmer than diffidence on his part and animosity on hers would help this production, though.
Its salvation lies in the sets, which the designer Leslie Frankish has constructed with considerable ingenuity out of large wooden letters and words. One of the columns of the church in Covent Garden, for example, is made up of the letters C-O-L-U-M-N, piled on top of one another. The Art Nouveau filigree over the fireplace in Higgins's study is, if you look closely, the word "fire" and the word "place" intricately entwined. Some words -- "gossip," "tattle," "banter" -- seem to be hanging all by themselves from the rafters, like bats.
Ms. Frankish has two turntables at her disposal, one inside the other, so that when scenes change, language literally comes alive. Verbs are suddenly off and running; nouns are circling one another. You get the unsettling impression that a giant crossword puzzle has gone on maneuvers. It's an imaginative conceit and thoroughly appropriate. After all, hasn't Eliza ventured into a labyrinth of words? Wherever she turns, there's a perverse conjunction or a pesky adjective waiting to trip her up. You could say that "Pygmalion" is the story of how she makes her way out of the diabolical maze to safety.
Even if Eliza and Higgins don't kiss at the end, that story remains a good one. But what are we to make of "Widowers' Houses," the third Shavian offering, which the author described as "a grotesque, realistic exposure of slum landlordism"? Granted, urban housing practices haven't improved much since 1892, when the play was first performed. On the other hand, for all his righteous fury, Shaw isn't exactly in top form here.
He had just begun to write for the theater. The action is haphazardly developed. The ironies are leaden. And only two of the seven characters have much zest -- Sartorious (Roger Rowland), self-made man and unrepentent slum landlord, and Mr. Lickcheese (George Dawson), the Dickensian lackey who collects the rents for him. Unfortunately, the plot hinges on a love affair between Sartorious's daughter Blanche and the young doctor she meets on a trip down the Rhine. He's a bit of a dope, and if she is not one of Shaw's least appealing women to begin with, she is by the time Elizabeth Brown gets through playing her.
"Widowers' Houses" has been relegated to the Court House Theater -- a thrust stage with the audience seated on three sides. This is "the thinking person's theater," where, the official literature has it, "you can only expect the unexpected." What that really means is that the least commercial endeavors wind up here. I'm less sure what is intended by "thinking person." Probably scholars or academics, who, along with their fine minds, tend to have a higher tolerance of mustiness than the rest of us.
In addition to works by Shaw, the festival's mandate allows for plays by his "contemporaries." The term is a loose one, since Shaw lived to the age of 94 and any play written during his lifetime (1856 to 1950) is considered fair game. "Charley's Aunt," Brandon Thomas's farce, which came out the same year as "Widowers' Houses," qualifies for a spot on this year's bill right next to "On the Town," the 1944 Broadway musical by Shaw's great pals, Comden, Green and Bernstein.
So do Noel Coward's "Point Valaine" (1934); Elmer Rice's drama "Counselor-at-Law" (1931); "10 Minute Alibi" (1933), a British murder mystery by the forgotten Anthony Armstrong, and "Drums in the Night" (1922), the first play by Bertolt Brecht to see the boards. If some are clearly less representative of the modern world than others, justification is found for them all. "The 30's could almost be defined by the detectives and crooks who linger over a sherry or who lurk around dark corners," argues the festival's artistic director, Christopher Newton, in a program note for "10 Minute Alibi." While acknowledging that mystery and detective plays are not great literature, he concludes that "they are great theater."
He may be right. The trouble is, "10 Minute Alibi" has a dandy first act that leaves you wondering why the play isn't more frequently revived, and a dud of a second act that gives you the answer in no equivocal terms. The first act lets you observe the perfect crime -- first, as the villain, a lover spurned (Peter Krantz), pictures it in his mind; then, as he actually goes about committing it. The two versions don't jibe, naturally. The dream is effortless; reality comes with comic hitches. The second act, however, has nothing better to do than sic two detectives on the murderer and see if they can't crack his alibi. All this -- which is to say, not much of anything -- takes place in a stylish flat in Bloomsbury that could have been designed and furnished by Frank Lloyd Wright. Form may not always triumph over content here, but the sets usually do.
They are easily the smartest aspect of "Charley's Aunt," which is performed with too much visible effort for my taste, but which looks fresh as lime sherbet in the Festival Theater. Still, there's not much point reviving the old war horse these days if you don't have an inspired clown to don the black dress and dour wig of Donna Lucia d'Alvadorez "from Brazil, where the nuts come from." Steven Sutcliffe is only half-inspired. He is fine when it comes to projecting the understandable irritation of a lovesick Oxford student compelled by circumstances to masquerade as an imperious old lady. But he misses the other half, which is to say the giddiness of one who, despite himself, is swept away by a ludicrous disguise.
As Cameron Porteous has designed it, Oxford at the end of the 19th century is a magical place -- light and airy rooms giving on to enchanted gardens. The trees, large spirals of green, neatly mirror the confusions of the characters who are spinning dizzily among them. By the last act of the play, Mr. Porteous has crowned each tree with a chandelier. Lovely touch, that.
All the same, it falls to Brecht -- clumsy and intractable as he can be -- to wrench the festival out of indolence and reverie. Of this season's works, "Drums in the Night" is probably the most representative of the modern world, even if the comparison is hardly comforting. The play is a raw clown show married to an angry nightmare, in which one Andreas Kragler (Peter Millard), a soldier reported missing from the war four years earlier, suddenly shows up on the doorstep of his fiancee. He is little better than a decaying corpse. She is pregnant and about to wed another. Her ignoble parents are obsessed with money and status. Inflation is racing out of control. And revolution has broken out in the streets.
Things do not end happily, although a few characters manage to save their hides. The only colors on stage, apart from a blood-red moon, are black, white and gray -- gray being the shade of most of the actors' faces. The prevailing moods are raucous, drunken or confrontational. Given the propriety and politeness elsewhere, it's a little like coming upon a stink bomb at a garden party. But the production, staged in the Court House Theater, is too sloppy and indulgent to do much harm. I'm afraid even thinking people were peeling away in droves at intermission.
Yet more rude gestures and angry words, not fewer, are called for. Otherwise the Shaw Festival risks dissolving into so much prettiness. What linked most of the productions I saw was not their shared roots in some hypothetical 20th-century soil, but their ultimate banality. Audience sensibilities are being soothed more than they're being challenged.
While it takes pride in its reputation as one of Canada's major cultural institutions, the festival is, at the same time, a significant tourist attraction. (More than 68,000 tickets were sold to Americans last season.) The two functions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they're not exactly synonymous, either. Art and commerce have their separate demands and pay different rewards.
How the festival might better reconcile them, I don't know. This much seems apparent, though. Picture-postcard theater, for all its blandishments, is not something to write home about.
© The New York Times
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