Word feast at Canada's Shaw Festival

George Bernard Shaw: author of a zillion plays, essayist, lecturer, world-class letter-writer, arts critic, political debater, and all around smart guy. His most famous plays— Arms and the Man, Pygmalion, St. Joan, Major Barbara, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Heartbreak House— are performed frequently despite their demands on actors and audiences. These are wide-awake, stay-alert plays, full of wit, contentious issues and language crisper than a cucumber, sharper than a scalpel.

The treat of Canada's Shaw Festival, held annually from April to November in the charming, flower-filled town of Niagara-on-the-Lake (nearly equidistant from Buffalo or Toronto) is that it offers productions of plays you rarely get to see.

For 48 years, the Festival has been devoted to the works of not only GBS but also his contemporaries. And since Shaw lived nearly a century (1856-1950), he had plenty of contemporaries.

This year, in addition to the two Shaws (John Bull's Other Island and The Doctor's Dilemma), I saw Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, J.M Barrie's Half an Hour, Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, and the musical One Touch of Venus, with a score by Kurt Weil in an unlikely collaboration with Ogden Nash and S.J. Perelman. All told, the Festival offers ten plays this summer.

Stuffed with language

With the exception of Barrie's one-act, each of the shows I saw takes nearly three hours, and all those hours are stuffed with language— and all that language must be delivered. Here we find no action heroes— well, no action actually— but instead characters created by playwrights who profoundly believed in human speech. Thoughts are expressed— cleverly (Wilde) or melancholically (Chekhov) or contentiously (Shaw): It's a word feast.

Of the several pleasures of watching a repertory company— actors who've worked together for years— beyond observing the range of individual talent, is discovering the surprising connections between plays.

Benedict Campbell, one of Canada's best-known stage actors, plays both Lopakhin in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard and Broadbent in Shaw's John Bull's Other Island. Not only is he romantically paired with the same actress in each script (Severn Thompson plays both Varya and Nora Reilly, each character a single woman who waits and waits for the wrong man), but both Lopakhin and Broadbent are real estate developers, about to turn the famous Russian orchard into vacation cottages and old rural Ireland into a hotel and golf course. This fortuitous connection opens a whole world of insight into the making of the 20th-Century landscape.

The Shaws: An Irishman in England

John Bull's Other Island: John Bull is the iconic figure of 19th-Century England, while the "other island" is Ireland. Shaw was an Irishman who lived his life in England; this play is Shaw's only comment on what the very Irish Yeats called "a geographical conscience."

Powered by that Shavian ability to articulate every side of a profound argument, the dialectic proceeds: Tom Broadbent, a successful businessman, speaks for English efficiency and the multinational entrepreneurial spirit; Peter Keegan, a spoiled priest, speaks for the Irish imagination and the authenticity of the countryside; Larry Doyle, a melancholy, ineffectual Irish expatriate, is caught in the morose middle.

Many other Irish characters parade before us in stories of pigs escaping from automobiles and various small-time swindlers, creating a portrait of a place and its inevitable future. King Edward VII is said to have laughed so hard when he saw this play that he broke his chair.

The Doctor's Dilemma: You couldn't ask for more relevance: a gaggle of rich, smug Harley Street physicians, all variations on quacks and self-aggrandizing life-and-death dealers, represent the dangers and hopes invested in big pharma and experimental protocols. ("We're not a profession, we're a conspiracy." Riposte: "Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.")

Add to that obvious relevance the play's vigorous debates: art vs. science, imagination vs. reason, poverty vs. money, women vs. men, and Bohemian society vs. high society.

The plot turns on an artist of great talent but nonexistent morality. His worshipful wife pleads with a famous doctor to cure him of a fatal disease. The doctor has fallen in love with the wife, and thus the dilemma— a dilemma compounded by the classic medical/moral choice of who gets saved.

All of this would be painfully riveting if it weren't so damned tedious: too many unpleasant people (a charmless cast), too many Jesuitical and sophistic talking heads.

The Wilde: Standing by your man

The Ideal Husband concerns the problem not with husbands but with ideals, and the dangers of so idealizing a person that any slippage from the pedestal becomes cause for grief and renunciation. Wilde sees forgiveness and charity as the ultimate virtues: Without them, love— which was, for Wilde, the greatest human emotion— doesn't stand a chance.

"Stand by your man" is the message— rendered all the more poignant by recalling that when The Ideal Husband first played in London, Wilde himself was living through a vicious public trial in which forgiveness and charity— and his man— were notably absent.

The eternal relevance of political sex scandals goes without saying. The plot turns on a past misdeed committed by a brilliant public figure, Sir Robert Chiltern (Patrick Galligan seems oddly miscast— he lacks the necessary youth, height and charisma). When the scheming, sexy, unscrupulous Mrs. Chevely (Moya O'Connell) blackmails Sir Robert with a compromising letter, the melodrama is launched; during the necessary pileup of events, Sir Robert's wife, Gertrude (Catherine McGregor) is revealed to be a bit too fine, too straitlaced; her love depends too much on honor.

Robert's best friend, the foppish, seemingly silly Viscount Goring (Steven Sutcliffe) turns out to be the moral center of the almost-devastating shenanigans, as well as the supplier of glittering aphorisms ("To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance").

Directed by the Festival's artistic director, Jackie Maxwell, with panache to spare, the bizarre costumes (worthy of any recent issue of the New York Times fashion supplement) rival Wilde's linguistic spectacle, and the set's central staircase allows the various women to reveal their derrieres in motion during their many exits.

The Chekhov: Cherry Hill foretold

Despite much publicity about its new Irish spin ("a version" by Tom Murphy, directed by Jason Byrne), The Cherry Orchard still seems its old Russian self. This austere production on a nearly bare stage, a gloomily lit moment in time— the past almost over, the future almost arrived— is evenhanded in its treatment.

Unlike Stanislavski's insistence that it was a tragedy and unlike Chekhov's insistence that it was a comedy, The Cherry Orchard remains generically a tragicomedy, revealing people's limitations, trapped not only in time and place but also by self. And so the orchard is chopped down, the suburbs and middle-classes will replace elegance and privilege, and Chekhov's prescience is again revealed to be uncanny.

(The mall kingdom of Cherry Hill, N.J., remember, was a 134-acre cherry orchard in the 19th century.)

One Touch of Venus: The main interest in seeing this truly dopey musical is in having seen it. It produced only one famous song, "Speak Low" (and the only one that sounds like Weill music).
The plot turns on a statue of Venus that comes to life, and the power of love; for more on this subject, see Shaw's Pygmalion and its musical offshoot, My Fair Lady.

Barrie's Half an Hour: Your clock is ticking

J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, seems at first glance an unlikely author of this sophisticated one-act about infidelity. Under the slyly brilliant direction of Gina Wilkinson, the link becomes clear: Barrie was obsessed with the passage of time (e.g., "I won't grow up").

A bewhiskered Scotsman winds the clock; the cast first appears as mechanical figures popping out of doors. We hear ticking. We hear "cuckoo." Poses are struck as though the stage has become a 19th Century narrative painting. In a half-hour of a woman's life, we see her abandon her posh marriage and then return to it. Half an Hour is a short, satisfying play, one of those "rediscovered gems" that nobody ever heard of— the specialty of the Shaw Festival.♦


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