Despite quibbles, I’m feeling like a flack for Shaw
Festival’s brilliant season. With eight productions open now, they’ve not got a
weak offering.
If R.C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End isn’t a masterpiece,
it’s one of the great war plays. Its understated honesty is gripping and
heartbreaking, with no heroic grandstanding, no anti-war preaching, just a
frighteningly realistic picture of doomed young men in the trenches of World
War I. Directed by Christopher Newton, designed by Cameron Porteous, lit by
Louise Guinand — all artists at the top of their fields — and cast with
entirely superb actors, this revival is so good it hurts.
Don’t expect a rousing finale or a tearjerking one. Don’t
look for contemporary relevance: The parallels are horrifying and constant but
never underlined. What elevates this sobering theatrical production beyond
depressing effect is the exhilaration of experiencing the power of great
theater.
Back down to ordinary
theatergoing, the latest revival of Bernard Shaw’s masterpieceMajor
Barbara is beautifully produced and performed, but not better than I’ve
seen before. Shaw Festival has had four previous fine productions; the terrific
1940 film had a dream cast and production staff; Charles Laughton’s 1956
Broadway production had more than an all-star cast — its walk-ons are now
famed actors. But except for Diana Donnelly’s charming but less than inspiring
Barbara, this version gets just about everything right.
Christina Poddubiuk’s designs, wonderfully lit by Kevin
Lamotte, are a model of simplified realism, adroitly shifting from
over-privileged to hapless poor, from elegant drawing room to Salvation Army
outpost, to sprawling munitions factory.
Director Joseph Ziegler keeps the Shavian dialogue on key:
solidly in character, endlessly argumentative and amusing, but unmistakable in
its ideas. Shaw’s usual inverted truths sound revolutionary: poverty is the
greatest sin, alcohol and gunpowder liberate the downtrodden masses, salvation
has to be bought. But they are cliches: our “wars” on poverty and terrorism
combat evil; money and power are needed to do good; to save free souls to
accept salvation one must first free their enslaved bodies.
The two main things
to say about Georges Feydeau and Maurice Desvallieres’ Something On the Side are
that this is a delightful, silly lunchtime confection and that it plays for
only 45 minutes, starting at 11:30 a.m. So you must want to be in crowded
Niagara-on-the-Lake early enough to find a parking place close by or have time
to walk to the theater.
The play has the expected witty dialogue by Feydeau, the
master of comic extra-marital intrigue, and more than his usual frantic
slapstick. A randy waiter and waitress prepare private lunches for two
philandering couples, and all six turn out to have hidden connections. A comic
counterpoint is a horny busboy who yearns for the waitress (or almost any other
woman).
Adapted and directed by Neil Munro, and deliciously designed
by Sue LePage, this slight entertainment is always stylish and somewhat
surprising in its plot twists. Simon Bradbury has special flair as the amorous
waiter, and Harry Judge is hilarious as the geeky virgin busboy.
My nomination for a
truly neglected American masterpiece is Lillian Hellman’s The Autumn Garden. This
“Chekhovian” play is neither so frequently revived nor so enthusiastically
discussed as Hellman’s earlier, more melodramatic works, yet I find it less
dated and more subtly artistic. Directed by the Stratford Festival’s leading
actress, Martha Henry, and richly designed by Shaw’s design director William
Schmuck and masterful lighting designer Louise Guinand, Shaw’s new production
is what this wonderful play merits.
All the characters are real but role-playing. Sharry Flett
perfectly balances fading Louisiana spinster Constance Tuckerman between
vulnerability and foolishness so that her wasted life is pitiable but not
tragic, and even sometimes appealing and amusing. Peter Hutt makes Nicholas
Denery, the unsuccessful painter who deserted Constance, both mean and
manipulative. But his Nick can turn on romantic charm to hold on to his cynical
rich wife and still support Constance’s delusion of having always loved him.
And until the very end, Jim Mezon’s dry-witted, alcoholic Edward seems to be
kidding himself that love has ruined his life by keeping him waiting for
Constance.
It all plays out with many qualifying nuances.
Shaw Festival | Journey’s End through October 8;Major Barbarathrough October 29; Something On the Side through September
25; The Autumn Garden through October
8. | Niagara-On-The Lake, Ontario, Canada | $20 to $82 ($16.08 to $65.91 US) |
800-511-7429, www.shawfest.com
This article appears in Jul 20-26, 2005.
