The Fourth of July weekend
may not mean much to Canadians, but the Shaw Festival made it a celebration for
me. After five previous shows this season at Shaw and twelve at Stratford —
all of surprisingly mixed quality — it was reassuring to see this great
company hit its stride with three winning productions in a row.
The complete surprise is Cicely Hamilton’s neglected Diana of Dobson’s,
which opened in 1908 in London and New York, and is getting its Canadian
premiere at the Shaw Festival 95 years later.
In a drab dormitory young female
employees of Dobson’s Drapery Emporium undress and prepare for bed after long,
hard work. They argue, joke, and complain about the dehumanizing treatment and
inadequate pay they receive. When a letter arrives for the articulate and
angrily depressed Diana Massingberd, she finds that she has inherited 300
pounds from a distant relative. Diana decides to leave the next day to spend it
all on a short dream existence, rather than invest it for security to only
slightly improve her life. An elderly female supervisor attempts to intimidate
Diana, who satisfyingly tells her off.
After a choreographed onstage
set-change that justifiably wins applause, we see the vacationing overdressed
English high society in an elegant hotel in Pontresina, Switzerland. The
hilariously affected Mrs. Cantelupe is talking about a glamorous young widow,
Mrs. Massingberd, whom she wants to investigate as a possible marriage prospect
for her nephew, Captain Victor Bretherton. Victor is a handsome idler without
prospects, whose extravagance cannot be supported by his pension of a mere 600
pounds a year (roughly $50,000 to $60,000 in current US dollars). Victor enters
with the mysterious Mrs. Massingberd (Diana, made over in Parisian garb) and a
self-made tycoon, Sir Jabez Grinley. Later Mrs. Cantalupe ferrets out the
information that Diana has an income of 300 pounds for the month and assumes
that figure is monthly (3,600 pounds a year). Ultimately, Diana finds that she
has spent her inheritance and must leave. Grinley proposes marriage to her, but
she refuses. Victor is pressed by his aunt to propose, but Diana tells him that
she is a shop girl without a fortune. He berates her for her dishonesty, and
she tells him that he is a useless parasite who could not survive if, like her,
he was left to support himself.
In the contrived, but touching, last act, we find Victor
looking dirty and unwell on a park bench in London. A constable tells him to
move on but recognizes Victor as his old commandant in the Welsh Guards and
offers him a handout. With hokey coincidence, Diana shows up, equally run-down,
also hungry and looking for a bench to sleep on. She attempted to return to
work but became ill and was evicted from her room. Dejected, Victor tells her
that his attempt to prove her wrong by supporting himself without his social
contacts or income has failed miserably. Of course, they end romantically by
swallowing pride and deciding that both can live fairly well on his income.
That plot summary may sound thin,
but the play is rich in social satire and early feminist thinking, and its
characters are either priceless parodies or charmingly realistic people. Alisa
Palmer’s direction is subtle and flawless. Judith Bowden’s sets and David
Boechler’s costumes are not only authentic-looking but also coordinated in
appearance and understated color with Andrea Lundy’s lighting to provide an
exquisite overall composition. The ensemble cast is equally fine-tuned.
Standout performances include Severn
Thompson, lovely and lovable as Diana, and Goldie Semple, outrageously imposing
and delightful as the snobbish, manipulative Mrs. Cantalupe. Peter Hutt manages
to insert comedy and hints of character strength in Grinley’s ruthless, nouveau-riche
lord of sweatshops. Evan Buliung seamlessly develops Victor from an amusingly
doltish idler to a genuinely attracted swain, and finally to a reformed young
man, vulnerable but dependable. He makes us believe that Victor’s basic decency
was there all along. You’ll like this play.
Sean O’Casey’sThe Plough and the Stars is an established masterpiece of
modern drama, though hardly a popular and successful one. Centered on a Dublin
tenement, where a colorful group of slum dwellers assemble, the play shows them
horribly affected by the Easter Rebellion of 1916, but mostly politically
uninvolved in it. The speakers and fighters for Irish independence take poses
and spout slogans with some pomposity but little honest feeling. For that
matter, O’Casey’s strong sense of satirical anger has him portray even The
Young Covey comically; Covey repeats socialist propaganda without truly
understanding its Marxist phrases. O’Casey was a socialist and had been a leader of the Irish Nationalists, but he came to believe
that the internal warring was naive about social consequences and led only to
Irish killing Irish. So this controversial play portrays the legendary
rebellion in anti-heroic terms.
We see the slum dwellers
drunk and selfish, looting rather than rebelling, fighting among themselves
more than against the British, and always posturing. But every annoying one of
them at some point engages our sympathy and affection. Almost all the
characters show some heroic personal behavior in caring for each other. Mostly
oppressively realistic, in the vein that O’Casey actually made fun of, The Plough and the Stars is richly
inlaid with song and symbolic images, and, of course, O’Casey’s gorgeous,
lilting language.
Visually, I find the
production awkward. Cameron Porteous’ unrealistic set pieces often confuse me,
especially combined with his very realistic costumes. Kevin Lamotte’s opaque
lighting also seems more likely to hide the significance of what is going on
rather than expose it. But Neil Munro’s stark direction is potent without
giving up a moment of O’Casey’s ubiquitous humor. No other modern playwright
provides such simultaneous tragedy and comedy without transition and sometimes
without obvious connection.
Fiona Byrne gets Nora
Clitheroe’s unconsciously flirty sexiness and selfish combativeness down pat,
along with her energetic nervousness. But I think we’re supposed to like and
sympathize with Nora more than Byrne lets me. It may be O’Casey: he makes Nora
cling to her husband, trying to get him to avoid the war, even when he is being
begged to assist a dying comrade right in front of her. Nora ignores her dying
supportive friend Bessie’s cries for help at the end, but is crazed with grief
at that point. Byrne plays it all on one note.
The large cast is otherwise
splendid. Benedict Campbell’s drunken Fluther evokes constant shifts from
amusement to sympathy to disgust. Simon Bradbury is a perfect O’Casey strutting
cock. Ben Carlson taunts him perfectly as the never-laboring spokesman for the
Labour movement. Wendy Thatcher is brilliant as Mrs. Bessie Burgess, witchlike
and hateful and taunting, then bravely supportive and kind, and finally
movingly vulnerable and despairing. And Mike Shara makes the sometimes shallow
Jack Clitheroe a heroic young man whose frustrations we can’t avoid sharing.
Not a fun evening in the
theater the way that O’Casey’s also tragic and comic Juno and the Paycock can be, The
Plough and the Stars is even richer in milieu and history anddoes deliver a powerful emotional
punch.
In an elaborate production directed by Shaw Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell,
Michel Marc Bouchard’s The Coronation Voyageis another impressive Canadian play.
Translated by Linda Gaboriau from the French, it is a cynical treatment of a
melodramatic plot that has much to tell us about French-Canadian politics and
history and has much for its fascinating characters to involve us in.
Handsomely set by Ken MacDonald aboard the grand ocean
liner Empress of France, it has
opulent period costumes by William Schmuck, all atmospherically lit by Alan
Brodie. We see four days of the voyage of a wildly mixed group traveling from
Montreal to London for Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. Minister Gendron
resents the British dominance of French Canada. His wife Alice still obsesses
over losing two sons in the 1942 Battle of Dieppe whose horrors, she feels,
were officially glossed over. Their daughter Marguerite has been chosen to
represent Canada by playing a Chopin work originally to have been played by
Etienne, a great prodigy whose hands have been crippled (she thinks) by a
tragic illness. Etienne’s father is traveling incognito but is known to be a
mafia chief in exile because he gave evidence to the government. The Diplomat
is facilitating The Chief’s escape to Europe.
Three “Elizabeths”
(of twenty on board, we’re told) are in Coronation costume, and their rehearsal
for the little pageant they’ll present for the Coronation raises questions
about the Queen’s true appearance. We get a narration from The Biographer, who
turns out to be employed to document The Chief’s disappearance in a prettied-up
memoir. Then we find out that Etienne’s hands were crushed by gangsters in
punishment for his father’s betrayal. And The Biographer keeps altering the
narration of what we actually know to be happening. And the Diplomat will
provide The Chief with false passports only if he is permitted to seduce The
Chief’s other, adolescent son. So everything becomes a shifting story about
storytelling and “history.”
The Abraham’s-sacrifice-of-Isaac treatment of the
possible seduction of the young boy is perhaps a tad melodramatic: ‘fate worse
than death’ and all that. “Only his soul will be harmed,” the
Diplomat says. And so is Etienne’s abortive romance with the relatively
soulless Marguerite who needs to learn about suffering to play Chopin. But the
plot elements are nothing if not intriguing, and this solid production is
entirely grabbing.
Again, a large ensemble of accomplished actors give the
play more than its due. George Dawson as The Biographer, David Schurmann as The
Minister, and Peter Krantz as The Diplomat are polished, layered, and
commanding. Jim Mezon actually hasn’t many lines to dominate his scenes with as
The Chief, but he has such presence and physical expressiveness that he is very
much in charge when silent and not even facing the audience. Dylan Trowbridge
builds the emotional charge of Etienne from wan cynicism to controlled pain to
searing, bitter anger. Jeff Lillico not only persuades that he is really no
more than 16 as the younger son but his rather intriguing suggestion that the
boy is looking forward to his sacrifice builds tension more than the
predictable plotting does. And Donna Belleville is magnificent as the
minister’s wife Alice, out-of-control with frustrated grief. Not one role is
simple or one-dimensional in direction or effect in this complex, wonderfully
played drama.
Shaw Festival, Niagara-On-The-Lake, Ontario, Canada:
Cicely Hamilton’s Diana of Dobson’sat the Court House Theatre to October 4; Sean
O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars at the Court House Theatre to October
5;Michel Marc Bouchard’s The
Coronation Voyageat the
Festival Theatre to November 1. Tickets: $20 to $77
Canadian dollars (currently $14.93 to $57.47 US). 800-511-7429,
www.shawfest.com.
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2003.
