In case the Shaw Festival should ask for requests . . .

How about a John Mortimer play at the Shaw Festival?

By now, Jackie Maxwell’s probably finished her list of Shaw Festival shows for 2011. But we’ve been thinking that we ought to be more proactive in letting Ms. Maxwell know what we’d like to see on stage in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario next year, or maybe the year after, especially now that we’ve seen most of what we’re likely to see at the Shaw in 2010.

So herewith our helpful suggestions.  We’ve already vetted them for compliance with the Festival “mandate” (plays during George Bernard Shaw’s lifetime, or set during that period):

A Voyage Round My Father (John Mortimer)

The late writer, a great favorite of ours, would never have created Rumpole of the Bailey if not for his eccentric father, a blind barrister who specialized in divorce. This play — we’ve read it, want very much to see it performed — is a tension-packed fictionalized account of the mutually abusive and mordantly funny relationship between Mortimer and his dad. We can see Michael Ball and Steven Sutcliffe in the lead roles. The play’s our first choice.

Alice Sit-By-The Fire (J. M. Barrie)

For the last 20 years, the only plays besides Shaw’s that you’d have a betting chance of seeing at the Shaw Festival in any given year have been Noël Coward’s and Oscar Wilde’s. But we think James M. Barrie ought to be in the rotation too. Not that he’s been ignored altogether; in fact, the Shaw is doing Barrie’s one-act Half an Hour as its lunchtime show this season.  But the only full-length Barrie play besides Peter Pan that the Shaw has ever done was The Admirable Crichton, and that was before our time as Shaw patrons.

James M. Barrie

In his day Barrie had a long string of successful plays. We’ve read most of them, and they’re packed with lively, witty dialogue, vivid characters, clever plots, and bittersweet sentiment. They don’t seem at all dated or flat. We’d be thrilled with Mary Rose (a good choice for the slot usually reserved for a “mystery thriller” in a Shaw season playbill) or Quality Street. But our first choice would be Barrie’s 1905 comedy Alice Sit-By-the-Fire.

Like Peter Pan, Alice Sit-By-the-Fire is concerned with the impact of a powerful imagination on reality. In Peter Pan, the Darling children’s playworld becomes real as Neverland; in Alice Sit-By-the-Fire, a teenage girl’s imagination, inflamed by cheap theatrical melodramas, spins out of control as she transforms herself into a heroine who can save her too-youthful mother from a forbidden romance. We could see Diana Donnelly and Julie Martell in the mother and daughter roles.

The Iceman Cometh (Eugene O’Neill)

Ms. Maxwell has been cautiously introducing accustoming Shaw Festival audiences to Eugene O’Neill over the last several years, so with any luck The Iceman Cometh is already in her sights. She softened up patrons in 2004 with Ah! Wilderness, O’Neill’s wistful comedy about a teenage boy, his family, and the summer he became a man. Then she ratcheted up the misery in 2009 with A Moon for the Misbegotten, a play about the earthy and disagreeable Hogan family.

Eugene O'Neill

We think folks ought to be sufficiently braced now for O’Neill’s masterpiece about the down-and-outers and losers who hang out in Harry Hope’s grimy Greenwich Village bar. Ready or not, we want to see The Iceman Cometh, and we think Ms. Maxwell should lure Ben Carlson back to the Shaw Festival to play the salesman Hickey. It’s a play that cries out for the talents of a repertory company like the Shaw’s.

The Dresser (Ronald Harwood)

The golden age of British theater! We wish we could have been there in the decades before television when great classical actors like John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson played all over the British Isles. We know The Dresser only from the film version from the early 1980s, starring Albert Finney as a fading Shakespearean and Tom Courtenay as his long-time dresser.

The part of "Sir" was based on British actor Sir Donald Wolfit

This portrait of the delicate and complex relationship between “Sir” (the actor) and Norman (his dresser) is a perfect fit for the Shaw, which last year gave us slices of English vaudeville during the same time period (John Osborne’s The Entertainer and Coward’s Red Peppers). We see David Schurmann and Evan Buliung in the lead roles.

They even made a movie from Shaw's Androcles and the Lion

Androcles and the Lion (Bernard Shaw)

Why does Jackie Maxwell, year after year, like Christopher Newton before her, avoid Androcles and the Lion?  Why should a short list of plays one wants to see at the Shaw Festival need to include one of Shaw’s most celebrated plays? Surely it’s not too hard to stage; the Shaw has done it twice before, though not since 1984, before our time. 

Happy to help!

The man who wrote Peter Pan

After I’ve gotten to know an author through his writings, I like to find out whether his life matches up with my notions. So the publication of Lisa Chaney’s A Life of James Barrie a year or so ago was especially timely for me; I’d been working through Barrie’s novels and plays over the last couple of years. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to know them.

Barrie wrote much more than Peter Pan, and wrote awfully well. Chaney gives due attention to other stages of his life and to his many other literary and dramatic successes. She falls occasionally into amateur psychoanalysis, but Barrie was so eccentric that I can hardly blame her. She writes well, though her book contains a surprising number of spelling errors, mostly the sort of thing that spellcheck programs don’t pick up, like “it’s” versus “its”.

(I have fond and vivid memories of a dark, very adult-focused production of Peter Pan at the Shaw Festival a few years ago, far different from the sentimental, kid-oriented version that high schools put on. In London a couple of years ago, we were delighted to find a statute of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, where Barrie often strolled from his nearby home.)

I was pleased to learn from Chaney about Barrie’s friendships with Thomas Hardy and other luminaries like Arthur Conan Doyle, R. L. Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and George Meredith. But Chaney makes little effort to relate Barrie’s work to that of his contemporaries, other than to contrast Peter Pan with other significant works of children’s literature.

There was surely more to be said. Personally, I could not help linking Barrie’s early A Window in Thrums, a book of tender episodes in the lives of rustic Scots, to Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, an episodic early novel containing affectionate portrayals of English rustics. And given their friendship, was it coincidence that Hardy abandoned novel-writing for poetry about the same time that Barrie abandoned novel-writing for drama? I would have liked to know what Chaney thought.

By the time of his last novel, The Little White Bird, Barrie had achieved a degree of control over language and tone that, in my view, would be surpassed only by E. M. Forster and P. G. Wodehouse in the twentieth century. He had an ear for dialect to rival Hardy’s. The half-dozen best of his ingenious and felicitous plays, gems like The Admirable Crichton, Mary Rose, and What Every Woman Knows, not to mention Peter Pan, ought to last as long as Shaw’s.

And how do the facts of Barrie’s life relate to his writings? Pretty well, I think. I had gathered from his novels and plays that Barrie had an emotional connection to pre-industrial Scotland and England and its language and traditions; that he half-believed that the British Isles were still subject to pagan forces and beings; that he was essentially asexual and perhaps stunted in his emotional and social development; and that he had a highly romantic view of childhood and children. All this is confirmed, more or less, in Chaney’s book. I never believed, as suggested by the recent Neverland movie, that Barrie tended toward pedophilia, and neither does Chaney. Barrie’s novels, some of which have writers as main characters, suggest that he honored the writer’s craft, and his biography bears that out.

We were very glad to see that the Stratford Festival (Stratford, Ontario) will be mounting J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan as part of its 2010 season).