Bernard Shaw’s Candida at the Shaw Festival

(May 14, 2011) We think we’ve seen a different, more robust approach to the Shaw plays offered at the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario) over the last decade. It’s not that we didn’t enjoy the Shaw plays we saw there during the 1990s – but they seemed to draw a little too deeply from a performing tradition of British constraint, formality, and artifice that kept Shaw’s natural vigor from coming through. We’ve had the same sense watching videos of buttoned-down BBC productions of Shaw plays filmed in the early 1970s.

Candida's father Burgess (Norman Browning) bullies Marchbanks (Wade Bogert-O’Brien). Doesn't this photo (courtesy of the Shaw Festival) remind you of an illustration out of a novel by Dickens or Thackeray?

In recent seasons the Shaw plays have seemed livelier, fresher, and more spontaneous, and the characters have seemed decidedly more human. The result has been that in many seasons the must-see show at the Shaw Festival has, in fact, been a Shaw play (like last year’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, 2008’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 2006’s Arms and the Man, and 2004’s Man and Superman), as is befitting. We can only speculate that a new generation of directors at the Shaw Festival gets the point that Shaw intended his characters to portray real flesh-and-blood men and women, not drawing-room caricatures.

Despite this salutary trend, this year’s Candida, which we saw last weekend, seemed to us a bit of a throwback to the older approach. We can’t help thinking that the production missed director Gina Wilkinson, who was originally announced as director of Candida but who sadly passed away in December 2010.

But Candida is still one of Shaw’s most entertaining comedies, and this show has some delightful comic acting, including a warm, nuanced performance from Claire Jullien as Candida. We especially enjoyed Krista Colosimo as Miss Proserpine, the old-maid secretary with a crush on her boss, a character that Ms. Colosimo artfully portrays as neither ridiculous or pitiable. And we were impressed with Wade Bogert-O’Brien (a lively and appealing Eugene Marchbanks), a young actor who seems to take to Shaw like a duck to water. The scenes move briskly along; for a Shaw play, this one’s relatively short.

Marchbanks (Wade Bogert-O’Brien) hectors Candida's husband Morrell (Nigel Shawn Williams)

The Shaw Festival’s advertising of Candida has, we think, been a little misleading.  There’s no bona fide love triangle at all. Candida is not truly torn between her busy-as-a-bee do-gooder parson husband and the adoring young romantic who appreciates her true worth – and we were relieved to see that Ms. Jullien, as Candida, didn’t try to play it that way. Marchbanks, young and naïve, may have thought he was making a serious run for Candida’s affections; no doubt Morrell himself had a crisis of marital insecurity. But Candida herself never wavered from our commitment to her husband, despite his flaws; this is a love story.

Candida (Clair Juillien) was never really tempted to leave her husband (Nigel Shawn Williams)

The most notable thing about this year’s Candida is that a black actor, Nigel Shawn Williams, has been cast as Morrell.  Wholly apart from Mr. Williams’s performance, which seemed to us respectable though not notable, we are not enthusiastic about this gesture in color-blind casting.

In this post a couple of years ago, we took exception to a public campaign to pressure the Shaw Festival to become more “diverse.”  (Of course, diversity flacks never mean real diversity at all, but only diversity in skin color, which is the least interesting and most meaningless of human differences.) We kept hearing the mantra that Ontario’s theaters should be “as diverse as Canada itself.”

But so what if southern Ontario (and western New York) are racially and ethnically diverse? The world of Bernard Shaw wasn’t!  And in his plays Shaw showed little or no interest in racial differences.  (Are there any characters of color in Shaw besides the Egyptian doctor in The Millionairess?) Shaw’s genius lay instead in sketching the genteel classes, the upstart capitalist classes, the varieties of socialists (Morrell’s Christian socialism, for example, as contrasted with Shaw’s secular socialism), the working classes, and the idle educated classes.

We might well be asked whether theatergoers shouldn’t simply teach themselves to ignore skin color, even in Shaw plays.  It’s a fair question, because going to the theater requires one to suppose a lot of things that aren’t so.  We’re able to suspend disbelief long enough to accept that a wooden stage is really the parlor of a radical London clergyman, or that people we’re seen walking the streets of Niagara-on-the-Lake are really Londoners named Candida, Lexy, and Miss Proserpine. It’s all part of watching a play.

But the stage is one of the few arenas of life where appearance does matter.  We rightly expect, for instance, that stage actors will be age-appropriate and gender-appropriate for their parts.  Candida, however, is set in London at the end of the 19th century, a time and place when a marriage between a white woman and a black vicar would have been unthinkable.

Thus, when a black man is cast as Morrell and a white woman is cast as Morrell’s wife, we must not only imagine that the actor is a socialist vicar in a lower-class London parish, but must imagine as well that the black actor is actually white.  Casting a black man as Morrell (or casting a black woman as Candida), with an otherwise white cast, lays an additional, unnecessary demand on an audience.

We pride ourselves on our imaginative powers and our mental flexibility, and we don’t want to suggest that this experiment in color-blind casting at the Shaw Festival kept us from enjoying the play or from appreciating Mr. Williams’s performance. But we are unconvinced that the experiment was a good idea. We would have rather seen an all-black cast, which would have avoided the issue altogether. The Shaw Festival’s ensemble doesn’t have many black actors, but Candida has only six characters.  It could have been done.

J.M. Barrie’s Half an Hour at the Shaw Festival

This one-act play really does take just half an hour to perform, and we’re still puzzled as to why the Shaw Festival didn’t put another short one-act play into its mid-day show, which is generally close to an hour long. But James M. Barrie’s Half an Hour still packs a lot into one show. 

In some marriages not every touch is welcome, or kindly intended.

Into some people’s lives there comes a moment that decides everything — sometimes, as in this play, a moment of high drama and irony. We meet the high-toned Lady Lillian (Diana Donnelly) in the middle of an intense, bitter, late-afternoon marital quarrel that crushes the last hope she may have had of living amicably under the same roof as her brute of a husband, Richard Garson (Peter Krantz). She keeps our sympathy even when we learn that for months she has had a lover, the adventurous and dashing Hugh Paton (Gord Rand); she flees to his arms instead of dressing to receive the dinner guests her husband has invited. 

Norman Browning and Laurie Paton as Mr. and Mrs. Redding; Peter Krantz as Richard Garson

Until now Lady Lillian has resisted Hugh’s urgings that she leave England with him — he is returning to his work as an engineer in Egypt — but in the wake of this last quarrel with her husband she decides impulsively and desperately to abandon her miserable marriage, leave everything behind, and join her lover. What follows is an emotion-drenched and entirely unpredictable series of events. 

The scenes of this short play linger in the mind, and the final suspenseful scene, with Peter Millard, Laurie Paton, and Norman Browning, is unforgettable. Diana Donnelly, one of our favorite Shaw Festival actors, is superb as the desperate, trapped Lady Lillian. 

The lovers are torn between their carnal passions and their need to pack.

Since James M. Barrie himself was apparently immune to carnal passion of any kind, we were a little surprised at the director’s decision to add touches of eroticism to the first two scenes. In the opening quarrel, Richard Garson strokes his wife suggestively even as his words make clear that he despises her; the implication is that their relationship included not only cruel words, but also sexual brutality. Minutes later, when Lady Lillian jumps into the arms of her lover, patrons are likely to wonder whether the Shaw Festival is about to cross new boundaries of explicitness in portraying physical passion.  But it all worked only to heighten the dramatic tension inherent in the story.

Eating our picnic lunch in the park after the play, we got to thinking about other short pieces of dramatic fiction from the same era (Half an Hour premiered in 1913). We were reminded not only of the characteristic “twists” in O. Henry stories like “The Reformation of Calliope,” but also of the wonderfully clever and sometimes cruel stories of Saki.  And we thought in particular of the final line in Saki’s short masterpiece “The Open Window”: “Romance at short notice was her specialty.” 

Harvey the pooka at the Shaw Festival

(May 3, 2010) We’re so familiar with the classic film version of Harvey — we’ve owned copies in at least three different video formats — that it wasn’t easy at first to hear the familiar lines spoken last week in different ways by different actors on the Shaw Festival stage. But we got over it in short order. This one flies on its own merits.

Elwood P. Dowd (Peter Krantz) makes friends with Nurse Kelly (Diana Donnelly)

Mary Chase’s Harvey is one of the great American plays. It won the Pulitzer and ran on Broadway for four years back in the 1940s, but we’d never before seen it on stage. This domestic comedy (with strong elements of fantasy and whimsy) is the story of Elwood P. Dowd (Peter Krantz), an amiable middle-aged man of no occupation who has failed to live up to his youthful promise after inheriting family money.  Elwood spends most of his days drinking in bars with his “friend” Harvey.

Unfortunately for Elwood’s long-suffering sister Veta (Mary Haney) and niece Myrtle Mae (Zarrin Darnell-Martin), Harvey is a pooka, a six-and-a-half-foot invisible rabbit. Veta cannot introduce Myrtle Mae into society, where she might meet eligible young men, because Elwood has an unsettling habit of introducing his invisible friend to people he meets.

Norman Browning

When Elwood appears unexpectedly at a ladies’ club concert in their home, guests scatter in alarm as Elwood introduces them to his invisible companion. That’s the last straw for Veta, who decides to have Elwood committed to Chumley’s Rest (Dr. Chumley is played by the hilarious and inimitable Norman Browning), a sanitarium run mainly by his uptight assistant and fellow psychiatrist Lyman Sanderson (Gray Powell).

Elwood's sister Veta (Mary Haney), visited by Dr. Chumley (Norman Browning), is unpleasantly surprised to find that Elwood's portrait of Harvey is up in place of the portrait of her mother.

Can magical creatures like pookas be real?  Can one man’s reality be different from another’s?  Is escapism underrated?  Harvey raises and answers metaphysical questions — but this production, directed by Joe Ziegler, downplays the thought-provoking elements of Harvey and goes for comedy. And although there’s a good deal of the supernatural in the play, Ziegler plays it for laughs as well.  The scene where Dr. Chumley’s orderly, Mr. Wilson (Tim Ziegler) looks up the word “pooka” and finds the dictionary talking back to him, for example, might well be a “thrill-and-chill” moment, but the Zieglers (both director and actor) make it a light moment.

Nurse Kelly and Dr. Lyman Sanderson talk to Elwood P. Dowd (James Stewart) in the 1950 movie version of Harvey

So how is this play different from the movie? For one thing, it’s more risque (although by contemporary standards that’s not saying much). In one scene, the tightly wound Dr. Sanderson tells Elwood that he and Nurse Kelly (Diana Donnelly) had made a “mistake” together earlier in the day; Elwood interprets this, in his diplomatic way, as a confession that the doctor and nurse had succumbed to sexual passion for one another. The movie version of Harvey contained no such suggestion — indeed, no suggestion that Elwood knew anything about carnality at all.

We heard some lines, especially early in the play, that we don’t remember hearing in the movie, and we missed some fine scenes that were evidently written just for the movie, especially a bar scene in which Elwood and Harvey order drinks from a bartender and talk to a down-and-out alcoholic friend who’s just gotten out of prison. The most striking difference between play and movie, however, is that the last scenes in the movie raise the possibility that the pooka might transfer his patronage from Elwood (who enjoys Harvey’s company for its own sake) to Dr. Chumley (who simply wants to take advantage of the pooka’s magical powers).  And unlike the play, the movie ends with a bit of match-making. The movie director evidently thought that more “resolution” and less ambiguity was needed in a feature film.

Mary Haney

This show won’t make us forget James Stewart and Josephine Hull (Elwood’s sister Veta in the movie), but it’s full of wonderful moments and has some marvelous acting, especially from Mary Haney, who is a much more clear-eyed and self-controlled Veta (and thus arguably a more effective foil to her brother Elwood) than Josephine Hull’s flustered character. We enjoyed Diana Donnelly as the sexually frustrated Nurse Kelly; Ms. Donnelly is well matched with Gray Powell as Dr. Lyman Sanderson, the oblivious, professionally-absorbed object of her infatuation.

And speaking of sex, Mary Chase uses the sexually repressed Dr. Sanderson to make fun of Freudian psychiatry, which was very much in vogue back in the 1940s.  The ease with which Dr. Sanderson diagnosed the perfectly sane Veta as a mental case reminded us of one of P. G. Wodehouse’s great minor characters, Sir Roderick Glossop, also a psychiatrist, who found everyone he met a candidate for the looney bin.

Less satisfying were the less experienced actors in the cast. Elwood’s niece Myrtle Mae Simmons was played by Zarrin Darnell-Martin, whose acting seemed to us markedly short of professional standards. Jim Ziegler, as Dr. Chumley’s muscle-man Duane Wilson, seemed merely to have copied the mannerisms of the actor who played the part in the 1950 movie.

Elwood P. Down (Peter Krantz) enchants Dr. Chumley's wife Betty (Donna Belleville)

That brings us to Shaw Festival veteran Peter Krantz, who plays Elwood P. Dowd. It must not be easy to play a character who never becomes angry or excited and who, no matter how others treat him, remains smiling, courteous, pleasant, and oblivious — in other words, a character whose manner hardly changes throughout the play. (The only thing close to an emotion that Elwood is permitted is a hint of eagerness whenever he thinks someone is offering him a drink.) About Mr. Krantz’s generally capable performance we have mixed feelings.

Mr. Krantz is not our favorite Shaw Festival actor to begin with, a prejudice that dates from his role as a sexual deviant in a 2003 Shaw Festival show we did not enjoy, The Coronation Voyage, and as the lead actor in what was unquestionably the worst Shaw Festival show we’ve ever seen, 2005′s The Invisible Man.  To us Mr. Krantz never seems quite wholly at ease; he has a certain watchful wariness about him that keeps us from being entirely comfortable when he’s on stage.  To our minds, therefore, his is not a stage presence well-suited to play a character whose principal characteristics are utter affability and freedom from guile.

But if not Mr. Krantz, then who? The program includes a list of the 2010 Shaw Festival ensemble, and we went through it to look for other candidates for the role of Elwood P. Dowd. Michael Ball or David Schurrman? Too long in the tooth. Patrick Galligan? Too urbane. Ben Carlson? Too edgy. Benedict Campbell could have pulled it off. Our pick would have been the versatile, age-appropriate Blair Williams, who unfortunately is not appearing at Niagara-on-the-Lake this summer.

We saw last year that Stephen Spielberg planned to start shooting a remake of Harvey in early 2010, with Robert Downey, Jr. or Brad Pitts rumored as candidates for the role of of Elwood Dowd. We were glad to see in the Shaw Festival’s program that this thoroughly unnecessary project has died a natural death.

Emsworth’s take on the Shaw Festival’s production of the Kurt Weill musical One Touch of Venus is at this post. And his thoughts on the Chekhov masterpiece The Cherry Orchard are at this post.

Emsworth’s pre-season thoughts on all the shows in the Shaw Festival’s 2010 season are at this post.