Star Chamber at the Shaw Festival (a review)

We wouldn’t for the world have missed Star Chamber, the one-act Noël Coward play that the Shaw Festival is putting on as its mid-day show this summer. It’s an absolutely hilarious send-up of self-absorbed actors at a committee meeting. This show starts at 11:30 a.m. and runs for about an hour at the Royal George Theater.

Here’s the storyline, such as it is: One by one, nine people arrive for a committee meeting that is to be held on the stage of a theater where one of them is performing. The nine are a board that is responsible for a old folks’ home for actresses. The serious-minded secretary of the board, Mr. Farmer (Guy Bannerman), who is the only non-actor on the board, is also the only the only one with any real interest in the business of the meeting, which is to consider some badly needed renovations to the home.

Neil Barclay

In fact, Mr. Farmer never can get the undisciplined actors to stop gossiping and pay attention to business. Johnny Bolton (Neil Barclay) constantly interrupts with old show business stories; no one listens to him. Dame Rose Maitland (Gabrielle Jones) cares mainly about taking the chair and bossing people around in the absence of the group’s president, Xenia (Fiona Byrne), who is late.

Evan Buliung and Fiona Byrne at the board meeting in Star Chamber

When the ditsy Xenia does arrive (looking and behaving very much like Barbra Streisand), she brings her Great Dane and gives it most of her attention. Eventually the actors give up any pretense of getting anything done and gather around the piano for a few songs.

The comic moments — sight gags, tart asides, self-important speeches, and actors playing to stereotype — start slowly, then come faster and faster. Our audience was reduced to continuous, helpless giggling about halfway through the show; we didn’t get control of ourselves till the curtain calls.

We marveled at their split-second timing of the ensemble. We certainly didn’t know any of Noël Coward’s show-business friends, on whom the play was presumably based, but how these characters reminded us of people we’ve met in community theater!

Sharry Flett with Stephen Sutcliffe in Sunday in the Park with George

We were glad to see Sharry Flett, who is still stunning, as a strong character again, rather than as a foggy old lady (her role this year in Sunday in the Park with George). Neil Barclay, born to play a ham, is precious as a rotund, veteran song-and-dance man.

The highlight of the songfest at the end was Evan Buliung’s “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” one of Coward’s best-known songs. (Buliung plays a dashing young actor, Julian Breed.) We were delighted to find, just before the show started, that Mr. Buliung’s parents were sitting next to us in the audience. They were very pleasant people who did not seem at all like stage parents and who were clearly very proud of their son (who is also starring in Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple at the Shaw Festival this summer). We are glad that Evan Buliung is back at the Shaw Festival this year after several years in Stratford (though what a fine Mark Antony he might have made in this year’s Julius Caesar).

Emsworth reviews of other 2009 shows at the Shaw Festival :

John Osborne’s The Entertainer (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Ways of the Heart (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Play, Orchestra, Play (see this post)
Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Brief Encounters (see this post)
Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten (see this post)

The Importance of Being Earnest at the Stratford Festival (a review)

The evening we were in Stratford, Ontario to see The Importance of Being Earnest, the audience laughed so much that the actors must have wondered, on the few times when a line did not get audible chuckles, if perhaps they’d blown their lines. This is a fine production of what we think is the funniest play ever written.

No such thing as excess: Brian Bedford in Lady Bracknell's third-act costume

Brian Bedford directs this show and also plays Gwendolen’s mother, Lady Bracknell. This is not the leading role, but you wouldn’t know it from the round of applause Bedford got for his first-act entrance, when he flounced into the London flat of Algernon Moncrieff (Mike Shara). Bedford got another round when he returned in the third act in another over-the-top costume.  In drag or out, Bedford still has the most enthusiastic following of any actor at either Stratford or Niagara-on-the-Lake. And of course no one can deliver Oscar Wilde’s immortal lines better than he.

Yet it must be said that Bedford’s voice in this show was not nearly as strong as that of the other actors. That wasn’t apparent when we last saw him as King Lear a couple of years ago. He’s not a young man. Perhaps his physical infirmities — one hears of back problems — are finally affecting his performances.

Shara and Carlson

Bedford was given an especially strong cast, beginning with Mike Shara as Algernon and Ben Carlson as Jack Worthing. (We can’t help noting with some alarm the regularity with which the Shaw Festival’s best actors desert to Stratford; we last saw Mike Shara hamming it up in Shaw’s Arms and the Man a couple of years ago.) We especially enjoyed Robert Persichini in his brief appearance as Algernon’s manservant Lane and Stephen Ouimette as Rev. Canon Chasuble.

Ben Carlson remedies his failure to propose to Sara Topham

The only problematical performance, as we saw it, was by Sara Topham as Gwendolen Fairfax. We remember with appreciation Ms. Topham’s Laura several years ago in The Glass Menagerie. As Gwendolen, however, she affected a high-pitched, sing-song voice that eventually grated rather than entertained. Properly understood, Gwendolen is a strong character (she is, after all, Lady Bracknell’s daughter), not an airhead.

The candy-house sets — three elaborate, completely different sets for each of the three acts — certainly caught our eye. The second act’s country house scene reminded us of an impressionist painting by Childe Hassam that we saw earlier this spring. The wife of our bosom didn’t like the sets, but we did.

According to the Stratford Festival’s website, The Importance of Being Earnest is a “critique of love, sex and social hypocrisy that remains stingingly pertinent even today.” This is rank nonsense; why do they say such things? This play isn’t relevant; it’s frivolous; that’s its appeal, and that’s why we wanted to see it again.

Naturally, we hoped to find things in the play we’d never noticed before, and we did.  Like Gwendolen’s line: “Once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not?  And I don’t like that.  It makes men so very attractive.”  How, in 1895, did Oscar Wilde get away with a line like that?  By putting it in the mouth of a female character, we suppose.

Nothing about this production changed our view that Oscar Wilde, and The Importance of Being Earnest in particular, must have made an early and lasting impression on P. G. Wodehouse, as discussed in this Emsworth post.   The plots of Wodehouse’s stories and his stock characters clearly owe a lot to this Wilde play.  Wodehouse even used the name “Bunbury” in one of his novels.  See the post!

However, we have an objection to register. No doubt to save money, this year the Stratford Festival is printing its programs on cheap paper stock, and the new programs are nearly twice as large as they used to be.

Doesn’t the management know that Stratford patrons save their programs from year to year? Our collection of Stratford and Shaw programs goes back years. These larger, mismatched programs don’t fit in the pile. Not only that, the programs were apparently prepared before any of the play’s costumes were ready, so the programs have no pictures of the cast in character. As visual records of the play for patrons, what good are they?

Other posts from Emsworth about shows in the Stratford Festival’s 2009 season:

Anton Chekhov’s wonderful The Three Sisters (see this post)

The musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (see this post)

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (see this post)

Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (see this post)

The folly of suggesting that Shakespeare should be “translated” for modern audiences (see this post)

The marvelous quarrels in Julius Caesar and The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

What P. G. Wodehouse owes to Oscar Wilde (see this post)

The musical West Side Story (see this post)

August: Osage County at the Music Box Theater in NYC (a review)

(January 30, 2009)  In New York City last weekend, Emsworth yielded to curiosity and went to see the heavily hyped August: Osage County, which has been on Broadway for over a year and which won the 2008 Tony. 

The Music Box Theater was packed, and, frankly, it’s been a while since we’ve been part of an audience that was so into a play.  But we left with just one thought on our minds: 

This was really the best play on Broadway in 2008?  The Tony?  The Pulitzer too?  Oh, my!

Don’t believe the critics. August: Osage County is what you’d get if you took six months of a daytime soap, boiled it down to three hours, and added laugh lines.

Tracy Letts

The soap formula calls for new dramatic revelations — infidelities, betrayals, crimes of passion – every two or three weeks.  That’s August: Osage County: fresh dark secrets about the Weston family, only they bubble up about every fifteen or twenty minutes. Playwright Tracy Letts exhausted his quota of coincidences and unlikely plot turns by the first intermission.

We learn in the first ten minutes of the play that the folksy Bev Weston is an alcoholic and that his bitchy wife Violet pops pills. But that’s just the beginning.

In short order we learn that their eldest daughter Barbara is separated from her husband, who’s shacking up with one of his students at a university (and that the separation is a secret from her family); that their middle daughter Ivy is secretly sleeping with her first cousin; and that their youngest daughter Karen has just gotten engaged to a shady businessman (narcotics?), who’s trying to get into the pants of Barbara’s 14-year-old daughter Jean.

Sound like six months’ worth of All My Children? That’s what I thought, too.

Estelle Parsons

This play panders shamelessly to trends in pop psychology, the stuff you’d see on Oprah and read about in Cosmopolitan. America loves “truth-telling” — so Letts writes a family-dinner-from-hell scene in which a hopped-up Violet (Estelle Parsons) tells her daughters and their husbands just what she thinks of them! America can’t get enough of The Vagina Monologues — so we get pajama-clad sisters joking about their mother’s privates.  American mothers live in fear that dirty old men will ply their young daughters with pot and try to seduce them — so Letts puts that in the play too!  His audience, viscerally involved, hisses right on cue.

Shock overload? No such thing! Tracy Letts also throws in subplots about suicide and accidental incest. He tries to hit as many of the primal fears of American women that he can. Make no mistake: this is a chick play.

Then he adds a crowning touch: a pure-heared young Cheyenne woman with perfect posture and absolute composure (Samantha Ross). She presides over the play as a sort of spirit presence (and as a conscience for the Westons), reminding us of the moral superiority of America’s indigenous peoples. Letts’s random use of hot-button items from contemporary pop culture make August: Osage County a hopeless mish-mash of a play.

Back in the day: Estelle Parsons with Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde

This may be the same production that won the Tony, but it’s not the same cast. All the actors from the original Steppenwolf production that came to Broadway from Chicago have long since moved on.

Still, there are some very good performances, especially from Estelle Parsons, who plays her “stoned” scenes to perfection.  She also gets to shriek and carry on much as she did when she won a supporting actress Oscar forty years ago in Bonnie and Clyde. We especially liked Molly Regan as Violet’s sister Mattie Fae; this actress is a veteran of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company and has serious acting chops. So does Amy Warren as Violet’s neurotic youngest daughter Karen; Ms. Warren has some marvelous moments with body language, using her arms and legs.

On the other hand, Madeleine Martin seems to feel that the best way to put across a surly 14-year-old girl (Violet’s granddaughter Jean) is to distort her voice and swallow her words.  She was painful to listen to. And the way Bill Fordham delivered his lines (he plays Barbara’s philandering husband Frank) was little better than amateurish.

This is theater for people who like TV. We were entertained — we admit it.  But we were not impressed.

Hamlet at the Stratford Festival (a review)

This year’s Hamlet at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Stratford, Ontario) really surprised us, from the casting to the pacing to unexpected moments of humor.  But this show really works.

The ghost of King Hamlet (James Blendick) and Prince Hamlet (Ben Carlson)

We knew we were in for something different from the opening scene.  Everyone knows, of course, how Hamlet begins, with jittery guards pacing over the foggy, ghost-infested ramparts of Elsinore Castle, exchanging folklore about supernatural visitations, and wondering how to let Prince Hamlet know that they have seen the shade of his late father. Like the ominous themes that mark the beginning of a Tchaikovsky symphony, the opening scene of Hamlet sets the mood for an evening of gloom. There’s only one way to play it.

Or so we thought. In this production, this opening scene went by in a flash. The ghost of the late King Hamlet (James Blendick) had given Prince Hamlet (Ben Carlson) his marching orders (“Revenge my foul and most unnatural murder!”) and retreated to purgatory almost before we had settled into our seats and staked our claim to the armrest.  Barnardo, Marcellus, and Horatio popped up through the trapdoor, whipped through their lines, and made their exits.  The scene changed, and Claudius and Gertrude, the happy newlyweds, were leading a promenade at a castle ball.

This Hamlet reminded me of nothing more than fast-paced thriller motion pictures from the 1930s and 1940s like The Big Sleep and Foreign Correspondent, filled with snappy repartee and action sequences. The movie connection was reinforced by the military-looking costumes worn and the rifles carried by many of the male characters (props not mentioned in my edition of Hamlet), and also by the use of blinding spotlights at different points in the play, meant, no doubt, to suggest the play’s probing into the dark recesses of the souls of Claudius, Gertrude, and Prince Hamlet.

Ben Carlson

We know Ben Carlson well from his work at the Shaw Festival. Several years ago, we saw him as Jack Tanner in a full-length version of Man and Superman, in which he had an almost impossibly long part to learn, compared to which memorizing his lines for Hamlet must have seemed like child’s play.

It is now clear that his talents are as well fitted for Shakespeare as for Shaw. Like the very best actors we have seen at Stratford, Carlson manages to make Elizabethan English intelligible to twenty-first century audiences, even when delivered, as here, at hyperspeed. (Instead of a melancholy Dane, this production of Hamlet features a manic Dane; the manic effect is exaggerated by stage lighting that leaves Carlson’s eyes mostly in shadow, not unlike a raccoon.) Best of all, Carlson showed us that Hamlet includes a healthy share of witty lines. I doubt that audiences at Stratford have ever laughed so much during performances of Hamlet.

The casting of this production defied all my preconceptions. In my mind’s eye, I see the Danish prince as a tall, slim, brooding teenager with an introspective, romantic bent. But Ben Carlson is a stocky man of medium height at best, decidedly older than what one might expect from a student at the University of Wittenberg (granted, the character is actually thirty, according to the gravedigger), thoroughly extroverted, with just a hint of incipient middle-age paunch. He’s no heartthrob.

Maria Ricossa as Gertrude

The same went for other characters.  I imagine Gertrude as a full-figured, vaguely sensuous woman approaching middle age, but Maria Ricossa, a trim, brisk Gertrude, is fully satisfactory.  I think of Ophelia as a barely adolescent flower girl who mopes around Elsinore; Adrienne Gould gives us a spunky Ophelia who knows her mind.  We liked her a lot, all the more because our expectations for Ophelias are so low.

Mercifully, this Hamlet spares us overlays of Freudian psychology.  Gertrude has no incestuous designs on Hamlet, and Oedipus does not rear his head. However, this Hamlet was systematically stripped of melodrama, which many theater lovers will miss. The show never slows down, even for dramatic effect, not in the scene in which Hamlet flinches from dispatching the conscience-ridden Claudius as he prays, not even when it is finally time for Horatio to say, over Hamlet’s corpse,

Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Laertes and Claudius

(Act V, Scene 2.) Claudius (Scott Wentworth) and Laertes (Bruce Godfree) keep up a brisk dialogue even as they play billiards (badly) and plot the murder of Prince Hamlet during Act IV, Scene 7. (The large billiard table on which they played was another distracting prop not indicated in my edition of the play.) To my surprise, by the end of the play the rapid dialogue seemed natural; we’d gotten used to it.

The Players

This was still a long play, a little over three hours; not much seemed to be cut. Fortinbras and his army, left out in some modern productions, duly appeared, and the play was better for their presence. The same for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Best of all, we saw and heard much from a marvelous troup of traveling players, who endured Hamlet’s gratuitous advice about how to act their parts with as good a humor as Laertes tolerated Polonius’s advice to be true to his own self.

Hamlet and Ophelia as conceived by Eugene Delacroix and Dante Gabriel Rossetti? See this Emsworth post on painters who’ve done scenes from Hamlet.

Seeing Hamlet reminded Emsworth of how J. K. Rowling lost her nerve in the final volume of the Harry Potter saga. See this post on what Harry Potter could have learned from Hamlet and other Shakespearean tragedies.

For Emsworth’s review of the Stratford’s Festival All’s Well That Ends Well, see this post.  For Emsworth’s review of Romeo and Juliet at the Stratford Festival, see this post.

Other Emsworth posts include reviews of shows in the Shaw Festival’s 2008 season, including Terence Rattigan’s After the Dance (see this post); Bernard Shaw’s Getting Married (see this post), Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (see this post), Leonard Bernstein’s musical Wonderful Town (see this post), and J. B. Priestley’s The Inspector Calls (see this post).

Emsworth gripes about the recent leadership debacle at the Stratford Festival, which resulted last winter in Des McAnuff’s becoming the sole artistic director of the Festival, in this post.

An Inspector Calls at the Shaw Festival (a review)

The Inspector Calls, playing through October at the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), is an ingeniously plotted classic mystery play, full of well-timed twists and turns, a sure bet for an evening’s entertainment. (I rant about this play’s strong ideological content in a separate post.) The Shaw Festival’s presentation is done well, but is not, to our mind, fully satisfying.

Emsworth previews the shows on the 2009 Shaw Festival playbill at this post.

In The Inspector Calls, the well-to-do Birling family has gathered for a dinner party to celebrate the engagement of Arthur Birling’s daughter, Sheila, to Gerald Croft. But the party is interrupted by the arrival of a man who identifies himself as Inspector Goole, and who tells the family he has just come from the morgue to ask them questions about a poor young woman who had just taken her own life.

The Birlings (Peter Hutt and Mary Haney) and Croft (Graeme Somerville) indignantly disclaim any knowledge of the girl. But as the Inspector questions them (moralizing as he goes), it becames apparent to the smug, well-to-do Birlings that they have more to do with the fate of the late Eva Smith than they thought.

Revelations follow upon revelations, and playwright J. B. Priestley feeds us just enough clues to let us guess what will unfold next. In fact, at the performance we attended, we could hear elderly, hard-of-hearing theater-goers behind us loudly whispering “I’ll bet it was really him that . . .” to their spouses during pregnant pauses in the action. At intermission, the conversation on the sidewalks outside the Festival Theater buzzed with speculation as to how it would all turn out.

It is a pleasure, year after year, to see Benedict Campbell at the Shaw Festival. What an outstanding, versatile actor! Six years ago, he was superb as Lear’s loyal follower, the Earl of Kent, at the Stratford Festival (playing with Christopher Plummer as Lear). Since then, happily, he has been at the Shaw, where, two years ago, we were genuinely moved at his and Kelli Fox’s portrayal of the the complex relationship between John and Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible. Last year, we were astonished to see him singing and dancing up a storm in Mack and Mabel, in which, energetically and single-handedly, he set the tone for a fabulous production. We had no idea!

This year, Campbell is the Inspector in Priestley’s thriller, and he has just the solid heft and authoritative presence that the role requires. He is, in fact, so convincing as an English police detective that many in our audience seemed to have difficulty accepting the possibility that he might be something else altogether. As to that, Priestley gives the audience plenty of clues, beginning with the Inspector’s name, “Goole.” Even so, I think many left the Festival Theater genuinely baffled as to just who had been visiting the Birling family.

The set for An Inspector Calls features a large platform that rotates imperceptibly by 180 degrees during the course of the play, moving the actors and the props with it. We are to understand, I supposed, that just as the self-satisfied Birling family come to see themselves in different ways, so we the audience are also to see them from different perspectives. (As noted in my earlier post, Priestley’s objective in this play is as much to indoctrinate as it is to entertain.)

All said and done, however, the “thrill” was missing from this thriller. The revelatory moment in the last act when chills should have run up and down our spines came and went without chills. We never made any sense of a mysterious light that flitted randomly along the edges of the set. A female figure (who had no lines) appeared hazily on stage between scene changes for no apparent reason. As the Birlings, two of our very favorite actors, Peter Hutt and Mary Haney, were not permitted to demonstrate their dramatic range and left us flat.

The Shaw Festival’s artistic director, Jackie Maxwell, seems to be following the practice of her predecessor, Christopher Newton, in allocating at least one slot in a season’s playbill to something in the nature of a mystery or thriller, plays like Laura, Sorry Wrong Number, and adaptations of Agatha Christie. Here we are reminded that our very worst experience at the Shaw Festival involved a play in this slot, 2006’s disastrous The Invisible Man. The sets and the costumes were gorgeous, the special effects superb, and the acting unobjectionable. But what mediocre material the cast had to work with! This “suspense” play, in which invisible parts of Griffin’s body were revealed during the opening scene, was about as suspenseful as the slasher movies in which teenagers start getting axed in the first five minutes. Nothing built up to anything, and the Invisible Man himself was a whining johnny-one-note. We never got to know any characters well enough to care about them, and the playwright failed to introduce two important characters, Dr. Kemp and his wife, until the play was mostly over. This year’s An Inspector Calls is more like it.

Interested in reading more about J. B. Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls? See my post An Inspector Calls and old-fashioned propaganda at the Shaw Festival.

The Shaw Festival’s 2008 production of Terence Rattigan’s outstanding 1939 play After the Dance is reviewed in this post.

An Inspector Calls and old-fashioned propaganda at the Shaw Festival

On their face, how could two plays be more different than An Inspector Calls and The Little Foxes?  (Both are in repertory at the Shaw Festival throughout its 2008 season; I review An Inspector Calls in this post and The Little Foxes in this post)  In one play, a police detective explores the life and untimely death of a young woman in an English industrial town; the other deals with greed and infighting in an Alabama family.

Yet these plays — a British mystery classic and a classic American drama — were cut from the same cloth. They have parallel plots, parallel themes, even parallel characters.

Two capitalist families

In The Little Foxes, Lillian Hellman gives us the Hubbards, a family of Alabama cotton merchants whose money has still not given them a unsatisfactory social position.

In An Inspector Calls, written only six years later, J. B. Priestley gives us the Hubbards’ English counterparts, the Birlings, a family of manufacturers in an English industrial town. The Birlings’ money has still not given them a unsatisfactory social position.

Two unholy business alliances

Each play begins with a dinner party. In The Little Foxes, the Hubbards are toasting a proposed business alliance with an industrialist from Chicago. The new partners count on avoiding the labor agitation that plagues industry in the north by building a cotton mill in the Hubbards’ southern town.

At the dinner party in An Inspector Calls, the Birlings are also celebrating a business alliance, the engagement of their daughter Sheila to Gerald Croft, the son of their principal business competitor. Arthur Birling and Croft expect the marriage alliance to lead to business understandings that will yield higher prices and suppression of labor agitation.

Two lead characters motivated by social ambition

In The Little Foxes, Regina Hubbard intends to leverage her new business relationship into a prominent social position in Chicago society.

Similarly, An Inspector Calls finds Arthur Birling angling for a knighthood.  With a title and a connection with the socially superior Crofts, he hopes to vault into the upper echelons of English society.

Two sons

Each family has a dissolute son in his early twenties. Leo Hubbard works in his uncle Horace’s bank and embezzles. Eric Birling works in his father’s office, drinks, and embezzles. Both young men patronize brothels.

Two daughters

Each family has a daughter in her late teens. The Hubbards plan to marry Alexandra off to her wastrel cousin Leo to keep all the money in the family.  Alexandra is the only member of the family with a moral or social conscience (her aunt Birdie has strong humane instincts, but she is one of the Hubbards’ victims, not properly a family member).

The Birlings plan to marry Sheila Birling off to the son of a competitor to consolidate their financial and social standing. Sheila is the only one of the Birlings with much of a conscience; she sees that her father’s factory workers “aren’t cheap labour — they’re people.”

Two indictments

Each of these two plays indicts a capitalist family on multiple counts of crimes both personal and social.

By the end of The Little Foxes, we know that the Hubbards strike their women, teach their sons to steal, hunt for sport while the poor go hungry, beat their horses, keep mistresses, blackmail one another, cheat black folk, charge usury, corrupt public officials, and beat down attempts by working people to organize. (I complain about Lillian Hellman’s use of the Hubbards as whipping boys for American capitalism in this post.)

Initially, the Birlings seem far less dreadful. We learn, however (as do the characters themselves), that they are guilty of the same sorts of crimes.  Arthur Birling has discharged and blackballed a factory employee for having the temerity to ask for two shillings more per week (think Oliver Twist) and trying to organize a strike. Sheila Birling gets the same unfortunate girl discharged from a job as a shopgirl for looking at her the wrong way. Crofts, the future son-in-law, finds the girl unemployed and hungry, makes her his mistress, then abandons her.  Then the Birlings’ wastrel son meets her, now a prostitute, uses her, and gets her pregnant.  At the end of her rope, the girl seeks charity from a private aid society controlled by Mrs. Birling, who turns her away.

Two soap boxes

Each playwright divides the world neatly into those who take and those who are taken from.  In The Little Foxes:

Addie: “Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it.

In An Inspector Calls:

Birling: “If you don’t come down sharply on some of these people, they’d soon be asking for the earth.”

The Inspector: “They might. But after all it’s better to ask for the earth than to take it.”

Putting out somebody’s talking points

In an otherwise excellent essay in the program for the Shaw Festival’s production of An Inspector Calls, Professor John Baxendale softpedals the play’s political implications.  Far from implicitly condoning violent Soviet-style revolution, he says, Priestley was not even promoting his political party’s radical legislative agenda.  The essay maintains that Priestley was merely seeking to foster feelings of mutual responsibility among his countrymen.

The play is not about social reform [says Professor Baxendale], better health care or full employment, important though these things are, but about a vision of how life could be different if we acknowledge the truth that we are all members of one another.

Indeed, at first blush that seems to be what the Inspector is saying when he deliveres his grand, melodramatic, climactic speech:

One Eva Smith has gone — but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their hopes and fears, their suffering, and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, with what we think and say and do. We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.

But warm fuzzy communal feelings and private charity were not what either J. B. Priestley or Lillian Hellman were about.  Nor did they have in mind the Biblical admonition to “love thy neighbor”; nothing could have been further from Priestley’s mind than the Christian communalism of the second chapter of Acts.

His message, instead, was that if Britain and America refused to accept socialism, bloody times were ahead, and mercy could not be expected.  And so Priestley ended the Inspector’s grand lecture with exactly such a grim warning:

We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.

Professor Baxendale asserts that the Inspector’s “fire and blood” language refers to the two world wars, rather than to revolutionary violence, but this is not a fair reading.  Priestley made no attempt in this play to disguise his admiration for Soviet socialism.  In explaining the methods of the Inspector to her family, Priestley has Sheila Birling allude explicitly to Lenin’s famous boast about capitalist rope when she says, “No, he’s giving us rope — so that we’ll hang ourselves.”

One can almost believe that these two extraordinarily talented dramatists, Hellman and Priestley, were working from a list of Marxist “talking points” for their plays:

* Portray all capitalists as instinctive monopolists and enemies of organized labor
*Caricature capitalists as holding extreme, selfish, individualist points of view
*Portray them as willing to pimp their own daughters for gain
*Portray their sons as thieves and as sexually ravenous
*Portray private charitable institutions (like Mrs. Birling’s) as corrupt and degrading
*Portray private ownership of land as unjust
*Show the world as divided into “us” (the worker class) versus “them” (the capitalist class)

Little wonder that An Inspector Calls and The Little Foxes turned out to be practically the same play!

Priestley preached the party line that capitalists were on the wrong side of history and that Soviet-style socialism represented the best hope for mankind.  Early in An Inspector Calls, set in 1912, he has Arthur Birling complacently telling his family how nicely the world is shaping up.  There’s no war coming, he says, just “a few scaremongers here making a fuss about nothing.” Look at the new aeroplanes, look at the automobiles, “bigger and faster all the time,” look at the huge new ocean liner set to sail the next week, the Titanic. In thirty years, Birling assures his family, labor troubles will be a thing of the past, and the world will have forgotten “all these silly little war scares.”

Writing in 1945, Priestley expected his audience to smile sadly at Birling’s unfilled prophecies. How short-sighted Birling and the capitalists were, we are to think!  And not only that: Birling was predicting “peace and prosperity and rapid progress everywhere — except of course in Russia, which will always be behindhand, naturally.”  Wrong about the Titanic, wrong about Russia!

In fact, Priestley was worse than a poor prophet; he failed to see what was before his own eyes. Like so many other fellow travelers, Priestley believed that the great socialist experiment in the U.S.S.R. had already succeeded; in fact, the blood of millions in eastern Europe had been shed only to sustain a brutal Soviet regime in which the tyrannical old bosses had been replaced by murderous new bosses.

In his preface to Mrs. Warren’s Profession (also part of the Shaw Festival’s 2008 season, but not scheduled to open till early July), Shaw was forthright about what he intended to accomplish in his plays: “I am convinced that fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective means of moral propagandism in the world . . . .”  In An Inspector Calls, J. B. Priestley proved himself Shaw’s staunch disciple.

See my review of the Shaw Festival’s production of An Inspector Calls in this post.

See my review of the Shaw Festival’s production of The Little Foxes in this post.

The Little Foxes at the Shaw Festival (a review)

(June 16, 2008) What a difference a director seems to make! At the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), the cast of The Little Foxes is practically the same as the cast of Getting Married (six actors appear in both plays). (I review Getting Married in another post.) In the Shaw comedy, everything comes off like clockwork, and the fun never stops. But the Lillian Hellman drama leaves you waiting for a climax that never really comes.

Emsworth previews the shows on the 2009 Shaw Festival playbill at this post.

I have already complained at length about the ferocious Stalinist ideology of The Little Foxes in this post; in another I have griped about the holes in Hellman’s plot. Despite these objections, the play is a near-masterpiece. Hellman’s characters are frighteningly real, every word in the script tells, and the story builds to what ought to be a shocking denoument.

But not in this production. For the first half of the play (by far the best half) the great questions are whether Horace Gibbens is really going to come home to the nest of snakes that is the Hubbard family (his wife Regina and her brothers Ben and Oscar), and whether he will go along with the siblings’ scheme that he join them in investing $75,000 into a new cotton mill business. When Horace finally does come home, disabled in body but determined to frustrate the machinations of his wife and her brothers, the lines are drawn, and we all brace for heavy weather.

But just when you expect to be squirming in your seats and wiping your perspiring palms on your pants, this production lets you down. Laurie Paton, who is Regina, is an outstanding actress, but here she neither looks or acts like the Jezebel she is supposed to be playing; she looks too pleasant. Nor does David Jansen, as the likeable and sympathetic Horace, project the steely resolve needed for him to win the war of wills with his wife. Between these two sparks do not fly, and in their scenes together the tension does not build.

And so, at the play’s climax, we are not nearly as afraid for Horace, or for his and Regina’s uncorrupted daughter Alexandra (Krista Colosimo), or for any of the other characters, as the playwright wanted us to be. Nor, for a play with harsh political overtones, are we fearful for America, as Lillian Hellman fervently wanted us to be. As for Alexandra, who represents Hellman’s hope for revolution and a more “just” America, Ms. Colosimo is made to deliver all of Hellman’s shrill, socialist soapbox lines at the end of the play at the same high pitch.

I cannot see Peter Krantz, a Shaw Festival regular who plays Oscar Hubbard in the The Little Foxes, on the stages of the Shaw Festival without a return of the visceral feelings that he aroused in those that saw him as the predatory pervert in the Shaw Festival’s production of The Coronation Voyage several years ago. My reaction is quite unfair to Mr. Krantz, and after seeing him in Getting Married as the sympathetic, comic Boxer, I thought I might have shaken this unfortunate association. But his character in The Little Foxes is every bit as repulsive as his character in The Coronation Voyage, and as Oscar Hubbard he quite undid the salutory effect of his portrayal of Boxer.

The veteran Shaw actress Sharry Flett is simply wonderful in The Little Foxes as the gentle, abused, alcoholic, but still hopeful Birdie Hubbard (Oscar’s wife). She inspires both our pity and our affection, and the scenes in which she is disrespected or worse are exquisitely rendered. The Shaw’s production is worth seeing for her performance alone. Also highly satisfactory is Lisa Codrington in the meaningful and thematically important role of Addie.

For more about the storyline of The Little Foxes, see this post. For comment on the political implications of The Little Foxes, see this post.

The Shaw Festival’s production of Terence Rattigan’s outstanding 1943 play After the Dance is reviewed in this post.

Getting Married at the Shaw Festival (a review)

(June 6, 2008) Performances of George Bernard Shaw don’t get much sharper than the Shaw Festival’s 2008 production of the comedy Getting Married. This show kept an embarrassing grin on my face for more than two solid hours, the first time something like that has happened since last year’s The Philanderer. Only a repertory ensemble whose members have spent as much time with each other and with Shaw as these have, could do a show like this so well.

Emsworth previews the shows on the 2009 Shaw Festival playbill at this post.

These actors understand Shaw’s wit and the rhythm of his cadences, and they deliver his lines so easily and with such timing that we hardly notice that Shaw’s comedy is a vehicle for radical ideas about marriage with which we most certainly do not agree (for instance, the idea that polyandry or marriage for an agreed term of years should be allowed). This production goes down so pleasantly that we hardly notice that, in this hundred-year-old play, Shaw was attacking laws concerning marriage (restrictions on divorce, financial responsibility of husbands for their wives’ torts, and so on) that are now mere historical curiosities. These laws were changed long before most of us were born.

Getting Married is the story of a wedding day that doesn’t come off as planned. Instead of putting on their wedding finery and appearing at the church, the young bride and groom are having second thoughts — not about each other, but about whether marriage carries too many risks, legal and social. Meanwhile, their friends and relatives, some single, some married, some trying to become unmarried, are experiencing their own hilarious crises.

Those who might tend to avoid a Bernard Shaw play because of the long, preachy speeches that slow down many of his plays should know that Getting Married has much less of this than usual. Getting Married was written only a year or two before his best-known play, Pygmalion, and has much the same lively spirit as that comedy.

Getting Married doesn’t really have a lead role. But the Shaw’s cast includes so many practiced scene-stealers that a lead is not missed. Chief among the culprits here are Michael Ball as the philosophical greengrocer Collins, on whom all the characters rely for everything (Alfred Doolittle, in Pygmalion, is undoubtedly a relative of Collins’s), Laurie Paton as the masterful, impossible Mrs. George, and the wonderful Norman Browning, who plays the same harrumphing lovable grouch that he always plays, and to the usual crowd-pleasing effect. Sharry Flett, as the gracious Bishop’s wife, is pitch-perfect. It has seemed to me that there have been fewer meaty roles lately for Michael Ball, my favorite actor at the Shaw, so it was good to see him in top form in Getting Married.

All in all, this show succeeds because of exceptional ensemble work. The real star of Getting Married is the director, Joseph Ziegler, who set the actors on a fine brisk pace.  Seated toward the front of the Royal George Theater, I enjoyed the “stereo” effect Ziegler achieved several times by positioning the actors so that rapid-fire lines from a half-dozen actors flew counter-clockwise around the stage.

I hope the problems that the inimitable David Schurmann was having with his voice the day we saw the show have been resolved. Fortunately, they didn’t detract from his performance.

The only jarring notes came during the bows, when a version of the sixties girl-group hit “Chapel of Love” came blaring out through the p.a. system and knocked the grin off my face.

The first time I experienced this sort of outrage was at the end of the Stratford Festival’s Troilus and Cressida about five years ago. As darkness fell at the end of that earthy and revelatory production, we were assaulted with the Nine Inch Nails tune “Closer,” with its immortal lyric, “I want to f*** you like an animal.” I understand that the Stratford’s new artistic director Des McAnuff has done the same thing at the end of this year’s Romeo and Juliet using the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven.”

Enough already, I say. A great play transports us to other times and places. After the curtain falls, I’m in no hurry to be yanked back to 2008. Even less do I want to be dropped off rudely in the sixties. Directors should let us depart in peace.

See Emsworth’s reviews of other shows in the Shaw Festival’s 2008 season, including An Inspector Calls, Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, and the classic American musical, with music by Leonard Bernstein, Wonderful Town. Terence Rattigan’s After the Dance is reviewed in this post.

Emsworth reviews the Stratford Festival’s 2008 production of Hamlet in this post.