Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House at the Shaw Festival

The Shaw Festival’s anniversary season has Bernard Shaw from all angles.  For light entertainment, there’s Candida; for Shaw set to music, there’s My Fair Lady.  For hardcore Shaw fans, there’s On the Rocks, a play that’s almost never performed.  And Shaw’s supposed “masterpiece,” Heartbreak House, which we saw in a sparsely attended performance in the Festival Theatre last weekend, is “difficult” Shaw.

The action of Heartbreak House covers a day and an evening during the first World War on the country estate of Captain Shotover (Michael Ball), who has remodeled his home along the lines of a sailing ship. (Designer Leslie Frankish has created a striking set that includes an undulating platform.) The 88-year old Captain supports the household by inventing weaponry gadgets that he sells to the British military.  

The other characters are as improbable as the Captain.  Young Ellie Dunn (Robin Evan Willis), who comes to visit the Captain’s daughter, Hesione Hushabye (Deborah Hay), is engaged to a man twice her age who has swindled her father. She is also in love with a man who has given her a false name and who makes up stories about exotic adventures; in the third act she announces that her true love is the octogenarian Captain.  Mangan, the fiancé (Benedict Campbell), is a rich industrialist who actually owns nothing.  Ellie’s father (Patrick McManus) is a skilled business manager with a reputation for having no business sense.  It’s not a naturalistic play. 

Much of the play has to do with marriage, though none of the characters seem to think that sexual attraction and romance have any necessary connection to marriage. Hesione, for example, is blasé about the serial philanderering of her husband Hector (Blair Williams), and she herself is attracted to Mangan.

The frustrating aspects of this play are outweighed, barely, by Shaw’s scintillating dialogue, which includes some delicious paradoxes and a rare Shaw pun about “safety matches.” And in Captain Shotover Heartbreak House has one of Shaw’s most memorable characters: an old man who amuses himself and exasperates his relatives by feigning senility and pretending not to remember what he is told. Michael Ball is a delight in what is surely one of Shaw’s plum roles.

But none of the other characters seem quite real. We think Shaw created them that way on purpose, in the same way that Picasso and Modigliani were, around the same time, painting figures without distinct features.  We simply don’t understand these characters well enough to make sense of their quarrels and infatuations.  The women are touchy as the dickens, always flaring up at one another, but you never see it coming. The men are fragile and cry at the drop of a hat. Unable to anticipate the frequent emotional twists and turns, we kept feeling guiltily that we must not have been paying enough attention.

This is also a play with too many coincidences; we thought one was the standard.  In the first act, we learn that the man who has been romancing Ellie under the name of Marcus Darnley is actually the husband of Ellie’s hostess, Hesione.  This meets the quota for coincidence and creates dramatic interest — but then, in the second act, the house is invaded by a burglar who turns out to be an old shipmate whom Captain Shotover was talking about in the first act.  In the third act, this same burglar turns out to be the long-lost husband of Captain Shotover’s housekeeper.  It’s all dizzying and wearying.

None of this is the fault of director Christopher Newton, who was, after all, stuck with a script littered with such stage instructions as “MRS HUSHABYE (promptly losing her temper),” “MANGAN (depths of emotion suddenly welling up in him),” “MRS HUSHABYE (suddenly melting and half laughing),” and “RANDALL (a childishly plaintive note breaking into his huff).”  Allowing for the challenges of the script, this show is beautifully acted all around. We were again impressed with the dramatic range of Deborah Hay, whose Hesione couldn’t be further from the floozie she played in Born Yesterday. We did feel that Mr. Newton might have restrained the normally nuanced Patrick Galligan (as Hesione’s brother-in-law Randall) from over-acting during one of the meltdowns that Shaw prescribes for his characters.

This production left us feeling that Shaw’s play was largely a expression of bad temper. The playwright vents his spleen against marriage, capitalism, and the Church; after the news of the Russian revolution, Shaw had clearly lost patience with the pace of Britain’s progress toward radical socialism.  By 1919, when he finished the play, it had become painfully apparent to Shaw that thirty years of Fabian speeches and pamphleteering hadn’t much advanced the cause, as we learn from a speech by Ellie’s father. (Mazzini Dunn is exactly the sort of person a socialist paradise needs: a man of ability who is happy to work hard for no personal gain.) Mazzini discusses the state of things with Hector Hushabye:

HECTOR. Think! What’s the good of thinking about it? Why didn’t you do something?
MAZZINI. But I did. I joined societies and made speeches and wrote pamphlets. That was all I could do. But, you know, though the people in the societies thought they knew more than Mangan, most of them wouldn’t have joined if they had known as much. You see they had never had any money to handle or any men to manage. Every year I expected a revolution, or some frightful smash-up: it seemed impossible that we could blunder and muddle on any longer. But nothing happened, except, of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to. Nothing ever does happen. It’s amazing how well we get along, all things considered.

In Heartbreak House Shaw was announcing that, as far as he was concerned, it was time to tear Britain down and start over.

Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Shaw Festival

Benedict Campbell as Lopakhin and Laurie Paton as Lyubov Andreyevna Ranyevskaya

You want variety if you’re thinking of seeing two Shaw Festival shows in one day.  For instance, you don’t necessarily want to see two yawner dramas like The Seagull and Heartbreak House within the course of nine hours.  We tried pairing a frivolous forties musical (see this post) with Anton Chekhov’s tragicomedy The Cherry Orchard and ended up with a nicely balanced day.  

On such doubleheader days we marvel at the repertory actors who are doing double duty.  The afternoon’s singing and dancing star of One Touch of Venus, Robin Evan Willis, for example, reappeared in the evening’s The Cherry Orchard as Anya — and we are in a position to report that Ms. Willis still had time between shows to have drinks at the Epicurean with what looked like out-of-town friends.  It was probably well that, in her first scene in The Cherry Orchard, Anya is supposed to be exhausted from a long journey.  Mark Uhre, Neil Barclay, Gabrielle Jones, and Julie Martell all delivered high-energy performances in the musical before walking across the street to use their heavy acting chops in the Chekhov play in the intimate confines of the Court House Theatre, where the actors are only inches apart from the patrons. 

Neil Barclay as Pishchik and Laurie Paton as Ranyevskaya

The Cherry Orchard is dear to our heart, and judging from the snippets of animated conversations we overheard at intermission, many of our many fellow patrons also had decided feelings about the play. It can’t be easy for a director like Jason Byrne to bring something fresh into a play so well-loved by so many, but we think he succeeded.  The Shaw Festival show is intelligently planned and exceptionally well-acted, and we found it genuinely moving.

The Cherry Orchard gives us several painful scenes in the life of a family of Russian aristocrats around the turn of the last century. The central figure is Lyubov Andreyevna Ranyevskaya (Laurie Paton), a widow whose large estate has a formerly magnificent cherry orchard that she considers “the one remarkable thing in the whole province.” As her brother Gayev (Jim Mezon) chimes in, it’s mentioned in “the Encyclopedia.”

But as much as she professes to love her home, Ranyevskaya has spent the last six years off in Paris wasting her fortune on a worthless lover while working out her grief from the accidental drowning of her small son.  She and and her daughter Anya (Robin Evan Willis) arrive back home just weeks before the estate is to be sold at foreclosure.  Even though the situation presents a business opportunity for himself, Ranyevskaya’s wealthy neighbor Lopakhin (Benedict Campbell) magnanimously urges her to save herself from financial ruin by taking an axe to the cherry orchard and converting the land into riverside summer cottages for upwardly mobile city-dwellers. 

As the family dithers, Yepikhodov plays his guitar for Dunyasha in the estate gardens. This illustration by Lajos Szalay is in one of our editions of The Cherry Orchard.

Ranyevskaya and Gayev can no more deal with this crisis than the czars could deal with the conditions that would lead to the communist revolution only a few years later. Still less can they hear advice from Lopakhin, whose father was, after all, only a serf. Together with their equally impecunious neighbor and constant houseguest Pishchik (Neil Barclay), they all dither until the day of the auction, expecting, like Micawber, that something will “turn up.” 

What riveted us in this Cherry Orchard was the relationship between Ranavskaya and Lopakhin.  Even though Ranyevskaya still thinks of her wealthy friend as a peasant boy, she is, paradoxically, anxious for her stepdaughter Varya (Severn Thompson) to be married to this very man. 

Early in the play, Lopakhin remembers when, as a child, his drunken father bloodied his nose and Ranyevskaya washed him up, saying, “Don’t cry, little peasant; it’ll mend by your wedding day.” A footnote in one of my editions indicates that this is just a proverbial Russian phrase, but Chekhov’s use of it was no accident. Decades after the bloody-nose episode, Ranyevskaya is hoping to see Lopakhin married in earnest. Is she thinking only of how such an alliance could save them all from poverty?  Or does she also mean to patronize the grown-up peasant boy?  Would she and Gayev still be anxious to bestow Varya on Lopakhin if Varya’s father had been a nobleman, not merely a lawyer? 

And what of Lopakhin and his heart-breaking inability to propose to Varya? Before seeing this show, we chalked it up to the inability of any Russian in this play to act sensibly or decisively. But now it seems clear to us that Lopakhin cannot propose to Varya because he is, instead, in love with the unattainable Ranyevskaya. He agrees to speak to Varya only because, like a peasant, he can deny Ranyevskaya nothing to her face.  But there will be no wedding day; his peasant’s nose, figuratively speaking, will be bloodied and unmended for the rest of his life. 

Robin Evan Willis, Laurie Paton, Severn Thompson, Jim Mezon

The cast of The Cherry Orchard is the Shaw Festival’s “A” team. Jim Mezon overpowered a weaker cast last year in A Moon for the Misbegotten, but here, working with actors of the same rank, he is an ideal Gayev, a drone of a brother given to meaningless eloquence. As the much-abused Varya, Severn Thompson gives a nuanced, genuinely moving performance, the best we can remember seeing from her. Laurie Paton is finest of all as the tragic Ranyevskaya; every word, gesture, and glance from her tells. 

The family leaves the cherry orchard estate. Lajos Szalay's illustration: "Good-bye to the old life!"

We don’t know what to make of the fact that each of three shows we’ve seen so far this year at the Shaw Festival involves elements of magic. In Harvey, of course, the pooka himself is magical and the story is spiced with supernatural events. In One Touch of Venus, a statute transforms into a goddess who, in one scene, disappears like magic from a barber’s chair. And in The Cherry Orchard, Anya’s governess, Charlotta (Gabrielle Jones), who was raised among gypsies, performs magic tricks for the amusement of the family.

Emsworth’s take on the Shaw Festival’s production of the Kurt Weill musical One Touch of Venus is at this post. His review of the classic American comedy Harvey, also in repertory at the Shaw Festival, is at this post.

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

One Touch of Venus at the Shaw Festival

Here’s the storyline:

Out of nowhere into the life of a meek young fellow comes a vivacious, unconventional young woman who attaches herself to him and puts him in compromising situations. With his spirit and libido aroused, he realizes that he needs to dump the shrill-voiced shrew he’s engaged to.

It’s the plot of the 1972 movie What’s Up, Doc? (with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal) — one of our very favorites — and also of the 1938 film Bringing Up Baby (with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant).

Whitelaw Savory (Mark Uhre) and his sassy assistant Molly Grant (Deborah Hay, who sings the show's title song)

And it’s also the plot of the only musical play the Shaw Festival is putting on this summer, One Touch of Venus, which is something of a forgotten classic. (Forgotten, probably, because it’s a little too risque for high school drama clubs; we guess that more people see musical plays in high school auditoriums than anywhere else.)

Like a lot of the musicals of the 1930s and 1940s, the story is thin and the characters tend to be cliches rather than real people — we’re thinking, for example, the role of Molly Grant (Deborah Hay), an archetype of the hard-boiled, sharp-tongued assistant who is probably in love with her boss. This is not one of the “great” American musicals, we wouldn’t say. But the songs and Kurt Weill’s music are wonderful, there are some fine comic scenes, and the Shaw Festival’s production is energetic and full of good performances.

Dance (1) by Henri Matisse. This 1909 painting is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

The centerpiece of the show is Venus, a priceless statue that wealthy Manhattanite Whitelaw Savory (Mark Uhre) has acquired on the black market for his private art gallery, which is otherwise devoted to modern art. (This art museum junkie’s heart was warmed to see Whitelaw’s studio strewn with reproductions of Matisse’s “Dance” and other masterpieces by Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky, and (we think) Robert Delaunay and Paul Klee (somebody tell us if we’re right!). The show’s first big song-and-dance number, “New Art Is True Art,” makes fun of modern art’s supposed disdain for traditional art.

The goddess of love comes on strong to Rodney Hatch

No sooner is the love goddess’s statue delivered to the gallery and removed from her crate than a mild-mannered barber, Rodney Hatch (Kyle Blair) arrives at the studio to give Whitelaw a shave. Left alone with the statue, Rodney pulls out an engagement ring that he has just bought for his fiancée and impulsively puts it on the statue’s finger. Amids pyrotechnics, Venus (Robin Evan Willis) comes to life and promptly falls for Rodney, whose ring has apparently broken an ancient spell. She heads off through Manhattan (pausing on her way to sing “I’m a Stranger Here Myself”) and reappears in Rodney’s apartment, where she tries to seduce him.

Meanwhile, Rodney Hatch is chased both by detectives who think he has stolen the statue and by Turks wielding daggers who are seeking to recover their stolen goddess. The chase leads to “Catch Hatch,” a long, frenetic dance sequence featuring much of the cast that is a highlight of the show. In one of the play’s funniest scenes, Rodney goes to the bus station to pick up his stunning but ill-tempered fiancée Gloria (Julie Martell) and his impossible future mother-in-law (perfectly played by Gabrielle Jones); their reunion is interrupted when Venus suddenly materializes. Rodney extricates himself from Gloria, but his romance with Venus hits a snag when the goddess realizes to her dismay that Rodney wants to install her as a housewife in Ozone Heights, a dreary subdivision on Staten Island.

Great harmony from Neil Barclay as Stanley, Kyle Blair as Rodney Hatch, Jay Turvey as Taxi Black, Mark Uhre as Whitelaw Savory

As Venus, Robin Evan Willis is the full package, a stunning, sensuous blonde whose voice has all the range that Kurt Weill’s songs need. We enjoyed all her numbers, including One Touch of Venus‘s best-known song, “Speak Low.” She is well-matched with Kyle Blair, a fine comic actor with a pleasant tenor voice.  We got a kick out of an excellent comic barbershop quartet number (sung in Rodney Hatch’s barbershop), “The Trouble With Women.” The lyrics of the last verse:

When I drove in my glamorous Chevy
I would park in a suitable spot
Then I’d turn to the girls like a heavy
And inquire if they would or would not
I always implied that they had to
But, oh jiminies, was I perplexed
On the night that one said she’d be glad to
I didn’t know what to do next

For the first time that we can remember with a Shaw Festival musical, though, we had issues with both the tempos and the balance on several songs. On the show’s first several numbers, we simply couldn’t make out what the actors were singing; the orchestra was too loud, and the lyrics went by too quickly. The problem was especially acute on Rodney’s ragtime-style “How Much I Love You,” whose lyrics by Ogden Nash are made up of one witty, rapid-fire simile after another.  If music director Ryan deSouza plays Scott Joplin, he ought to be familiar with the instruction Joplin usually inscribed on the sheet music for his rags: “It is never right to play ‘rag-time’ fast.”

We weren’t the only people at our preview performance with trouble hearing lyrics; all around us, people weren’t laughing at the comic songs for exactly the same reason. (It wasn’t a problem with “The Trouble With Women,” though.) Mind, we don’t suggest amplifying the performers; we like to hear vocals coming from mouths instead of speakers.  And we thought the singers were projecting well enough.  But perhaps a smaller orchestra would have suited the show in this venue. A three-piece rhythm section, a trumpet player, and a woodwind player would have done nicely.

We also questioned the pace of Robin Evan Willis’s first featured solo, “I’m a Stranger Here Myself.” This is a bluesy number whose mildly suggestive lyrics didn’t seem to have maximum impact at the relatively brisk tempo set by the band.

Ava Gardner in the 1948 film

We ran across an excellent essay on “One Touch of Venus” by Mark N. Grant (see this link), which we recommend, and from which we learned that the inspiration for “Speak Low” was the line “Speak low, if you speak love,” from Act II, Scene 1 of “Much Ado About Nothing,” spoken by Don Pedro to Hero. We were also pleased to find that the original Broadway cast recording of One Touch of Venus, featuring Mary Martin in her first major role, is still available; we’ve been listening to it on Rhapsody.

Emsworth’s take on the classic American comedy Harvey, also in repertory at the Shaw Festival, is at this post. And his thoughts on Chekhov’s 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.

Play, Orchestra, Play at the Shaw Festival (a review)

The Peppers are a bit old in the tooth to pass for a pair of young sailors

After seeing three of them, we can say with assurance that it was an excellent idea for the Shaw Festival to give four of its season’s shows over to Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8:30. The show at the Royal George Theater, Play, Orchestra, Play is every bit as entertaining as the others. 

The three one-act plays that make up Play, Orchestra, Play are quite different from each other: one is comic, one is brutally serious, and one is essentially a romantic fantasy. This is pretty much the same mix as in Brief Encounters, which we loved (see this post), but there is a good deal more music in Play, Orchestra, Play than in Brief Encounters — five songs in all, plus musical interludes between the plays.

First in order is Red Peppers, a slice from an evening in the life of George and Lily Pepper, a vaudeville pair who are are hanging on by their fingernails as the end of that era nears. The Peppers are still working, in cheap regional music halls, but their cross-talk is stale and their act’s not very good.

The Peppers squabble in their dressing room

We meet them on stage, dressed as a pair of sailors singing “Has Anyone Seen Our Ship”; the end of the number is spoiled when Lily (Patty Jamieson) drops her prop as they dance off the stage. As they change in their dressing room (the period costumes include vintage British underwear!), George (Jay Turvey) blames Lily for flubbing her exit, and they start rehashing old grievances.

But they stop bickering, close ranks, and redirect their fire toward the common enemy: the conductor of the house orchestra, the house manager, and another performer, all of whom drop by during the interlude before they go on again. (At some point in his career, Coward himself must have had to rely on unreliable house musicians for tempos; in Red Peppers he settles a score or two. In this production, unfortunately, the orchestra’s just a little too loud, so that we couldn’t catch all the lyrics to “Has Anyone Seen Our Ship” and “Men About Town.” No doubt the Peppers were familiar with that problem, too.) The insults fly around the dressing room; the pugnacious Peppers are shockingly willing to alienate the very people on whom they depend for professional survival. It’s all very funny, and very real.

Coward

Coward was at the top of the entertainment world when he wrote this play in 1935. But he clearly loved people like the Peppers, who were at the bottom of the profession, for their fierce independence and their commitment to their craft. We met people a lot like the Peppers last winter when we read J. B. Priestley’s 1929 novel The Good Companions, which tells the story of a traveling troupe of perfomers who play small music halls throughout England.

The middle play, Fumed Oak, features the equally vulgar and far less lovable wife, daughter, and mother-in-law of Henry Gow. Fumed Oak is straight drama and has no musical numbers, but this was the play in Play, Orchestra, Play that we liked best.

Henry Gow (Stephen Sutcliffe) does his best to ignore his whining daughter and bitchy wife

The unfortunate Henry Gow (Stephen Sutcliffe) has been stuck for years in a job as a retail clerk; worse, he’s married to Doris Gow (Patty Jamieson again), who long ago tricked him into marriage with the old pregnancy ploy, thereby frustrating his dream of going to sea and seeing the world. “You’re a bad lot, Dorrie,” Henry tells his wife. “Mean and cold and respectable.” It took three years after their “little rough and tumble” for a baby to be born; their daughter Elsie (Robin Evan Willis), now a teenager, is a “horrid little kid,” as Henry says. His mother-in-law (Wendy Thatcher) lives with them in their tiny, noisy apartment and whines and bitches at everyone.

Henry Gow (Stephen Sutcliffe) declares himself free

During the first part of Fumed Oak, Henry sits silently at his breakfast listening to the females snipe at one another. (Unlike the bickering in Red Peppers, there’s nothing funny about it.) During the second part, Henry carries off an enormously satisfying coup, gives the women what for, and escapes his hellish home. Is this play misognynist? We thought about it and decided it wasn’t.

We wondered what the title of this play meant. Henry Gow says that when Conrad and Kipling wrote about the sea, they “knew there was a bit more to it than refinement and fumed oak and lace curtains and getting old and miserable with nothing to show for it.” When we got home, we looked it up and found that “fumed oak” is oak that has been darkened by exposure to ammonia — not a bad metaphor for Coward’s character.

The show concludes with Shadow Play. Unlike the first two plays, which deal with working class folk, Shadow Play delves into the lives of the rich and fashionable. (Coward was remarkably familiar with people of all stations in life.)

Julie Martell and Stephen Sutcliffe as Vicki and Simon in Shadow Play

In Red Peppers, vaudeville partners George and Lily Pepper had only each other to lean on. In Shadow Play, Vicky Gayforth (the exceptionally fetching Julie Martell) and her husband Simon (Stephen Sutcliffe again) are socialites who have forgotten why they needed each other in the first place. Simon is carrying on a notorious affair with Sibyl Heston (Robin Evan Willis again); Vicky is letting an infatuated young man pursue her, but hasn’t yet decided how far to let him go.

After Vicky and Simon have come back from a romantic play, Simon proposes that they divorce. But the desperately miserable Vicky has already taken extra sleeping pills, and the rest of the play is a drug-induced dream sequence, much of it in song, as Vicky relives their early romance. Julie Martell and Stephen Sutcliffe are fine duet partners (as they are in the Shaw Festival’s Sunday in the Park with George this summer, as well). The songs in Shadow Play are “Play, Orchestra, Play,” “Then,” and the melodic and memorable “You Were There.”

The backdrops for each of these one-act plays consist of scenes projected onto a screen (see the picture at the top of this post). These work very well and are especially effective during the fantasy sequences in Shadow Play.

Director Christopher Newton programmed a good many of Noël Coward’s full-length plays while he was the Shaw Festival’s Artistic Director. We hope the Shaw doesn’t take too long a break from Coward after this year. Surely, in a couple of years, it will be time for the Shaw to put on Cavalcade again — what an unforgettable show that was! And we’d really love to see The Vortex.

Emsworth reviews of other Shaw Festival productions in 2009:

John Osborne’s The Entertainer (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Ways of the Heart (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Star Chamber (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)