The Admirable Crichton at the Shaw Festival

We found J. M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, now playing at the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), so clever and delightful in every detail that we’ll see it again if we can. We haven’t enjoyed ourselves so much at the theater in a long time.

Nicole Underhay as Lady Mary Lasenby, David Schurmann as Lord Loam, and Steven Sutcliffe as Crichton

Crichton (pronounced “CRY-ton”) is a 30-year-old butler in the high-toned Mayfair household of the Earl of Loam (David Schurmann), described by the playwright in the printed version of the play as “a widower, a philanthropist, and a peer of advanced ideas.” One of Lord Loam’s ideas is that class differences are artificial, and he has decreed that, once a month, all the servants in his house must take tea in the drawing-room with him and his family as guests and equals. These social events are dreaded not only by Lord Loam’s three daughters, but also by the servants. Crichton, who as butler is head of the servants’ hall, finds them excruciating:

ERNEST: Do you know, Crichton, I think that with an effort you might look even happier. (Crichton smiles wanly.) You don’t approve of his lordship’s compelling his servants to be his equals — once a month?

CRICHTON: It is not for me, sir, to disapprove of his lordship’s Radical views.

ERNEST: Certainly not. And, after all, it is only once a month that he is affable to you.

CRICHTON: On all other days of the month, sir, his lordship’s treatment of us is everything that could be desired.

Lord Loam’s daughters know how profoundly uncomfortable Crichton is with this charade of equality:

LADY MARY (sarcastically): How Crichton enjoys it!

LORD LOAM (frowning): He is the only one who doesn’t; pitiful creature.

CRICHTON: I can’t help being a Conservative, my lord.

LORD LOAM: Be a man, Crichton. You are the same flesh and blood as myself.

CRICHTON (in pain): Oh, my lord!

Under pressure, Crichton reluctantly explains his distaste for “equality” to Lady Mary:

CRICHTON: My lady, I am the son of a butler and a lady’s-maid — perhaps the happiest of all combinations; and to me the most beautiful thing in the world is a haughty, aristocratic English house, with every one kept in his place. Though I were equal to your ladyship, where would be the pleasure to me? It would be counterbalanced by the pain of feeling that Thomas and John were equal to me.

Steven Sutcliffe as Crichton and Nicole Underhay as Lady Mary Lasenby

A few days after the “servants’ tea,” Lord Loam and his family leave on a private yacht for an extended voyage to the South Seas. Crichton suggests a kitchen maid, Tweeny, as ladies’ maid on the yacht for Lady Mary and her sisters, and Crichton himself is persuaded to go along as Lord Loam’s valet.

Two months later, the entire party is shipwrecked on a deserted island in the South Pacific, where it becomes immediately clear that Crichton is the only one of the Londoners with survival skills. Indeed, Crichton finds himself in his element, able, intelligent, and masterful. He disabuses his erstwhile superiors of the notion that they can continue to be idle on the island, and as “nature” takes its course, their roles are reversed: Crichton becomes a benevolent, respected master of a smoothly run island establishment, and the others, who call him “the Gov.” (which is how the servants back in London referred among themselves to Lord Loam), become his servants.

Ready to fend off a wild beast on the island

Nature also takes course in the form of a blossoming romance between Crichton and Lord Loam’s eldest daughter, Lady Mary (who in the new “natural” order of things has been rechristened “Polly”, just as household servants in London households were given arbitrary new names by their superiors). After two years on the island, none of the party expects to be see London again. The sight of a ship forces the issue of what must happen to their relationships if they were to be rescued and restored to Mayfair.

In this show, every touch from director Morris Panych is golden; every minute a dozen small things tickle your fancy. It all works: the narration, the costuming, the songs, the singing animals (Panych’s idea, not Barrie’s), the little bits of pantomime business, the vanity of Ernest, who annoys everyone with his epigrams. The narration is taken directly from J. M. Barrie’s stage directions (reading his plays in print is a treat). The animals sing clever arrangements of swing tunes from the 1920s in close harmony. The “servants’ tea” scene in the opening act is comic genius. Panych’s material is superb, as Barrie’s characters are fully drawn and brilliantly colored, and Panych has given this show all the sauciness and scope of a well-directed musical.

David Schurmann as The Earl of Loam and Marla McLean as Tweeny

What’s priceless, though, is the way this superb cast delivers Barrie’s lines. No better Crichton could have been found anywhere than Steven Sutcliffe. He is as commanding on the stage as a Mayfair butler as he is as the buff, masterful “Gov.” on the island. The diminutive Marla McLean is an arresting and remarkably convincing Tweeny. David Schurmann, a world-class Shavian actor, plays the naïve and ineffectual Lord Loam. We were especially glad to see the ravishing Nicole Underhay back at the Shaw Festival.  Her transformation from a bored, jaded Londoner to an exuberant, accomplished island-dweller is something to see.

Crichton is a marvelous character, and he’d probably be better-known today if The Admirable Crichton hadn’t been overshadowed by the the popularity of Peter Pan, and if P. G. Wodehouse had not created Jeeves, who since the 1920s has been by far the best-known fictional member of the English serving classes. Jeeves was not strictly speaking a butler; he was a gentleman’s gentleman, serving Bertie Wooster as valet, personal secretary, butler, and jack of all trades. Still, Jeeves and Crichton have a lot in common as polished, intelligent, well-read masters of their own domains.

We think Wodehouse, a man of the theater who happened to be one of J. M. Barrie’s cricket pals, surely had Crichton as one of his models when he brought Jeeves into being. Early in The Admirable Crichton, for instance, we learn that Crichton has an ulterior motive for promoting Tweeny as a maid for Lady Mary and her sisters on the yacht:  the promotion will elevate Tweeny’s social status and make her a more eligible mate for himself.

CRICHTON (after hesitating): There is in this establishment, your ladyship, a young woman –

LADY MARY: Yes?

CRICHTON: A young woman, on whom I have for some time cast an eye.

CATHERINE (eagerly). Do you mean as a possible lady’s maid?

CRICHTON: I had thought of her, my lady, in another connection.

LADY MARY: Ah!

We thought immediately of Jeeves. In story after story, as Wodehouse devotees know, Jeeves manipulates his employer to his will, whether to inveigle Bertie Wooster into taking a vacation in the country (so Jeeves can go fishing), to further a romantic scheme of Jeeves’s, or to tighten his control over Bertie’s selection of ties and dinner jackets. Like Jeeves, Crichton manages to further both his employer’s needs and his own personal wishes at the same time.

And who can doubt that the title of Wodehouse’s first great collection of Jeeves stories, The Inimitable Jeeves, echoes the title of The Admirable Crichton?

The two essays in the Shaw Festival’s program for The Admirable Crichton, by Mr. Panych and Michael Billington, claim to find egalitarian socio-political overtones in the play; Mr. Billington says it has “subversive implications.”  We don’t see it at all.  J. M. Barrie was a romantic, not a socialist, and we’ve never detected any political agenda in his novels and plays. Indeed, if anything political can be extracted from The Admirable Crichton, it would be the fundamentally conservative notion that class distinctions aren’t the bastard offspring of leftist bogeymen like imperialism, feudalism, and capitalism, but arise naturally in every society.

But Barrie did have, along with the similarly apolitical P. G. Wodehouse, a genuine sympathy for and interest in servants as human beings. The Admirable Crichton includes an exquisite portrait of the social distinctions between different kinds of servants in large English establishments. Consider what we learn when Tweeny is interrogated by Lady Mary as a possible lady’s maid for the voyage:

LADY MARY: And you and Crichton are — ah — keeping company?

(CRICHTON draws himself up.)

TWEENY (aghast): A butler don’t keep company, my lady.

LADY MARY (indifferently): Does he not?

CRICHTON: No, your ladyship, we butlers may — (he makes a gesture with his arms) — but we do not keep company.

AGATHA: I know what it is; you are engaged?

(TWEENY looks longingly at CRICHTON.)

CRICHTON: Certainly not, my lady. The utmost I can say at present is that I have cast a favourable eye.

Another great English dramatist, by contrast, had no interest in servants as people. Many of Emsworth’s readers will recall the exchange between Algernon and his butler Lane in the opening scene of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest:

ALGERNON: Why is it that at a bachelor’s establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information.

LANE: I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.

ALGERNON: Good heavens! Is marriage so demoralising as that?

LANE: I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.

ALGERNON (languidly): I don’t know that I am much interested in your family life, Lane.

LANE: No, sir; it is not a very interesting subject. I never think of it myself.

But Wodehouse and Barrie do find servants interesting. In “Jeeves in the Springtime,” Jeeves speaks to his employer about his own personal life with the same delicacy and reserve as Crichton. Asked how he knows that Bingo Little’s uncle lives in Pounceby Gardens, Jeeves tells Bertie Wooster, who is narrating the story,

“I am on terms of some intimacy with the elder Mr. Little’s cook, sir. In fact, there is an understanding.”

[Bertie narrates:] I’m bound to say that this gave me a bit of a start. Somehow I’d never thought of Jeeves going in for that sort of thing.

“Do you mean you’re engaged?”

“It may be said to amount to that, sir.”

“Well, well!”

The stories of P. G. Wodehouse owe much of their interest to the cooks, butlers, valets, gardeners, secretaries, and pig-keepers who populate the country estates of Lord Emsworth and Bertie Wooster’s relatives.

J. M. Barrie, one of Emsworth’s favorite writers, was a elegant English prose stylist who can fairly be mentioned in the same breath as Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. The Admirable Crichton first appeared in 1902, two years before Peter Pan. The play is less fantastical than Barrie’s Peter Pan, and also much lighter — we’re remembering the dark, wonderful Peter Pan at the Shaw Festival in 2001.

To those who appreciate this production of The Admirable Crichton, we recommend not only the reading editions of J. M. Barrie’s plays, but also Barrie’s novels, like A Window in Thrums and The Little White Bird. We hope fervently that the Shaw Festival will be doing more Barrie plays over the next few seasons.

We preview the Shaw Festival’s 2011 season

A year ago we were wondering whether the Shaw Festival management might be chafing a little at having to build its seasons around the plays of Bernard Shaw. The 2009 season was all about Noël Coward, and the Festival’s marketing for 2010 certainly didn’t lead with the two Shaw plays that were on the bill. In fact, the first Shaw play of 2010 didn’t even open until the end of June.

Shaw

But if the Shaw Festival is thinking about putting Shaw on the backburner, it’s not happening in 2011, because for its 50th season there will be an unprecedented four Shaw plays at Niagara-on-the-Lake. Personally, we’re not tired of Shaw yet. Here’s what we think of the 2011 Shaw Festival season, beginning with the shows we’re looking forward most.

1. The Admirable Crichton (James M. Barrie). Several months ago, when we offered a few suggestions for future Shaw Festival seasons (see this post), a play by J. M. Barrie was high on the list. It wasn’t The Admirable Crichton, but we’ll settle for this inventive comedy, which we’ve read but never seen (the Shaw Festival put it on back 1976, when Emsworth was still a student, unaware of theater festivals in Ontario).

James M. Barrie

Like several Shaw plays (including Candida, also on the 2011 playbill), The Admirable Crichton involves the clumsy efforts of “advanced” English folk to live up to their socialist ideals. In this play, the Earl of Loam makes it a monthly practice to hold a dinner in which his household’s servants are treated like equals. The idealistic earl explains to Crichton, the butler: “Can’t you see, Crichton, that our divisions into classes are artificial, that if we were to return to Nature, which is the aspiration of my life, all would be equal?” Crichton, a clear-sighted conservative, does not agree: “The divisions into classes, my lord, are not artificial. They are the natural outcomes of a civilised society.”

Fantasies become reality in many of Barrie’s plays.  In The Admirable Crichton, the Earl’s household, servants and all, take a long voyage together and find themselves shipwrecked on a deserted Pacific island, where the Earl’s egalitarian theories are put to the test. In Bernard Shaw’s My Fair Lady (also on the 2011 playbill), a poor flower girl is taken out of her station life and transformed into a jewel of society; in Barrie’s play a butler is changed into a master, and a lord finds a station in life fitting his own natural ability.  Stephen Sutcliffe will play the butler, Crichton, and David Schurman will be the Earl of Loam.

2. My Fair Lady (Bernard Shaw, Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe). We can’t imagine why they’ve never put on My Fair Lady at Niagara-on-the-Lake till now. Sure, it’s just an “adaptation” of Shaw’s play Pygmalion, but it uses a high percentage of Shaw’s original lines and sticks to the story. There was no good reason for the Shaw Festival to snub My Fair Lady for 49 years.

P. G. Wodehouse must have been suffering from indigestion, or gout, or kidney stones when he saw this show in the 1950s and told a friend it was “the dullest lousiest show” he’d ever seen.  This is our favorite musical play, if Showboat isn’t. We love its songs and have sung and played them all our life: “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “Get Me to the Church On Time.” Deborah Hay, who so successfully played another girl from the slums a couple of years ago in Born Yesterday, will play Eliza Doolittle.  We particularly look forward to Benedict Campbell as Henry Higgins.  Little round man Neil Barclay, who is in fact an excellent song-and-dance man, will be Alfred Doolittle.

3. Candida (Bernard Shaw). This never-tedious comedy is among our favorite Shaw plays. Candida is the wife of James Morelle, a vicar and popular socialist speaker who serves a run-down parish in London. In the fundamentalist circles of Emsworth’s younger years, one sometimes heard of preachers who were “so heavenly minded” that they were “of no earthly good.” Morelle is the liberal analogue, so zealous for his causes that he doesn’t pay enough attention to the living, breathing people in his own circle, especially his wife. We give the radical socialist Shaw credit for being able to satirize someone like Morelle, a soldier on the front lines of the socialist campaign.

The plot of Candida revolves around the infatuation of young Eugene Marchbanks for Candida, who is 15 years his senior. In other productions of Candida that we’ve seen, Candida is portrayed as genuinely wavering between the young poet and her husband. This has never seemed right to us; we don’t think Candida ever seriously considers leaving James for the boy, and we don’t think the dramatic interest of the play requires it.

Gina Wilkinson was originally scheduled to direct Candida; sadly, she passed away in December 2010. Claire Jullien will play Candida.

4. Drama at Inish (Lennox Robinson). Several years ago we got a charge out of the Shaw Festival’s production of Seán O’Casey’s 1926 play The Plough and the Stars, even though we had trouble understanding the heavy Irish accents. Irish drama was something new for us, and we liked it.

We’ve been expecting more O’Casey but instead, in 2011, we’ll be getting a 1933 drama called Drama at Inish from one of O’Casey’s Irish contemporaries, Lennox Robinson. We dug around and found a copy of this comedy on-line and were greatly entertained by our reading of it. Jackie Maxwell herself, who we think is the best director at the Shaw Festival, will be directing. Two of our favorite Shaw Festival actresses, Mary Haney and Corrine Koslo, will have leading roles.

This is a play about actors and their audiences. Perhaps you remember a story — it might have been Mark Twain, maybe Bret Harte — in which some cowboys seeing their first play didn’t understand that the drama on stage wasn’t real, so they pulled out their pistols to shoot the stage villain. Drama at Inish similarly pokes fun at small-town theater-goers who confuse the real world and the gloomy on-stage worlds of Ibsen and Chekhov. (When this play initially came to Broadway, it was called “Is Life Worth Living.”)  

5. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Tennessee Williams). This 1955 play is high on our list of all-time favorite plays. It will be only the second Tennessee Williams play to appear at the Shaw Festival (we enjoyed Summer and Smoke in 2007) and hope A Streetcar Named Desire won’t be far behind. We note, in passing, that, 10 years ago, before they relaxed “the Mandate,” the Shaw Festival probably wouldn’t have offered a play written after Shaw’s death in 1950.

This is the story of Brick and Maggie, a young couple whose childlessness is a sore point with Brick’s father, Big Daddy, a wealthy, domineering Southern planter who is dying of cancer. Maggie’s childless condition is due mainly to Brick’s puzzling lack of interest in his wife; does Brick simply despise her, or is he (like Tennessee Williams himself) simply not attracted to women?

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is full of delicious, unforgettable scenes and characters.  Moya O’Connell will play Maggie the Cat; Jim Mezon will play Big Daddy.  It seems that this will be Mr. Mezon’s only major role at the Shaw Festival in 2011; we’re a little disappointed that in the Festival’s 50th year, he’s not playing a lead role in a Bernard Shaw play. 

6. The President (Ferenc Molnár). This one-act comedy, starring Lorne Kennedy, was such a success as the one-hour lunchtime show at the Shaw Festival in 2008 that they’re bringing it back. We meant to see it then, but it never worked out, so we’re glad for this second chance.  This play too involves a “make-over”; a cabdriver with communist leanings must become someone suitable as the husband for the daughter of a soybean tycoon. Presumably most of the same cast will be back, although Chilina Kennedy, who played the daughter in 2008, is now a leading lady at the Stratford Festival. At $32, it’s a bargain.

The plot of The President, originally written in Hungarian in 1929, is thoroughly Wodehousian, and in fact there’s a connection: P. G. Wodehouse adapted one of Ferenc Molnár’s plays into the 1926-27 Broadway smash The Play’s the Thing, which we intend to re-read before heading off to see The President.

7. Topdog/Underdog (Suzan-Lori Parks). This 2001 play by Suzan-Lori Parks won the Pulitzer. It’s about two brothers (black men, but they actually are brothers) and their struggles to get by. They’re the only two characters in the play, which will play for only a short run (from July 19 through August 27) in the Shaw Festival’s new Studio Theater, which they reserve for “contemporary” plays. The Shaw’s track record in this space (John Osborne’s The Entertainer in 2009, Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money in 2010) is very good.

8. Heartbreak House (George Bernard Shaw). It’s one of Shaw’s greatest plays, according to all the experts, and who are we to argue? It includes some of our favorite Shaw characters, like old Captain Shotover, who treats his country house as if it were a sailing ship and pretends to be more senile than he really is. We consider the Captain a role model for our own declining years and are delighted to see that Michael Ball will take the role.  In fact, this show will have the Shaw Festival’s “A” case, with Robin Evan Willis, Deborah Hay, Patrick Galligan, and Patrick McManus as key cast members.

The first half of Heartbreak House, written during the first World War, is witty and entertaining; the second half turns deadly serious, and it’s all intensely metaphorical. In fact, we would go so far as to suggest that Shaw’s reputation for being “talky” owes more to Heartbreak House than to any other of his plays. Toward the end, the characters simply sit around the terrace engaged in intellectual duels that make you, in the audience, feel stupid because you didn’t understand someone’s winning thrust.

9. Maria Severa (Jay Turvey and Paul Sportelli) Ever longer grows the list of recent Broadway musicals (like Spring Awaking, Billy Elliott, and In the Heights) that we have not seen and, frankly, don’t feel the urge to see. So will we make it a priority to see this brand-new musical by two talented members of the Shaw Festival company (Jay Turvey and Jay Sportelli)?

The play is about Maria Severa, a historical character who, in her short life (1820-1846), became a legendary Portugese singer of fado songs.  Julie Martell, who is both easy on the eyes and an excellent singer, will play the title role.

10. When the Rain Stops Falling (Andrew Bovell). We don’t know about this one. Here’s what Ben Brantley said in a review of a London production of this Australian play in the New York Times last summer:

The play begins with people hidden by umbrellas walking in circles under sheets of water, until a man in the center of the stage is compelled to scream a scream of human angst. Then a fish falls into his arms.

11. On the Rocks (George Bernard Shaw). Besides three of Shaw’s best-known plays, the 2010 season will include one of his least-known — or, at least, an adaptation of it. We were altogether unfamiliar with this late (1933) Shaw play till we saw it was going to be offered in 2011, so we read it.  We can now explain (a) why, in 50 years, this is only the second time the Shaw Festival has put on On the Rocks and (b) why it needed to be “adapted”.

Interviewed at the age of 92, P. G. Wodehouse stated, “I don’t want to be like Bernard Shaw. He turned out some awfully bad stuff in his nineties. He said he knew the stuff was bad but he couldn’t stop writing.”  Shaw may not have been in his nineties when he wrote On the Rocks, but it’s the sort of thing Wodehouse was talking about.  As Shaw wrote it, On the Rocks is a tedious play about a conservative English prime minister and his cabinet who, in a time of national crisis that has brought the nation close to anarchy, suddenly “realize” that various collectivist measures are what is needed to save the country. It’s the equivalent of a radical socialist’s wet dream. The characters, on the page anyway, are wooden and featureless. No doubt the adaptation, by Michael Healey, will be more interesting than if we were given Shaw’s play straight, but we’re not attracted.

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!