Reviews 2001
Reviews 2001
✭✭✩✩✩
by Vera Caspary and George Sklar, directed by Neil Munro
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 24-July 14, 2001
“An Unengaging Mystery”
Last year when the Shaw Festival programmed J.B. Priestley's "Time and the Conways" in the usual mystery slot, I had hoped that the Festival had finally outgrown the need for these insubstantial entertainments. But "Conways" did not do well at the box office, so this year the Festival has compensated by programming two mysteries--"Laura" by Vera Caspary and George Sklar in the first half of the season and "Love from a Stranger" by Frank Vosper based on Agatha Christie in the second half. Even the musical this year is "The Mystery of Edwin Drood". In the past these mysteries have chiefly justified themselves by the strength of the acting and direction on display. With "Laura" flaws in acting, direction, design and in the play itself combine to produce a less than satisfactory evening's entertainment.
The story of "Laura" is best known through the 1944 movie by Otto Preminger that has become one of the classics of film noir. Laura Hunt, a successful advertising executive, has been found murdered and the detective investigating the case becomes as obsessed with her as all the other men in her life. Vera Caspary with the help of George Sklar wrote a play based on her 1942 novel but producers showed no interest in it until after the movie appeared. Even then the play was not a success, closing on Broadway after only 44 performances. Seeing the play only confirms that Caspary and Sklar, who did not write the screenplay to the film, were just not very adept at translating the novel to the stage. Neither the characters nor their motives are clearly delineated, the language is often awkward and, damagingly, there is little sense of mystery or suspense.
Director Neil Munro's trademarks of overlapping dialogue and placing actors behind furniture or with backs turned to the audience tends to further obfuscate the material. He quashes virtually all the humour in the play except for a few lines of Laura's maid, humour that would provided some contrast to the tedious goings-on. As if still under the spell of Priestley, Munro is keen to make us wonder when the action we see is happening and even if it happened. He does this by giving the actor playing the detective exactly the same complex routine after entering at the beginning, middle and end of the play. At the end as at the beginning, formerly empty seats when suddenly illumined by a flick of his cigarette lighter briefly reveal the ghostly cast of characters while the detective contemplates Laura's portrait. This is brilliant in itself, but it's hard for us to ask whether all we have seen is real or only the detective's reverie when the story itself has been so uninvolving. Inexcusably for this kind of play, Munro has staged the final shootout in such an ambiguous way that much of the audience could be overheard to wonder who was or was not dead at the end.
The difficulties are increased by Yvonne Sauriol's peculiar set design. At Laura's penthouse apartment the walk-out terrace is half a storey higher than the living-room. Thus not just the living-room but the whole apartment must be "sunken". This makes the final chase scene very awkward and one crucial entrance impossible to understand. In mysteries as in farces the geography of the set has to be absolutely clear. We have to know who is where and what leads where or no tension can be built. Here the set is confusing and over-fussy. Sauriol provides six planes of action while Munro almost exclusively uses only three. Her costumes, however, are all straightforward and appropriate to character. Ereca Hassel provides the highly complex lighting, including fades within fades, that Munro requires.
Usually the Shaw heightens the theatrical interest of its mysteries by casting them with its most experienced actors. This is largely true in "Laura" except in the title role. Jane Perry, in her first major role at the Festival, does not capture the complexities of her character. Laura is an ordinary but plucky woman who has been made over into a successful sophisicate by her Pygmalion, an acid-tongued journalist named Waldo Lydecker. As in Shaw's version of the legend, this Eliza Doolittle has come to surpass her creator much to his chagrin. To understand the story it is crucial to see this, but Perry gives us only an ordinary woman playing at sophistication, not the creation reclaiming ownership of herself. It is also crucial that there be some sexual magnetism between Laura and the detective, but here there is none.
It is good to see Michael Ball (Waldo) playing something other than the crotchety old men he is usually assigned. For the 1940s the hints are as clear as they could be that Waldo is a homosexual, but to play this up too much, as Ball does, means we don't take he claim seriously that he loves Laura. He does indeed love her--not as a person but as his possession. As Detective Mark McPherson, Ben Carlson communicates a general world-weariness rather than a specific obsession with Laura. In this the script gives him no help and neither does Munro, who is content to show this by having Carlson stare at Laura's portrait and play her music.
The secondary roles are all well taken. Stephen McQuigge, in his Shaw Festival début, makes a strong impression as the teenager, Danny Dorgan, obsessed with Laura and so does Patricia Hamilton as the landlady and Danny's worried mother. Kevin Bundy makes Shelby Carpenter, Laura's leech of a Southern suitor, suitably weak-willed. But Mary Haney, playing Laura's maid Bessy, the only character who seems at all true to life, injects the play with much-need humour and can bring down the house with her delivery of such simple lines as "Dinner is served".
All in all this production is a disappointment. If, after seeing the play, you try to sort out your confusion by renting the film version, I can tell you you will only find yourself even more confused since it and the play diverge in several important ways. Only the original novel will clear up the difficulties that Caspary and Sklar created in adapting the novel to the stage and that Neil Munro's direction has only made worse.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Jane Perrry.
2001-07-11
Laura