Reviews 2001
Reviews 2001
✭✭✭✭✩
by Noel Coward, directed by David Savoy
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 7-September 23, 2001
“Play, Orchestra, Play”
For the second year in a row the Shaw Festival has chosen as its lunchtime show a play from Noel Coward's 1935 cycle of nine one-acters collectively titled "Tonight at 8:30". Last year we had the highly successful "Still Life". This year is the equally enjoyable "Shadow Play". Both focus on a couple at the parting of the ways, but while "Still Life" remains in the real world, "Shadow Play", subtitled "A Musical Fantasy", seeks to portray the realm of the unconscious.
After five years the marriage of Victoria and Simon Gayforth has reached a crisis. Simon is receiving the attentions of another woman, and Vicky in revenge is encouraging the friendship of another man. To calm a raging headache, Vicky takes three sleeping pills instead of her usual two. Vicky tells her friend Martha that "it would be so much easier, wouldn't it, if we had music when things go wrong". She soon finds out. As the pills take hold, strains of the musical she has just seen waft through her mind as she in her reverie relives her relationship with Simon in reverse chronological order.
Coward uses this short piece to explore the notion of how people use dream and art as a way of understanding reality. Indeed, by the end we left to wonder where Vicky's dream begins and where it leaves off. A melancholy tone of faded ideals hangs over the work. As with "Still Life", there is more material in the 45 minutes of this show than in many a full-length play.
One could hardly ask for a better cast. Patti Jamieson ably captures Vicky's mixture of fragility, frustration and confusion and her voice is well-suited to music of this period. Patrick R. Brown seems born with the poise and elegance of the 1930s that so naturally inform his movement, speaking and singing. Together they are a delight in all three numbers of the show.
The rest of the characters are mere sketches but the cast is able to suggest a background for each in the space of only a few lines. This holds for Karen Wood (Vicky's wide-eyed maid), newcomer Gabriel Burrafato (the couple's rigid butler), Blythe Wilson (sensual and calculating as Simon's "other woman") and another newcomer Jeff Madden (Vicky's rather louche "other man"). Jillian Cook has the largest of these secondary roles and shows that Vicky, though adrift both in real life and dream, has in her friend Martha a steady anchor. Guy Bannerman in his brief appearance makes the most of Martha's bluff husband. Third newcomer David Leyshon is hilarious as an upper class twit straight out of P.G. Wodehouse.
Director David Savoy carefully shades the reality that begins the play into the increasingly surreal musical dream-world to which Vicky succumbs and brings out the intriguing ambiguity of the ending. William Orlowski again proves a master at designing exciting, intricate choreography for a small stage. Judith Bowden's black Art Deco backdrop and futon-like bed do not really conjure up the "well-furnished, rather luxurious bedroom" the text specifies, but the unusual dressing table that can metamorphose into a number of different objects including a train compartment and a car is quite ingenious and captures the recombinatory nature of dreams. All is enhanced by Jeff Logue's wide range of lighting effects.
The real star of the production, however, is music director Paul Sportelli. Based on the scores for the play's three main songs--"Then", "Play Orchestra Play" and "You Were There" along with fragments of the charleston "In Pink"--Sportelli created the arrangements, reprises and underscorings required for almost three-fourths of the show. Sportelli's music is perfectly in tune with Coward's style and becomes the prime shaper of Vicky's dream-world.
"Shadow Play" is rare, experimental Coward last presented by the Festival back in 1971. No fan of Coward or of unusual musicals will want to miss it. One viewing is really not enough to savour all there is to this confection. In fact, directly after seeing it, I whipped round to box-office and bought tickets to see it again.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Patrick R. Brown.
2001-07-25
Shadow Play