Reviews 2001
Reviews 2001
✭✭✭✭✩
by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Todd Hammond
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 5-September 22, 2001
“Wilde Shading Into Ionesco”
“Fanny’s First Play” (1911) had the longest initial run of any play by Bernard Shaw. The current production at the Shaw Festival, the third in the company’s history, makes clear why this should have been while proving that the work is still immensely enjoyable today. The play is an unabashed comedy with layer upon layer of satire building up to the point where virtually everything anyone says has one or more barbs attached. Todd Hammond, in his first major directing assignment at the Shaw, has been given a dream cast for this play which they bring off with great panache.
In the Induction to the play we meet the eccentric Count O’Dowda, who is so disgusted with the crassness of England and the modern age that he has moved to Venice where he lives and dresses as if it were still the 18th century. Although he has striven to keep his daughter Fanny unaware of the real world, he has sent her away to his own university, Cambridge. There she has written a play. To fulfill her wish he has hired professional actors to perform it and invited four London critics to see it in a private performance. Little does he suspect that the play will be an exposé of the futility of parental control of a child’s experience and a satire on the notion of respectability. In the comically heavy-handed way of a novice playwright, Fanny introduces us to two families, the Gilbeys and the Knoxes, who each have to deal with the shame that their own carefully reared child has spent a fortnight in jail and has kept company with the most unsuitable kind of person. Both families are brought together in a conclusion filled with surprises where conventional morality is turned upside down. In the Epilogue we learn the verdicts of the four critics and Fanny’s father on Fanny's first play.
Shaw's play is a delightful confection. Not only does he take aim at his usual targets of British hypocrisy and adulation of hierarchy, but also satirizes low-budget theatricals, dramatic conventions, theatre criticism and even himself. Without its frame Fanny’s play’s strict symmetry, epigrams and topsy-turvy finale make it seem very much like Oscar Wilde shading into Eugene Ionesco. Hammond and designer Teresa Przybylski have highlighted the proto-absurdism of the play to great effect so that the Gilbeys and the Knoxes seem like early versions of Ionesco’s Smiths and Martins. Przybylski has costumed the two sets of parents in reversed colour patterns to make them seem interchangeable and Hammond has the same furniture used for both households. Przybylski has made the Count, the critics and other not involved in the play look very much like caricatures by Cruikshank. And her set where two odd neoclassical statues become supports for the impromptu stage curtain cleverly reinforces the relation of Induction to Fanny’s play. Kevin Lamotte has contributed the witty lighting effects.
The cast is uniformly excellent. Hammond has drawn from them, as is necessary at the intimate Court House Theatre, finely detailed performances. Indeed, there are innumerable details you may find yourself savouring long after the show is over. David Schurmann (Count O’Dowda) displays his mastery once again at making even the most fanciful character believable. Severn Thompson makes clear the subtle distinction between Fanny, nervous on her own but filled with conviction, and Margaret Knox, the born-again realist in her play. Peter Millard and Nora McLellan are absolutely hilarious as proper Mr. and Mrs. Gilbey. They alone among those in Fanny’s play give us the sense of actors acting and bringing their own routines to bear on a brand new work. This added nuance gives their performances an extra fillip of delectability.
Roger Rowland and Donna Belleville are fine as Mr. and Mrs. Knox, and, though lacking the added nuance of her counterpart, Belleville makes the repetitively pious Mrs. Knox deliciously humorous character. One may be surprised to see Peter Krantz cast as the Gilbeys’ butler Juggins, but as it soon becomes clear he is perfect at making a Jeeves-like composure in face of the increasingly odd behaviour those around him into a rich source of humour. Simon Bradbury (Duvallet), with a slightly wandering accent, achieves the difficult feat of not making a caricature of an impassioned Frenchman. Robert Benson (Cecil Savoyard) shows us a proudly stodgy character who is unaware he is precisely the kind of philistine Count O'Dowda left England to avoid.
Caroline Cave and Matthew Edison in their first season at the Shaw are both impressive. Edison gives the erring Bobby Gilbey an imperfectly insouciant air while Cave makes his plucky friend Dora, a "daughter of joy" as Duvallet says, seem like a foretaste of Eliza Doolittle. Among the critics (who include George Dawson, Jeff Meadows and Todd Witham), all ready to abandon their principles when faced with a pretty authoress, William Vickers stands out as the self-important but perspicacious Mr. Trotter.
This is Shaw at his funniest and most accessible. The Festival last did this play in 1987. Given the regular rotation in which Shaw’s plays appear at the Festival, you won’t want to wait another 14 years to see it, especially when the present production is so well done it bursts with vitality and humour on every side.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Costume sketch for Cecil Savoyard. ©2001 Teresa Przybylski.
2001-08-14
Fanny’s First Play