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by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Neil Munro

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

July 3-October 9, 2004

"A Super Show"

“Man and Superman” is one of Shaw’s most audacious plays and it receives an equally audacious production directed by Neil Munro and featuring an outstanding performance by Ben Carlson as John Tanner. 

“Man and Superman” is really two plays in one.  The one bearing the main title is a three-act comedy comprising Act 1, 2 and 4 of the play.   The second, titled “Don Juan in Hell”, makes up Act 3 and is a two-hour dream sequence in the form of a philosophical debate.  The two plays were first performed separately--“Superman” in 1905”, “Don Juan” in 1907.  In 1962 “Don Juan”, in fact, was the first-ever play presented in what would be called the Shaw Festival the next year.  There are only eleven performances from  June 26 to July 25 when the entire four-act play is presented.  This takes six hours including two intermissions and a one-hour lunch break.  The level of this production is so high that for any Shavian or dedicated theatre-goer this full version is a must-see.  Yet, since the plot does not depend on the philosophical excursus of Act 3, the three-act version is still warmly recommended to anyone visiting the Festival.

The plot of the three-act comedy is actually quite straightforward.  Ann Whitefield’s father has just died.  His will has named both Ann’s grandfather, Roebuck Ramsden, and the notorious revolutionary Jack Tanner as her guardians despite the fact the two men cannot stand each other.  The poet Octavius Robinson hopelessly adores Ann, but she has set her sights on Tanner.  In a parallel plot, Octavius’ sister Violet has secretly married but refuses to name her husband leading to recriminations and much wild speculation.

Shaw transforms this simple plot into a play of ideas by contrasting Ramsden as a representative of middle class morality with Tanner, who seeks to base all relationships on truth and not the lies, such as the sanctity of marriage, that the middle class uses to protect itself from reality.  At the same time the battle between Ann and Tanner becomes a battle between man and womankind in general, the misogynist Tanner convinced that the domesticating goals of women divert men from self-realization. 

The “Don Juan in Hell” sequence expands the play’s meaning even further by identifying the characters with their counterparts in the Don Juan legend as found in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”.  Jack Tanner is the libertine Don Juan Tenorio, Ann becomes Doña Ana and Ramsden the Commendatore who argue their case before the Devil himself.  Don Juan is bored with Hell which is dedicated to pleasure and beauty and wants to go to Heaven.  The Commendatore is bored with Heaven and seeks entrance to Hell.  In the course of their debates Shaw gives us, via Juan/Tanner a detailed account of the “Life-Force” which is shaping mankind to evolve to greater and greater consciousness, towards, in fact, the Nietzschean “Superman” who will have no need for the petty conventions that presently confine men’s aspirations. 

Neil Munro’s direction follows up on his deconstructivist production of Shaw’s “Misalliance” last year.  In “Misalliance” actors actually took to two lecterns on stage to deliver some of Shaw’s more didactic passages and the stage could be entered through doors or just as often through revolving walls.  In “Man and Superman” designer Peter Hartwell has created another non-naturalistic set.  Modern bent-metal chairs and footstools represent everything from chairs to benches to car seats to rocks.  The painted backdrop for the first two acts is on rollers and winds up to the next scene.  Munro has the stage hands change the set for the next scene in front of the audience before each intermission.  He has each of the actors appear in silhouette on the backdrop before making their first appearance as if to illustrate, as is so often said, that Shaw’s two-dimensional characters only come alive when on stage.  Though the actors wear long coats of the Edwardian period, they have modern hairstyles highlighted with coloured streaks, suggesting that these people are modern thinkers discovered in the trappings of an earlier era.  Kevin Lamotte’s lighting is appropriately more expressionistic than naturalistic.  Composer Paul Sportelli reinforces the “Don Giovanni” references by giving the characters their own entrance music derived from the opera. 

Despite Shaw’s extraordinarily detailed naturalistic descriptions of place and character in his stage directions, a non-naturalistic presentation benefits the play by underscoring its artifice, something Shaw often does himself in the text.  In “Man and Superman”, where so much of the discussion involves the illusions men choose to live by, it makes perfect sense to emphasize the world on stage as a theatrical illusion.

The play has been ideally cast from top to bottom.  John Tanner is the longest role in any English-language play.  After seeing Carlson so effortlessly subsume this character, you’ll have no doubt that he is one of the finest actors of his generation.  He accomplishes the great feat of making Tanner speak passionately from his own beliefs rather than seem merely the author’s mouthpiece.  Carlson deliciously captures the tension and irony in Tanner, a man who sees so well the flaws in conventional thought but has so little insight into his own emotions.  Indeed, as Carlson plays it, we can’t help wondering whether the fervour of his incessant talking, commented on in the play, does not correlate with pent-up sexual energy.

Fiona Byrne has played the innocent so often it’s a pleasure to see her here as a seductress.  She makes the most of Ann’s own ironic habit of verbally transforming all her ardent desires into forms of duty.  The interplay of her Ann and Carlson’s Tanner is like that of Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick, except that this Beatrice has been after Benedick from the start.  Evan Buliung is hilarious as Octavius, the oversensitive poet she rejects, who falls for every form of sentimentality going.  Patrick Galligan is excellent as Tanner’s no-nonsense chauffeur Henry, whose very presence elegantly demonstrates how dependent the upper class is on the lower.                      

David Schurmann’s Roebuck Ramsden is one of the easily outraged conservative gentleman he so often plays and Schurmann delivers the immaculate, expertly timed comic performance one has come to expect.  Lisa Norton and Graeme Somerville are delightful as the secondary lovers Violet and Hector, Norton making her part stronger, Somerville his role subtler, than one might guess simply from the text.  Benedict Campbell scores a comic coup as Mendoza the lovesick bandit leader of Act 3.  His overblown delivery already marks Mendoza as someone more to ridicule than fear even before he launches into his hopelessly uninventive love poetry.                

In its shorter version “Man and Superman” is an ideal show to discover the many virtues of Shaw the playwright and of Shaw the festival.  However, anyone already hooked on both won’t want to miss the full six-hour extravaganza and will find this ultimate brain-tickling comedy passes by all too quickly.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Fiona Byrne, Benedict Campbell, David Schurmann and Ben Carlson.

©2004 Andrée Lauthier.