✭✭✭✭✩

by J.M. Synge, directed by Micheline Chevrier

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

July 3-September 5, 2004

"McLellan Makes This Wedding Sing"

The Shaw Festival’s first lunchtime play of the season is a seldom-performed one-act comedy by John Millington Synge, author of that masterpiece of Irish drama “The Playboy of the Western World” seen at the Shaw in 1996.  While the play deals with the larger issue of the conflict of nature and civilization, the most immediate impression it makes is as a rather rude anti-clerical satire. 

The show’s chief joy is character of Mary Byrne, one of many strong, vital women who inhabit Irish drama.  Mary is the mother of the itinerant tinker Michael whose wife in all but name is Sarah Casey.  Sarah wants the priest of the nearby village to marry her and Michael so they will be respectable, but the priest wants to charge them a fee for this higher than they can afford.  Mary sees no need for her son to married, especially if is costs money.  Thereupon a physical and verbal battle ensues between the “pagan” tinkers and the priest on the value, if any, of religion and the priesthood to common people at all. 

Nora McLellan’s performance as Mary is hilarious and unforgettable.  Mary is inebriated throughout the show and McLellan, made-up to look like a flea-infested hag, wonderfully catches all of Mary’s varying states of consciousness from blissful exuberance to sudden meanness, sodden wiliness and uncontrolled rage.  She’s like a female Falstaff without the pretence to grandeur.

William Vickers plays her nemesis the priest.  Smug, sanctimonious and bigoted, he represents the clergy as its worst, wearing his fine vestments as armour and using his words as weapons, futile though they are again a force of nature like Mary Byrne.  David Leyshon plays Michael as a sullen man who keeps to himself but has an inner anger that can suddenly burst out when prodded.  As Sarah Casey, Trish Lindstrom, looking wild and animal-like, starts out rather too big, leaving her little room for the larger emotional scenes later on.

Micheline Chevrier has directed the piece with an admirable sense of rising tension that explodes into the all-out brawl at the end.  Deeter Schurig has created costumes for the tinkers that look so lived-in that you can easily imagine they smell as bad as the priest says they do.  Schurig’s set design suggests both the naturalistic and symbolic at once.  In a nice touch a hanging bowl we might have thought represented the moon is taken down and revealed as merely a bowl, though it is Sarah Casey, so affected by the moon, who takes it down.  Peter Debreceni’s dim light settings create an atmosphere both natural and mysterious.

Synge’s play was published in 1907 but not performed at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre until 1971 because of its controversial priest-baiting.  We can see it now as a tightly written exploration of themes Synge would later develop in greater detail elsewhere but anchored by a great central character.  With Nora McLellan as that character you won’t want to miss it.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Opera News,  March 2005..

Photo: David Leyshon. ©2004 Shaw Festival.