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by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Jim Mezon

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

May 26-October 7, 2006

"True Enough to Be Very Good"

This is the fourth time the Shaw Festival has mounted Shaw’s surreal comedy “Too True to Be Good” and it is in almost every way superior to the play’s last outing in 1994.  The play’s unusual structure may have puzzled critics in 1932, but now it seems daring.  The wide range of topics it covers dealing with the dissolution of all certainties and despair for the future strikes a very strong chord today.  And under director Jim Mezon the play has never been funnier.

In his Preface, Shaw described the three-part structure of the play as funny in the beginning, serio-comic in the middle and “a torrent of sermons” at the end.  This self-awareness, including Shaw’s knowledge of his own penchant for sermonizing, is one of the many playful aspects of the piece that make it seem so modern.  Starting with the title, the play is based on series of reversals of expectations.  The play begins with the speech of a Microbe who has become sick from the illness of his nameless host Patient.  The “sickly” Patient has become ill and remains so because of the “care” of her mother, Mrs. Mopply, who has already lost several children to illness.  The Patient’s night nurse (aka Susan Simpkins aka “Sweetie”) turns out to be a thief and lets in another thief (aka Aubrey Bagot aka “Popsy”) who plans to steal her jewels.  Rather than being alarmed, the Patient is so anxious to get away from her mother she suggests that the two thieves kidnap her and sell her jewels to pay for their getaway as an escape for the thieves and a chance finally to experience life for the Patient.  The three end up in a sunny, unnamed, far-flung outpost of the British Empire, nominally under the command of Colonel Tallboys, who would rather paint watercolours, but which is actually controlled by the amazing efforts of a Private Napoleon Alexander Trotsky Meek, whose given names suggest the power that his family name and outer demeanour seem to hide. 

Here the two thieves, one an ordained minister, find that leisure is not all it’s cracked up to be and the Patient is disappointed by life itself.  None of the three, however, is as cynical as the Elder, Aubrey’s father, a confirmed atheist, who appears in the last act and is convinced the world is about to end. As the Elder tells us:  “The universe of Isaac Newton, which has been an impregnable citadel of modern civilization for three hundred years, has crumbled like the walls of Jericho before the criticism of Einstein. …  Nothing can save us from a perpetual headlong fall into a bottomless abyss but a solid footing of dogma; and we no sooner agree to that than we find that the only trustworthy dogma is that there is no dogma.”  Since the play was written in 1932 his cynicism seems prophetic.  Besides that, Shaw brings up the conflict between what he calls the “higher centre” and the “lower centre”, the mind and the body, or more specifically, intellect and sex.  As Aubrey says, “Since the war the lower centres have become vocal. And the effect is that of an earthquake. For they speak truths that have never been spoken before--truths that the makers of our domestic institutions have tried to ignore.”  The absurdist humour combined with such startlingly relevant discussions makes for an intellectually invigorating evening. 

Director Jim Mezon starts the play in the right mode of fantasy by prefacing the action with a scene in which black-clad actors circle the sleeping Patient with various objects that recur in the course of the play.  This immediately sets up the action as the fevered dream of the Patient and Mezon plays on this unreality throughout.  A large conch shell, for example, is used as if it were a gramophone.  Alan Brodie’s lighting is crucial in establishing the aura of unreality of the Patient’s room, the blazing heat of the British outpost and the spiritual gloom of the ending.  Kelly Wolf’s costumes capture the nature of each character but she exercises her imagination most freely in the harem garb for the escaped Patient and in the female thief’s comic view of what a countess might wear.  She makes the Microbe look thoroughly disgusting, rather more like a ball of radioactive mucus than any bacterium.  Costuming the Microbe as a thief as in 1994 also helped draw a parallel with the Patient’s Nurse and her companion.       

Mezon has drawn exactly the right level of exaggerated playing from the cast, heightened enough so preserve the air of fantasy but not so forced that we disregard the characters as abstractions.  The one exception is Williams Vickers as the Microbe, who tends to overplay his part through loud whining.  I much preferred the sly, quieter unsavouriness of George Dawson’s Microbe in 1994.

Otherwise, the cast is uniformly good, fully aware that this kind of play is funnier the more the characters take the action absolutely seriously.  Mary Haney is hilarious as the over-solicitous Mrs. Mopply whose only source of attention comes from having a perpetually sickly child.  Nicole Underhay is a delight as the Patient, making her profound disillusionment with freedom and adventure very funny.  One of her character’s most unusual realizations is that “We do nothing but convert good food into bad manure”--not quite a topic we associate with Shaw.

As the two would-be criminals, Kelli Fox and Blair Williams are a treat.  Fox, obviously relishing the chance to play such an overtly comic role, is especially funny when the low-born Susan Simpkins attempts to play a foreign countess, using an accent that wanders all over the map of Europe.  Williams’s deft characterization turns out to be the mainstay of the action.  Indeed, his depiction of sententious seriousness befuddled by the incomprehensibility of reality pretty much summarizes the attitude of the whole play.

Benedict Campbell is a wonderfully pompous Colonel Tallboys, good at making class distinctions but nothing else, while Andrew Bunker has a fine turn as the indispensably ultra-efficient but self-effacing Private Meek.  Graeme Somerville has the most serious role as Sergeant Fielding, a soldier in a crisis of faith because he finds the two books that have guided his life, the Bible and “Pilgrim’s Progress”, no longer answer his questions.  Norman Browning fortunately does not play the Elder as loony geezer but rather as a baleful prophet dragged down by his own cynicism.  This provides an excellent parallel to his son, the optimistic Aubrey, who gives a long sermon at the end of the play “that we have outgrown our religion, outgrown our political system, outgrown our own strength of mind and character” from which the characters in ones and twos sneak away ot leave him alone with his preaching.

Of the two plays by Shaw on offer at the Festival, “Arms and the Man” may be better known, but Jim Mezon and his cast have made this rarity both funnier and more intellectually rewarding.  When quirks in a play like “Too True” have been captured so well, you don’t want to wait twelve years for it to come around again.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: William Vickers (as The Microbe) and Nicole Underhay. ©David Cooper.