✭✭✭✭✭

by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, directed by Joseph Ziegler

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

May 5-October 7, 2006

"Tara Rosling Triumphs in ‘The Heiress’"

“The Heiress”, now playing at the Shaw Festival, is a fine production in every way and features a superb performance in the title role by Tara Rosling.  The play is one of the few adaptations of a novel so thoroughly dramatic that it has found a life of its own on the stage.  The source, Henry James’s novel “Washington Square” (1880), provided the adaptors Ruth and Augustus Goetz with their single greatest success.  Their 1947 adaptation captures the ambiguities of James’s tale and still packs a powerful emotional punch.

In the play as in the novel Catherine Sloper has been brought up by her father, a wealthy New York doctor, after her mother’s death in childbirth.  Dr. Sloper has intended that Catherine should become a replacement for the wife Catherine “killed” as he thinks, but his constant reminders to Catherine of how she falls short of her mother in every way has brought about just the opposite.  She is painfully shy, awkward and completely unworldly.  When Morris Townsend, a distant relation of her cousin’s fiancé, meets her, he immediately falls in love with her and within two weeks proposes marriage, a marriage staunchly opposed by Dr. Sloper, who believes the penniless Townsend is simply after Catherine’s money.

Director Joseph Ziegler, who played Townsend himself in Toronto in 1986, moves the action along at a slow, inexorable pace that vitiates any whiff of melodrama and allows the tension to build naturally to the four devastating scene endings that punctuate the second act.  He draws highly detailed performances from the whole cast, all marked with a sense of restraint that suits both mid-19th-century upper-class decorum and heightens the impression of ambiguity since what said is often no clear guide to what is felt or intended.

As Catherine, Tara Rosling gives a brilliant performance.  For the first two thirds of the play she shows us a young woman who has been so oppressed by her father’s dominance and so worn down by his constant criticism that she can barely speak or act for fear of doing the wrong thing.  Inevitably, this hesitancy leads her to do the wrong thing all the time which only leads to further criticism.  Every aspect of Rosling’s Catherine shows the crippling effect of her upbringing--her haunted look, her minimal gestures, her wooden posture.  Any natural reaction has been drummed out of her.  Yet, under Townsend’s influence we see her gradually begin to bloom despite these constraints.  When Catherine realizes she is unloved the pain Rosling communicates is almost unbearable.  Her metamorphosis to poise, self-possession and cruelty by the end is remarkable.  It’s marvelous to see a young actress cover such a wide dramatic arc with such supreme control.

The rest of the cast is also excellent.  Mike Shara gives one of his best-ever performances as Townsend.  He manages to keep us in doubt about Townsend’s true motives right until the end of the play.  Does he love Catherine for herself or her money?  Even when we suspect that Catherine’s money plays a large part in his attraction to her, Shara plays the character with such ardour and sincerity that we find it as hard as Catherine’s Aunt Penniman to believe that his motivation is solely mercenary.

Michael Ball is well cast as Catherine’s father.  He shows his devotion to his patients that makes him a good doctor and the devotion to his dead wife’s memory that reveals an unquenchable inner pain.  But once we realize that this latter devotion has turned his “care” for Catherine into disgust and hatred, we begin to wonder whether he or Townsend is the greater blight on her life.

Donna Belleville plays Catherine’s Aunt Penniman, the only one who can freely communicate with Catherine, Dr. Sloper and Townsend.  Partially this is because they each regard her as innocuous, but Belleville reveals towards the end that even beneath Aunt Penniman’s smoothing tones and solicitude lie surprisingly harsh opinions.

As Mrs. Montgomery, Townsend’s sister, Catherine McGregor is able to assume a frankness of attitude that gives away nothing to Dr. Sloper but what he wants to believe.  In smaller roles, Nora McLellan as Aunt Penniman’s sister, Jessica Lowry as her daughter and Henry Judge as her fiancé bring with them the fresh air of normality and a human naturalness so lacking in the Sloper household. 

Christina Poddubiuk has created one of those realistic sets so beautifully proportioned and well appointed one wishes one could just move in.  Her costumes accurately reflect mid-19th-century American fashion while also being true to the characters.  Catherine is dressed primarily in an indefinable mauve-grey and Townsend cuts a handsome figure without looking flashy.  Louise Guinand cast an ominously cold light over all the scenes.

With its beautiful physical production, its highly detailed acting and its brilliant central performance, “The Heiress” is one of the must-sees of this year’s Shaw Festival.        

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Michael Ball and Tara Rosling. ©David Cooper.