✭✭✩✩✩

written by Michael O’Brien, directed by Neil Munro

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

May 27-October 29, 2006

"Hard to See"

The Shaw Festival’s current world premiere production of “The Invisible Man” is one of those projects whose point, like the play’s title character, is hard to see.  H.G. Wells’s original short novel of 1897 is a classic.  James Whale’s 1933 film based on it is also a classic.  Both can be experienced in less time, with less expense and with greater pleasure than Michael O’Brien’s lumbering, revisionist stage adaptation.  O’Brien’s purpose is confused.  If his goal is to adapt the novel for the stage, then why is at least half of it occupied with characters and events that do not appear in the novel?  Instead of “Adapted from the novel by H. G. Wells”, the programme should more accurately read “Variations on themes suggested by the novel of H. G. Wells”.  Besides that, the action is too unclear to appeal to children and too dull to appeal to adults.    

O’Brien uses only the bare bones of Wells’s novel.  A mysterious bandaged man takes lodgings above a tavern in the village of Iping.  He arouses increasing suspicion among the villagers until they discover his secret--that he had made himself invisible--and they hound him out of town.  As he travels through the country James Griffin, the Invisible Man, makes use of a tramp named Thomas Marvel, who eventually betrays him.  Griffin escapes and accidentally finds the home of a former schoolmate David Kemp.  Kemp, however, secretly alerts the police and the chase continues until the increasing deranged Griffin is caught.

This being a kind of “Boy’s Own” adventure tale, what is missing are any important female characters.  To remedy this perceived flaw, O’Brien does away with the tavern owner Mr. Hall to have Mrs. Hall run it on her own.  He makes Millie, Mrs. Hall’s “lymphatic” maid whom Wells mentions a few times in passing, into a major character and attributes her general slowness to react to a slowness of mind.  O’Brien’s most significant change is to provide Griffin with a love interest.  It’s true that R. C. Sheriff in his screen adaptation for James Whale also did so in the person of the invented Dr. Cranley’s daughter Flora.  But O’Brien goes far beyond this.  He gives Wells’s bachelor Dr. Kemp a wife, Catherine, who not only was at medical school with Kemp and Griffin but presented a brilliant paper on which Griffin’s further research in invisibility is based.  Griffin was in love with her but she chose to marry Kemp, leaving Griffin bitter and jealous and outraged that Catherine should throw away her promising medical career.  Lovers of politically correct rewrites, if no one else, should be delighted.  Not only that, but Catherine foregoes Victorian notions of confinement during pregnancy to take an active part in capturing Griffin.

As if making an invented character the second most important one in the play were not enough, O’Brien also radically changes the ending and Griffin’s personality.  In his author’s note, O’Brien says he does like the way Griffin is portrayed in the novel or in Whale’s film.  Rather than having a bad man become worse as in Wells or present him as a good man whose derangement is a side-effect of his invisibility potion as in the film, O’Brien wants to show a good man driven to desperation, based supposedly on Wells’s own life.  If this is so, why not then ditch the “Invisible Man” pretense and write a play just about Wells’s life? 

Not only is the plot askew but so is the design.  Judith Bowden lines the front of the Royal George stage with footlights and makes much use of old-fashioned painted drops and sets as if director Neil Munro were going to present the play as a 19th-century melodrama.  Yet, the modernized plot hardly chimes with a period presentation.  While Bowden’s period costumes are attractive, her sets are not.  The two-storey set dominating the first act shows a cozy pub below and Griffin’s room above, but it occupies only the stage left half of the stage with stage right totally empty.  To go to Griffin’s room, actors have to step off the set’s base to the stage floor and then step up to enter the staircase leading to his room.  After a while we have to wonder where the two missing walls of the pub are since people walk through them so often.  Griffin’s room above is too high.  The magic effects to show Griffin’s invisibility often take place in the very back of the room so if you’re sitting in the front half of the auditorium you don’t see what’s happening and if you sit in the back half you’re too far away. 

I saw the show more than two months after it officially opened and Marshall Magoon’s magic effects were still only creakily integrated into the show.  The best of these is near the end when the Invisible Man threatens Kemp with a knife that seems to float in mid-air.  Otherwise, the more effective portrayals of the character are purely theatrical.  The vision of a man-shaped void making its way slowly through the mist is haunting, and Griffin’s attacks are best shown through the cast’s great talent at mime.  Allan Cole’s music is good at suggesting the rustic feel of English village life but less impressive at creating suspense.  Kevin Lamotte’s lighting, however, is key in generating what little aura of gloom and the supernatural there is in the production. 

With such flaws the show would be hard to take if the acting were also poor.  Fortunately, it is not.  As the title character, Peter Krantz necessarily must act primarily through his voice alone.  It is miked and it’s too bad it could not be made to appear to come from the stage rather than the speakers on either side of the stage.  Yet, Krantz’s voice is rich and he conjures up through intonation a sense of Griffin’s misery and delusion greater than any lines he’s given.  Though they are stuck playing personifications of goodness and heroism, Jeff Meadows and Jenny L. Wright do what they can to make David and Catherine Kemp seem like real people with Wright giving Catherine a particularly attractive personality.

If there is one plus to O’Brien’s adaptation, it is that he has restored a character central to Wells’s novel but omitted in Whale’s film--and that is the tramp Mr. Thomas Marvel.  The fact that Griffin realizes that he needs a visible confederate to help him carry out his plans already shows up the flaws in Griffin’s notion that invisibility grants any useful power.  The scenes with Neil Barclay as Marvel are the best and most amusing in the play with Barclay depicting a man so inebriated that he can move with bizarre ease from thinking he hears voices to believing they emanate from a man he cannot see.  Barclay’s ability at mime is so good that we “see” exactly where the Invisible Man is better with him than with anyone else.

As regulars at the Coach and Horses, Michael Querin (Gould), Anthony Bekenn (Fearenside), Guy Bannerman (Henfry), Douglas E. Hughes (Huxter) are pretty much interchangeable as the local yokels.  Notable cameos includes Al Kozlik as the initially skeptical Dr. Cuss, David Leyshon as the vicar and science-enthusiast Mr. Bunting, Cameron MacDuffee as the comically unheroic Constable Jaffers, Bernard Behrens as the crotchety Mariner and David Schurmann as the clear-thing Colonel Adye.  Among the women Wendy Thatcher gives the publican Mrs. Hall a quirky mixture of the comic and sensible that is a constant pleasure.  Trish Lindstrom gives a fine portrait of the slightly dim Millie, who does finally prove that she may be slow but is not stupid. 

With such a range of characters so well played it’s a pity that the play itself is so poor.  Director Neil Munro and Artistic Director ought to have seen that when they read the script, so it is surprising they decided to lavish so much time, effort and expense on it to predictably so little purpose.  O’Brien’s adaptation is entertaining enough that it is not the crushing bore that “Lord of the Flies” was in 2000 or “Rashomon” in 1996.  Nevertheless, it is an adaptation so deliberately perverse and so unsure of its target audience that anyone who sees it will likely feel the need immediately to read Wells’s novel to find out the real story.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Peter Krantz and Jeff Meadows. ©2006 Andrée Lanthier.