Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
✭✭✭✩✩
by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 4-October 29, 2006
"Off the Mark”
The Shaw Festival’s fifth production of “Arms and the Man” is rather a disappointment. It certainly doesn’t measure up to the play’s last outing here in 1994 or to Stratford’s production in 1982. While the set design is a treat and there are some good performances, there are also some sub-par performances and flaws in the direction.
In this 1894 comedy we meet Raina Petkoff, a spoiled Bulgarian girl, who is betrothed to the narcissistic Major Sergius Saranoff. Both avow an ideal “higher love” to each other, but when the Swiss Captain Bluntschli, a mercenary for the enemy forces, bursts into Raina’s bedroom one night to escape pursuit, she soon falls for the man who carries chocolate instead of ammunition, her “chocolate cream soldier”. Meanwhile, Sergius seems keen on a bit “lower love” with the family servant Louka. Shaw neatly pits the realists Bluntschli and Louka versus the idealists Raina and Sergius.
Shaw’s comedy undermining heroism, patriotism and any sort of idealism associated with war ought to be particularly relevant just now. In director Jackie Maxwell hands, however, it comes off as a silly trifle. In part this is because she focusses so much on the play as a battle of the sexes that she misses the bigger picture. In part it lies in her misinterpretation of key characters. And in part it lies in her adding or playing up unnecessary physical gags as if she thought the play were not funny enough on its own.
The worst example of misinterpretation is Maxwell’s view of Sergius as a testosterone-flooded idiot. According to Shaw and to the Shaw Festival’s own programme notes by the late Ronald Bryden, Sergius is not meant to be a clown but an example of heroism that the world has outgrown. Bryden quotes Shaw that Sergius is a “movingly human figure whose tragi-comedy is the true theme of the play”. Instead of this, Maxwell has actor Mike Shara either constantly striking ridiculous poses or doing training exercises whenever he’s on stage. Sergius attraction to Louka is enough to undercut is alleged adherence to “higher love”, so all Maxwell’s added shtick, even though Shara performs it with gusto, is unnecessary and frequently distracts from what he is saying.
Another bizarre alteration is making Major Paul Petkoff, Raina’s father, into a drunkard. It’s true he asks for brandy in his coffee, but Maxwell has Peter Hutt make Petkoff’s first entrance as if already sloshed and proceed to empty an entire brandy bottle at breakfast in his first scene. In the text the comedy of Major Petkoff is over-confidence and narrow conservatism. To make him drunk misses a point crucial to the comedy and its meaning and in Hutt’s slurred delivery obscures many important lines. Maxwell also neglects several obvious bits of comic business in the text. The retrieval of Raina’s portrait from Petkoff’s coat is not as exciting as it should be with an inebriated Petkoff and Maxwell totally overlooks the long set-up joke about the Petkoffs’ “library” by focussing instead on their new electric bell to for servants.
The only part of the play that seems to engage Maxwell are the scenes between Louka and Nicola, where a woman prepared to do anything to rise above her station is being held down by a male’s conventional hierarchical world-view. These scenes she has Catherine McGregor and Peter Millard play as serious drama, and indeed they are the only scenes that seem to have some fire to them.
As for the rest of the cast, Patrick Galligan is an atypical Bluntschli. He plays the role not as a comedian, but as the attractive, eminently sensible, unsentimental rationalist he is supposed to be. In this, Galligan probably comes closest to what Shaw originally intended. Nora McLellan is very funny as Mrs. Petkoff, a woman with an absurdly high regard of herself as the epitome of fashion and culture in the supposed backwater that is Bulgaria. The show’s central liability is Diana Donnelly as Raina, certainly the least ethereal Raina seen so far at the Shaw. It is a one-note performance and that single note is unluckily an unvarying whine. Even at the end when Bluntschli finds her out, she doesn’t change her tone or demeanour. In a good production we are supposed to she her metamorphosis from gilr to woman. Here nothing happens.
Sue LePage presents Petkoffs’ home not as just a large house replete with folk-inspired elements that might pass for a mansion in a land devoid of grandeur. William Schmuck’s costumes, however, suggest that the Petkoffs actually are wealthy, even though they brag that they “go back twenty years”. Mrs. Petkoff’s gowns and turbans are humorously outré, but she has too many costume changes appropriate for the real level of wealth the Petkoffs are revealed to have, especially as compared to Bluntschli. Similarly, Schmuck makes Petkoff’s favourite old coat look brand new without any of the signs of wear and tear that men’s favourite robes or slippers are wont to have. To do this is to miss the visual counterpart to the play’s critique of the Petkoff family’s adherence to worn-out ideals.
An uninformed audience might enjoy the show for the superficial gags Maxwell adds to it, and indeed, Mike Shara is very funny, even if all his stage business obscures the point of his character. This production suggests that Maxwell, who can make a wonderfully nuanced experience of such a complex play like “The Magic Fire”, has not yet got the knack of how to direct Shaw.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Mike Shara and Diana Donnelly. ©David Cooper.
2006-09-11
Arms and the Man