Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✭✭✩
by St. John Hankin, directed by Christopher Newton
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
June 15-October 5, 2007
"An ‘Engagement’ Not to Be Missed"
In 2001 and again in 2002 the Shaw Festival had a major hit with “The Return of the Prodigal” (1905) by St. John Hankin (1869-1909). This year the Festival brings us a second Hankin play, “The Cassilis Engagement” (1907), that deserves as much success as the first. As with “Prodigal” former Shaw Artistic Director Christopher Newton is at the helm of an impeccably acted and designed production. Now having seen two of Hankin’s five plays, we can understand more fully why Hankin’s contemporaries felt his early death was such a blow to British drama.
The two plays complement each other--“Prodigal” subtitled “A Comedy for Fathers”, “Cassilis” “A Comedy for Mothers”. As with “Prodigal”, “Cassilis” shows that Hankin’s style of comedy is very special, halfway between the brittle wittiness of Oscar Wilde and the social satire of Shaw but shot through with the kind of melancholy one finds in Chekhov that gives the comedies unexpected depth. In “Cassilis”, Hankin takes the typical structure of comedy and turns it upside down. The usual plot of comedy shows how a young couple defies their parents’ objections to get married. Here the play begins with the engagement of a young couple from different classes but whose parents seem to support their decision. The action, though still comic, then works from engagement to breakup.
Young Geoffrey Cassilis, the widowed Mrs. Cassilis’ only son and heir to a vast country estate and fortune, has fallen in love with Ethel Borridge, a lowly shopgirl he met during an omnibus accident in London. Mrs. Cassilis’ friends and relations in the country around the family seat at Milverton are appalled both at the engagement and at Mrs. Cassilis’ seeming approval of it. “Seeming” is indeed the key word. Mrs. Cassilis is afraid that if she were to let her true feelings of opposition be known and object openly to the engagement, Geoffrey might marry the girl out of spite. Instead, Mrs. Cassilis’ strategy is to invite Ethel and her mother to stay with them in the country to see if the lowborn city girl can really stand the dull kind of life her fiancé will live.
The excellent cast finds Goldie Semple in superb form as Mrs. Cassilis. She shows a steely strength of will both when feigning unconcern before friends and relations and when lavishing kindness on Ethel and her mother. Semple never allows her performance to slip into cheap irony. Instead, she subtly communicates the mounting toll such extended pretence takes on Mrs. Cassilis. As Mrs. Borridge, a mother with a different agenda, Mary Haney is hilarious as a fish who doesn’t seem to realize that she is out of water. This role, too, could be grossly overdone, but Haney keeps her character from ever turning into a caricature. She is, as always, adept at physical comedy, and the scene where she silently strives in vain to feign interest in a Schubert Lied sung in German is comic acting at its highest level. In an amazing turnabout at the end, she reveals so much rage and bitterness in the character that this person who had been such a source of comedy suddenly becomes a source of pathos.
In her best-ever performance at the Shaw, Trish Lindström shows us a young woman who, like Mrs. Cassilis, devotes all her energy to maintaining appearances. Ethel has been to a finishing school and Lindström carefully distinguishes between the high-class accent Ethel uses with Geoffrey and his family and the low-class accent she uses when alone with her mother. Slipping accidentally into the wrong accent only shows the strain such pretence is taking on her. With great nuance Lindström shows how Ethel’s highly ambiguous attitude we see at first gradually hardens into one that no one can control.
David Leyshon could easily have made Geoffrey into yet another of the many British twits he has played over the years, but, significantly, he does not. His Geoffrey is authentically in love with Ethel and love, not dimwittedness, blinds him to the growing evidence of how ill suited she is to his kind of life. Hankin seems to have written the role of Geoffrey’s aunt, the Countess of Remenham, as an homage to Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, and Donna Belleville plays the character as if she had simply stepped from “Earnest” into this play with all the immense self-importance and spouting of poisoned aphorisms one would expect. Patrick Galligan has an important cameo as the Countess’s dissolute brother Major Warrington, whose first name “Algernon” must also be a deliberate allusion to “Earnest”. Since he is known to frequent the lowlife of London, he immediately recognizes Ethel for what she is and encourages her to be herself. This is the handsome Galligan at his suavest and he carries off the part beautifully. Charlotte Gowdy, as Lady Mabel Venning, the Countess’s daughter, like everybody else except the Countess, practices dissembling, but in her case it is more poignant. We see from Gowdy’s subtle body language that Mabel has always loved Geoffrey even when she directly denies it. Laurie Paton as Lady Marchmont, Mrs. Cassilis’ sister and confidante, makes the role interesting by showing how the initially indignant character gradually gets caught up in her sister’s game. Lorne Kennedy is an intentionally dull rector and Wendy Thatcher his scatterbrained wife.
Newton captures exactly the right tone by emphasizing that this is not a farce but a comedy of character. The play is an ensemble piece and it is hard to imagine a troupe better equipped that the Shaw company to make it run so smoothly and to get so much out of even the simplest lines. Newton is correct in ensuring that the ending of the play is disturbing rather than funny since Hankin’s critique of class cuts both ways. William Schmuck’s design reinforces Newton’s approach. The set and the main furniture are made of white, square steel rods. This rigidity can be disguised various ways as indoor or outdoor furniture but we are aware through the cleverly choreographed scene changes that underlying all appearances is a structure that is both rigid and cage-like.
Again we are in debt to the Shaw for bringing an undeservedly forgotten work to light. We can only wonder if more Hankin is in the offing. Till then, this is an “Engagement” you won’t want to miss.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: David Leyshon and Goldie Semple. ©David Cooper.
2007-08-30
The Cassilis Engagement