Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✭✩✩
by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Alisa Palmer
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 12-October 7, 2007
"Shaw Doesn’t Need a Push"
Shaw wrote his second play, “The Philanderer”, in 1893 but it was not publicly performed until 1907. This is currently the Shaw’s fourth production of the play and only the second to include the fourth act Shaw later excised. When last seen in 1995 at the Court House Theatre directed by Jim Mezon, this frothy comedy was a light, very funny entertainment even including the fourth act. At the Royal George under director Alisa Palmer, the play doesn’t work nearly as well and seems long even in the three-act version. It’s hard to get the knack of directing Shaw and Palmer does not yet have it. Her attempt to make the play funnier by exaggerating two of the characters has the opposite effect.
The self-confessed philanderer of the title is Leonard Charteris. He thinks he has begun his first serious love affair with the young, widowed Grace Tranfield, a self-confessed “New Woman”, and proposes to her. The problem is that his previous romantic conquest, Julia Craven, who also claims to be a “New Woman”, will not give him up. In an attempt to escape from Julia, Charteris tries to manoeuvre Julia into marriage with the seriously misnamed Dr. Paramore. There is little secrecy to be had since all the characters are members of the Ibsen Club, a forward-looking private club for “unmanly men” and “unwomanly women”.
The performance of the evening is that of Ben Carlson as Charteris. In his twelve seasons at the Festival, he has become a master of delivering Shaw’s complex, paragraph-long sentences with amazing clarity and wit. You can appreciate his breath control and the subtlety of emphasis and phrasing in his speaking as much as if he were a singer. He makes Charteris such a dazzling figure that you forget, as do his conquests, what an egocentric rake he is. The counterweight to him is the serene Grace Tranfield of Deborah Hay. Unlike the emotional Julia or Julia’s mannish sister Sylvia, Grace most clearly lives up to the ideal of the “New Woman” who is ruled by reason not passion or pretense. Hay plays Grace with a wonderful sense of warmth and self-assurance.
Where Palmer errs is in pushing the parallel couple of Julia and Dr. Paramore to extremes. Nicole Underhay’s Julia starts out so big that there is no room for further development. One need only compare Underhay’s far more restrained Alma Winemiller in this year’s “Summer and Smoke” to this to see that her overemphatic delivery is a directorial decision. Julia is a potentially rich character. Trying to win Charteris back after he has affianced himself to someone else is an endeavour that even she at some level seems to know is hopeless. Why she should indulge in theatrical hysterics is unclear since that wins her more contempt than sympathy. Palmer seems to want Underhay to eliminate any hint of pathos in Julia’s behaviour with the result that the character appears inchoate and irritating rather than interesting.
In contrast, Palmer makes Peter Krantz’s Dr. Paramore worse than he should be. Paramore should have some attractions. How else could Julia seek to make Charteris jealous by paying him attention? Yet, Palmer and designer Judith Bowden conspire to make him look like the 19th-century equivalent of an adult geek with greasy hair and dumpy clothes. Palmer has Krantz emphasize Paramore’s mental preoccupation with his experiments overshadow the sincerity of his feelings for Julia. That the two should ever have anything to do with each other thus becomes highly unlikely. Rather than making the play funnier, the improbability of the situation makes us lose interest.
The rest of the cast is strong. Norman Browning is in his element as the grumbling Joseph Cuthbertson, father of Grace, who wonders what the younger generation is coming to. As Colonel Craven, father of Julia, Peter Hutt seems, comically, to be in a perpetually bad mood, and rightly so since Dr. Paramore has determined that the Colonel has only a year to live. Nicola Correia-Damude, as Julia’s sister Sylvia, a clichéd portrait of the “New Woman” who flaunts her liberation by dressing in man’s clothes and smoking, is a hearty contrast to Julia’s emotionalism.
Judith Bowden has created a handsome wood-panelled set that under Louise Guinand’s lighting and small changes of decoration serves as three very different locations. Flanking the stage are two statues of semi-clad women reinforcing in numerous ways the history of how men have idealized and objectified women and thus literally keeping the play’s surprisingly modern theme of gender construction constantly in view. The cleverest set is the Ibsen Club itself featuring a bust of the master and the prominent signs demanding “Silence”. Shaw may have been an avid supporter of Ibsen but he could still see the contradiction in dedicating a temple burdened with strict rules to a man who championed freedom.
From May 25 to July 15, the Shaw Festival performs the excised fourth act in which we meet the characters four years after the events of Act 3. The way that Palmer has directed the play seems entirely geared towards the four-act, not the three-act version. Her three-act version seems merely to stop short rather than conclude. With the characters of Julia and Dr. Paramore pushed to such extremes, we feel we need a further act to resolve the sense of paradox. That should not be the case. Since most people, as I did, will be seeing the three-act version, the director has to make it work on its own. After all, Shaw thought the three acts self-contained when he cut the fourth. My favourite “Philanderer” remains the 1995 production where Act 3 ended with what felt like a real if ironic conclusion and Act 4 functioned as a kind of wry epilogue for those who have a hankering to see what happens to fictional characters after the main story is over.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Deborah Hay and Ben Carlson. ©David Cooper.
2007-09-28
The Philanderer