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<b>by Oscar Wilde, directed by Richard Monette
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
August 11-October 27, 2007
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"Not So Wilde"
Oscar Wilde’s comedy “An Ideal Husband” is the last play directed by Richard Monette during his tenure as Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival. Many will heave a sigh of relief--not because the show is good (it isn’t) but it is the last. It serves as depressing testimony to Monette’s inadequacies as a director that have marred virtually every show he has helmed over the past fourteen years.
His production of “The Taming of the Shrew” back in 1988 was brilliant and made his name as a director. His “As You Like It” from 1990 set in Quebec was undervalued at the time but caught the melancholy air of that work beautifully. Who knew that he had only two good productions in him? From then on, serious plays he directed became tired and wan and comedies became increasingly jigged out in variations of the gimmicks first used in “Shrew”. The climax of the latter is his “Comedy of Errors” now playing at the Avon Theatre where Shakespeare’s play can barely be seen for the forest of shtick. “The Ideal Husband”, strangely enough, suffers from the listlessness he usually brings to serious plays.
“The Ideal Husband” is the first time that the Stratford Festival has staged any Wilde other than “The Importance of Being Earnest”. Though both plays appeared in 1895, “Husband” still retains certain trappings of melodrama from Wilde’s earlier plays that he did not totally expunge until “Earnest”. Unlike “Earnest”, “Husband” presents a serious story set in the trivial but deadly world of epigram-spouting wits.
At the centre is Sir Robert Chiltern, an immensely wealthy, happily married Member of the House of Commons and Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Into his life steps the unscrupulous Mrs. Cheveley, who has returned to England after the death of her lover Baron Arnheim. Mrs. Cheveley knows the dirty secret of Chiltern’s wealth. Arnheim had persuaded Chiltern to sell a Cabinet secret and they made a financial killing in acting on this classified information. Mrs. Cheveley plans to expose Sir Robert’s past if he does not drum up government support for a fraudulent construction scheme in which she has heavily invested. Since Lady Chiltern believes Sir Robert to be “the ideal husband”, a model of virtue in both public and private life, Mrs. Cheveley could destroy not only Sir Robert’s career but also his marriage.
Balancing Sir Robert’s moral dilemma is the ebullient amoralism of his friend Lord Arthur Goring, who may as well be an earlier avatar Algernon Moncrieff from “Earnest”. He is the prime dispenser of epigrams in the play including such gems as “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance”. The main question in this subplot is whether Sir Robert’s sister Mabel can woo Lord Goring away from his life of irresponsible bachelorhood.
The task of a director is to make the two very different tones of the piece work together. Anyone who saw Duncan McIntosh’s production at the Shaw Festival in 1995 will know this can be done. The two wittiest characters are Lord Goring and Mrs. Cheveley, with the difference that Lord Goring’s amorality is only a pose whereas Mrs. Cheveley’s is not. A good director could make much the Wildean theme of wit as a kind of mask. Richard Monette, however, does nothing at all to relate the two aspects of the play or even to encourage a uniform playing style from the cast. In fact, it seems that the actors have been free to choose whatever style they wish. This is a mistake in any play but in a play so concern with style as Wilde’s it is disastrous. After all, Wilde once said that in all important and unimportant matters, “style, not sincerity is the essential”. Here, we get neither.
Only a few actors--Sara Topham as Mabel Chiltern, Chick Reid as Lady Bracknell-like Lady Markby, Severn Thompson as the Countess of Basildon, Bruce Dow as Gorling’s butler Phipps and especially Brian Tree as Lord Goring’s father the Earl of Caverson--have any sense of the refined artificiality required in a Wildean comedy. Otherwise, Tom McCamus’s dour naturalistic style as Sir Robert clashes with it completely. Dixie Seatle makes Mrs. Cheveley about one hundred years too modern but she is the only actor who gives her character any life. As Lady Chiltern, Brigit Wilson is perfectly dreadful, without a clue how to make this idealist believable and given to the kind of wailing one might expect of a Sicilian peasant, not an English aristocrat. Monette directs David Snelgrove as Lord Gorling to deliver each of his witticisms directly to the audience from the centre of Festival stage as if they nothing to do with the play. Snelgrove makes Gorling so pleased with himself and so empty-headed he is hardly the powerful match for Mrs. Cheveley he has to be to make the play work. Such disparities of acting styles suggests no clear directorial point of view and the play, which ought to be fascinating, comes off as a tedious jumble of disconnected scenes.
The lack of a unified style is present in the unattractive costume designs of François St-Aubin. St-Aubin makes one of the more bizarre remarks ever to appear in Stratford programme notes. He claims that he did not design period costumes because “I have no choice: I live in 2007. We can’t make an actress of today look like 1890. She spends all day in flip-flops--and then has to play a countess. She will not walk in that type of corset .... We will have to create the costume so she can wear it.” Not only does St-Aubin confess to a fairly major deficiency in his abilities as a designer (others do manage to design period costumes, after all), but he also shows little knowledge of acting. The result is costumes in a mishmash of styles with some truly awful colour combinations for the women’s gowns. Add in the indifferent sets of Michael Gianfrancesco and the indifferent lighting of Kevin Fraser, and there is little on stage to intrigue the eye or ear.
With the cast thus left to its own devices by the director and designers, it’s no surprise that an air of pointlessness creeps into the production. No one seems to know why they are there or how their parts relate to each other. At least Monette’s gimmicky “Comedy of Errors” aimed to be fun. Here, Monette seems basically to have given up on the play. Obviously, if he has ceased to care about the work, something the performances and design certainly reflect, then why should we?
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Brian Tree, Sean Arbuckle and Sara Topham. ©David Hou.
<b>2007-09-03</b>
<b>An Ideal Husband</b>