✭✭✭✭✩

by Willian Congreve, directed by Peter Hinton

Soulpepper Theatre Company/National Arts Centre,

Young Centre, Toronto

July 4-August 2, 2008

William Congreve’s masterpiece The Way of the World (1700) is often called one of the greatest comedies in English, yet it is infrequently produced.  The complex language, the convoluted plot and the dominant tone of cynicism all work to make the play more respected than liked.  Fortunately for theatre-lovers, along comes a Soulpepper-NAC coproduction directed with such clarity by Peter Hinton that it should win legions of converts to Congreve.

In Congreve’s world men and women are like two separate tribes who unite in marriage only to increase status or power but never for love.  Even the young lovers are motivated as much by money as love.  Mirabell (Mike Shara) wants to marry Millamant (Caroline Cave), but unless he can gain the blessing of her aunt Lady Wishfort (Tanja Jacobs), who loathes him, he will not receive her full dowry.         

Hinton has updated the setting to the 1950s, a suitably parallel era of wealth and hypocrisy, that immediately makes the male-female power struggles more accessible.  Shara catches exactly the right tone of ironic forthrightness and makes Mirabell, schemer though he is, the most sympathetic character in the play.  Cave give Millamant an hauteur so artificial it actually suggests a real passion lies beneath her lofty façade.  Jacobs gives the single most hilarious performance so far this year as Lady Wishfort.  It is completely over-the-top, making Dame Edna seem like a bag-lady, but then this magnificent character is an inexhaustible fount of humour, at one moment despairing at the ravages of age, at another going to extreme lengths to appear alluring.  Nancy Palk as Mrs. Marwood and C. David Johnson as Mr. Fainall, involved in an adulterous affair, are wonderful as the villains of the piece, both filled with unmitigated disdain for those around them. 

Most remarkable is how the entire cast delivers Congreve’s deliberately ornate prose with complete clarity so that by the end you come to relish his extraordinarily witty mouthfuls of words that seemed so intimidating at the start.  Parts of the plot may still remain a mystery by the conclusion and Congreve’s world view is even darker than the one Hinton presents, yet the experience is exhilarating and makes one hope that Soulpepper will take more excursions into the glitteringly amoral world of Restoration comedy.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-07-07.

Photo: Tanja Jacobs and Nancy Palk. ©Andrée Lanthier.