✭✭✭✭✩
<b>by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Joseph Ziegler
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 22-November 16, 2008
</b>
"I Do"
“Getting Married” (1908) is one of those Shavian plays that is really a multi-voiced debate in the form of a comedy. It is Shaw’s genius that he, seemingly alone until the advent of Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn, knew how to make an intellectual dispute so witty and amusing. The play is heartily entertaining for the whole of its two hours. It is the Shaw Festival’s genius that it has become so accustomed to the ways of a playwright considered difficult even in Britain it can present such a play as this with just the right sense of irony and lightness of touch to make it a triumph.
The play has a minimal plot. Alice Bridgenorth and her husband Alfred, the Anglican Bishop of Chelsea, are looking forward to the marriage of their youngest daughter Edith to the worthy young Cecil Sykes. The various acquaintances and relatives who gather in the kitchen of the episcopal palace are suddenly abashed to learn that Edith and Cecil have called off the wedding at the last moment because of a pamphlet both have read exposing the “true nature” of marriage. Because the group in the kitchen has been having their own tussle over what marriage should and should not be, the new event causes them to try to draft a contract of marriage that will treat men and women as equal partners. When this project fails, it falls to the arrival of a deus ex machina in the form of the voluptuous Lady Mayoress, Mrs. George Collins, to sort out all the difficulties.
Shaw peoples the play with characters representing various attitudes towards marriage. The Bishop and his wife are the epitome of a happily married couple. Sharry Flett makes Alice a sensitive soul who sees love as the only basis for marriage. David Schurmann as the Bishop uses his distinctive voice and precise diction to give his character a sense of authority especially when the Bishop reveals that he has long suspected that marriage would one day become primarily a legal rather than religious act. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the Bishop’s brother, General “Boxer” Bridgenorth played by Peter Krantz, hopelessly in love with Alice’s sister, Lesbia Grantham, who refuses his every proposal. Krantz finds much humour in the slightly dense, conservative officer whose stalwart, bemedalled exterior hides a soft centre that leaves him prone to uncontrolled weeping over his lost cause. Byrne is equally fine as his opposite Lesbia, whose soft, feminine exterior belies a steely resolve to preserve her independence at all costs, even if it means never having children.
As a contrast to these couples a third group presents a third and, for its time, very radical approach to marriage. Reginald Bridgenorth (played by Peter Millard), brother of Alfred and “Boxer”, has recently publicly assaulted his wife Leo (Nicola Correia-Damude) so that she may divorce him and run off with her lover St. John Hotchkiss (Martin Happer). Shaw not only uses this trio to satirize current British laws that made divorce almost impossible but to push the possibilities of marriage even farther. It transpires that Leo still loves Reginald and doesn’t really want to get rid of him completely. Rather, she wishes the law allowed a kind of polyandry where she could have several husbands each to suit her mood. Millard makes his character suitably confused, Correia-Damude hers suitably impetuous and Happer his at first seemingly oily but ultimately one of the smartest of the bunch. As he says to Soames, “You can talk to me of the quintessential equality of coal merchants and British officers; and yet you can’t see the quintessential equality of all the religions”--something people still have trouble accepting.
The cast is completed by the young couple itself played with comic earnestness by Gray Powell as Cecil and Krista Colosimo as Edith. Michael Ball plays William Collins, the philosophical greengrocer-cum-caterer, whose wife has “broken him in” to marriage, and Norman Browning has a fine comic turn as the Bishop’s dour, acerbic chaplain, Father Anthony Soames, who believes Christianity has nothing to do with marriage since the Early Church advocated only celibacy and chastity. As he notes, according to Paul marriage exists only to help people avoid fornication as in 1 Corinthians 7:9: “It is better to marry than to burn”.
Into this world of contention arrives Laurie Paton in the Mrs. George Collins’s resplendent in her full mayoral regalia. Said to be gifted with second sight, Paton’s Mayoress project a sublime calmness in the face of all the agitation around her. When she asks each person what he or she really wants each feels compelled to answer with the truth that finally aids in finding a solution. In a magical sequence, she falls into a trance and becomes a medium for the truth of the world. Speaking as all womankind to all mankind she says, “When you loved me I gave you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment,.... A moment only; but was it not enough? Were you not paid then for all the rest of your struggle on earth? Must I mend your clothes and sweep your floors as well? Was it not enough?”
Designer Sue LePage clothes the characters in attractive costumes except for the intentionally shabby wear of Reginald Bridgenorth. She imagines the palace’s kitchen as a grey medieval room with a large hearth and braces for cooking over a fire. Louise Guinand’s lighting enhances the sense of dinginess. The modish turn-of-the-century costumes look out of place in the medieval setting, but that may, in fact, be a clever way of reinforcing Shaw’s point that there is no reason why modern people should fit into medieval institutions and laws. It’s hard to imagine this uncannily relevant play any better performed than it is under Joseph Ziegler’s sure-handed direction that tickles the funny bone and the intellect simultaneously. For a physically and mentally invigorating evening, it’s a play not to miss.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Michael Ball, Fiona Byrne and Martin Happer. ©Emily Cooper.
<b>2008-08-16</b>
<b>Getting Married</b>