Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✭✩
by Oscar Wilde, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 10-October 9, 2010
“Nearly Ideal”
The Shaw Festival’s new production of “An Ideal Husband” is by far the best I’ve seen. Director Jackie Maxwell negotiates the main difficulty of the play, its frequent alternation of tine between comedy and melodrama, with complete mastery. Judith Bowden’s steampunk design is daring--some might find it distracting--but otherwise Maxwell reveals the play for the masterpiece it is.
Oscar Wilde is, of course, best known for his 1895 comedy “The Importance of Being Earnest” often called the best comedy in the English language. But the play in deleting melodrama from comedy is actually atypical of Wilde’s work. “An Ideal Husband”, which also premiered in 1895 just six weeks before “Earnest”, is much more typical in mingling witty characters who seem to have stepped out of “Earnest” who others whose concerns are completely serious.
The play focusses on the serious characters, Sir Robert Chiltern, a respected member of the House of Commons, and his wife, Lady Gertrude Chiltern. The witty characters are Mabel Chiltern, Sir Robert’s sister, and Lord Arthur Goring, a family friend. The characters who partakes of both worlds is villainous Mrs. Cheveley. She was an enemy of Lady Chiltern’s at school and her now-dead lover, Baron Arnheim, was Sir Robert’s mentor. Mrs. Cheveley wants Sir Robert to suppress a report due in Commons that reveals a scheme to build a canal in Argentina as fraudulent. Mrs. Cheveley has invested heavily in this project and doesn’t want to lose her money. She knows from Baron Arnheim that that Sir Robert once bought stocks based on inside information. If Sir Robert does not do as she says says, she will expose his former indiscretion and ruin his career. This will also ruin the Chilterns‘ marriage since Lady Chiltern has always believed her Sir Robert to be the ideal husband, that is a model of virtue.
Maxwell’s solution to melding the seemingly incompatible worlds of triviality and seriousness is my making it clear that the air of triviality that Lord Goring, Mabel and Lady Chiltern affect is a pose they adopt to be fashionable. In “Earnest” no one ever drops the pose they have adopted. In “Husband” poses can be donned or doffed at will. In Act 2 Lord Goring tells his father, “Everybody one meets is a paradox nowadays. It is a great bore. It makes society so obvious”, to his father asks, “Do you always really understand what you say, sir?” “Yes, father,” Goring replies, “if I listen attentively.” By showing verbal wit as an affectation, it allows Goring and Cheveley to indulge in it when they wish to appear unconcerned or to drop it when they wish to be serious. Too often, as in the Stratford Festival disastrous staging in 2007, directors try to force the play into the mold of “Earnest” and then cannot deal with serious sections that don’t fit.
Steven Sutcliffe is excellent as Goring. He presents him as a dandy, affected, yes, but not so effete as to make his relationship with Mabel unbelievable. His timing makes his quips sparkle but the sense of volatility he gives Goring makes his sudden bouts of earnestness and candour seem a natural part of his character. Moya O’Connell is outstanding as Mrs. Cheveley. Too often the character is played an an out-and-out villainess, rather than someone driven to villainy. O’Connell gives us the sense that she knows and even fears the risk in the dangerous game she is playing. Her mask of wittiness seems to hide an underlying vulnerability. Thus, when we hear from Gertrude that she stole when she was in school, this doesn’t so much confirm Mrs. Cheveley as inherently evil as suggest that long ago she must have had feelings of inadequacy that must led to it. Needless to say, humanizing Mrs. Cheveley makes her the most fascinating character in the play and is a major factor in mitigating the melodrama of the serious scenes.
Patrick Galligan and Catherine McGregor are well paired as the Chilterns. Galligan has become expert at playing fundamentally good but morally conflicted men. Here he clearly delineates how Mrs. Cheveley’s knowledge of Sir Robert’s past and her threat of blackmail cause him increasing inner torment that becomes ever harder to disguise. By playing her role with a sense of poise, McGregor pulls off the difficult job of making Lady Chiltern’s idealism appear perfectly natural.
Fortunately, within the staid Chiltern household is Miss Mabel Chiltern who serves as a foil to both of them, their own female counterpart to Lord Goring who adopts his pose of triviality. Marla McLean excels in the role and the banter between her and Steven Sutcliffe is delightful. Goring has two foils--his father Lord Caversham, played with gruff earnestness by Lorne Kennedy and his valet Phipps, a man of the lower classes who, as played by Anthony Bekenn, regards Goring’s affectations with amused disdain. Wendy Thatcher as Lady Markby (a first sketch of Lady Bracknell), Jenny L. Wright as the Countess of Basildon and Krista Colosimo as Mrs. Marchmont provide a comic glimpse of the vacuity of high society.
Some may find they have to get past Judith Bowden’s unusual design concept to appreciate Maxwell’s insightful direction. As if to emphasize that insider trading and manipulation of government finding for business purposes is as relevant today as in 1895, Maxwell has encouraged Bowden to imagine what 19th-century would be like if it had persisted into the present. Bowden’s vision, basically the visual equivalent of steampunk in fiction, produces decided mixed results. The three-level set that serves supposedly as the house of the Chilterns and for Lord Goring is entirely of metal, its many supporting narrow columns making it look more like a railway platform than a home. In this alternative Victorian style, black has replaced white as the formal shirt colour. Lady Chiltern’s outfits are more staid and more in keeping with 1895. Mrs. Cheveley’s, however, are modern haute couture. For fashionistas Lord Goring and Mabel, the style seems to be imitation Issey Miyake. Mabel’s dresses seemed to have been dipped in a red dye allowed to seep upwards and high boot with functionless laces, while Goring wear a waistcoat in the final scene that hangs below his jacket. When he takes off his jacket, the low-hanging waistcoat looks distractingly like an apron.
I can see why Maxwell would like to have a 19th-century play with modern ideas sport a modernized 19th-century design, but it doesn’t work. If people can see past the design, and with effort it is possible, they will see the most fully imagined “Ideal Husband” they are ever likely to see.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Moya O’Connell and Steven Sutcliffe. ©David Cooper.
2010-09-06
An Ideal Husband