Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✭✩
by G.B. Shaw, directed by Christopher Newton
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 10-October 9, 2010
“This foolish dream of efficiency" (Act 3)
The Shaw Festival has revived Shaw’s Irish play “John Bull’s Other Island” in an excellent production directed by the Festival’s former Artistic Director Christopher Newton. The play may focus on English-Irish relations but Newton emphasizes its broader concerns with colonization, exploitation, globalization, national identity and land development. In this way Shaw’s 1904 play seems even more relevant now than it did on its last appearance in 1998.
“John Bull” is a very unusual work. It plays with the notion of national stereotypes, even bringing on a character acting the part of a “stage Irishman” of the period whom the central English character of the play, of course, mistakes for the real thing. Just as Shaw plays with character stereotypes he also plays with genre. “John Bull” is a comedy without a happy ending. The man who should received his comeuppance, does not, and the couple we hope will get together also do not. Not far beneath the comedy of the play is the notion that there is no happy ending for a country like Ireland.
The play centres on two civil engineers, Tom Broadbent, an Englishman, and Larry Doyle, his associate and an expatriate Irishman. Broadbent has had to foreclose on a property in Ireland and plans to take it over himself. He’d like Doyle to come along but the property happens to be in Roscullen where Doyle was born and lived until he fled, and Doyle is too full of dislike for the Irish and too afraid of a claim of marriage a woman, Nora Reilly, has held him to for 18 years. When it seems that Broadbent is also interested in Nora and might be fall for her himself, Doyle agrees to accompany him. When Broadbent arrives in Roscullen, he does fall in love with Nora. Aided by whisky he spends the night gazing at the moon with her and professes his love, which she, in her strict fashion interprets as a proposal of marriage. When Doyle arrives the locals invite him to be their representative in Parliament. When he refuses, Broadbent accepts.
The irony found everywhere in the play is how the Englishman Broadbent falls in love Ireland and its physical embodiment in Nora while the Irishman Doyle is only reminded of the provincialism, superstition and impracticality of the people that drove him to England. Under Christopher Newton’s direction a second irony is made far more apparent than it was in the Shaw’s previous revival of the play in 1998. Newton makes abundantly clear that Broadbent only falls in love with his preconceived romantic notion of Ireland and its people, never with the real thing. In Act 1 Broadbent mistakes Timothy Haffigan, a man who playacts a stage Irishman fulfilling every possible stereotype, as the real thing. Though Doyle berates him about this error, it has no effect and everything Broadbent sees in Ireland confirms his patronizing view of its inherent quaintness and need for British practicality and ingenuity.
Broadbent appreciates all the Irish landscapes before not for their inherent beauty but for the possibilities they offer for development into future resorts and gold courses. We may know nothing of the “Irish Question” that looms large in this 1904 play when all of Ireland was ruled directly by the British Parliament. (Northern Ireland was not partitioned from the rest of Ireland until 1921.) But we do all understand the ideas of paternalism, colonialism, land development and exploitation that Broadbent so cheerfully and unconsciously embodies. Newton’s emphasis on this makes a play that can seem a curiosity into a work of surprising relevance. Broadbent’s unresistable rise to success, because the Irish cannot convince themselves to unite against him, turns this play into a very dark comedy indeed.
William Schmuck’s design supports Newton’s view. After the initial scene in the engineers‘ offices in London, the rest of the action takes place against a backdrop of of an Irish landscape that deliberately looks like a painting. Under Louise Guinand’s atmospheric lighting, hillocks on stage that is still painted as the wooden flooring of the office, are created before our eyes by furniture piled up in various ways and concealed with square-quilted coverlets in shades of green. We thus are in an artificial, imagined Ireland throughout the play.
There is not a weak link in the cast. Benedict Campbell is hilarious as Broadbent, a man so caught up in his own view of what Ireland is that the reality of the place never impinges on his fantasy. He is delightfully unaware that everyone else in the play sees through him. Graeme Somerville conveys Doyle’s complex personality made up of self-loathing for his Irish background and pride in his assiduously acquired English ways. He is excellent at showing the disgust Doyle feels when once back on Irish soil he occasionally lapses into his old Irish. This is especially evident in a wonderful scene between him and Nora when he is torn between winning her away from Broadbent and warning her away from himself. It is clearly his internal conflict that leads them to quarrel just when Nora is hoping for some expression of feeling from him. “Oh, that's so Irish! Irish both of us to the backbone,” he rails against himself.
Severn Thompson is a lovely Nora Reilly, who seems to approach life with hope balanced against expected disappointment. She has a radiance and delicacy that far outweighs her status as an heiress. In Newton’s staging Doyle’s loss of Nora to Broadbent comes across as a tragedy for both of the Irish. The fourth major character is Peter Keegan, a defrocked Catholic priest, still honoured by the locals for his “magic” powers of blessing, whose studies of other religions and solitary life have given him a fundamental understanding of the world far beyond the superficial concerns of everyone else in the play. Jim Mezon gives a magisterial performance as Keegan. His instantly commanding presence and the intensity of his speech open up deeper perspectives with which to view the action. For what seems to be a satiric comedy it is highly unusual to have a character like Keegan announce that our life on earth is hell. He prophesies to Broadbent that Ireland will not always be viewed as a place to exploit for its raw materials: “[T]he day may come when these islands shall live by the quality of their men rather than by the abundance of their minerals.” Mezon delivers Keegan’s final peroration with the marvellous sense that his present hearers may not understand him now though they may in future. Assuming a God’s-eye view, he proclaims, “For four wicked centuries the world has dreamed this foolish dream of efficiency; and the end is not yet. But the end will come.”
The supporting cast provides a set of vivid portraits of the Roscullen locals. Guy Bannerman is Cornelius Doyle, Larry’s father, who still does not understand his son’s actions. Mary Haney is Larry’s straight-laced Aunt Judy. Patrick McManus is the hotheaded Barney Doran, Jonathan Widdifield the dimwitted and superstitious Patsy Farrell and Thom Marriott the supercilious Father Dempsey. David Schurmann plays Broadbent’s English valet Hodson, who seems all propriety except in a fine scene when left alone with Matthew Haffigan also played by Ric Reid. When Haffigan assumes that Hodson has an easy job, Hodson drops is RP accent for his native Cockney and lets the Irishman know that there are people as oppressed in England as in Ireland and how his family fought its way up so that Hodson could have such a position. Schurmann instant transformation from propriety to fierce indignation is one of the many superlative moments of fine acting that elevate and add complexity to the tone of the play.
This the only the Shaw’s fourth production of “John Bull’s Other Island” in 49 seasons and it may be its best so far. Funny and filled with a host of unexpectedly timely insights, this is a production any fan of Shaw or anyone interested in the workings of economics in history should make every effort to see.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive..
Photo: Graeme Somerville and Severn Thompson. ©Emily Cooper.
2010-09-06
John Bull’s Other Island