✭✭✭✩✩

by George Bernard Shaw, adapted by Michael Healey,

directed by Joseph Ziegler

Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

July 8-October 8, 2011

On the Rocks is the first in a series of lesser-known plays by Shaw to be adapted for the Shaw Festival by Canadian playwrights.  This is both good and bad news.  The good news is that the Festival plans to produce the lesser-known plays it has neglected for the past several years.  The bad news is that we will not be seeing them as Shaw wrote them.  It is a foolish idea.  Where except at the only festival in the world devoted to Shaw’s plays can we ever expect to see the plays Shaw wrote as he wrote them?

The online notes for On the Rocks claim that some of there plays by Shaw “we have not programmed because they somehow seem too dense or too arcane”.  The solution: “Rather than ignore these plays, we sought to bring them new life and began talking about the idea of giving these later works to Canadian playwrights, as a way not only to revitalize these works but to bring a Canadian perspective to Shaw’s work”.  The obvious problem is that the resulting adaption will neither be wholly Canadian nor will it be wholly Shaw.  Over its fifty seasons the Shaw Festival has created an audience with a definite taste for “dense” and “arcane” drama.  Just look at the series of works by Harley Granville Barker.  It’s insulting both to Shaw and to the Shaw Festival audience to presume that there are certain works by its namesake playwright that we cannot judge as they are.

Not long ago certain later Shaw plays like Too True to Be Good (1932) and In Good King Charles’s Golden Days (1939) would have been considered as too “dense” and “arcane” except that directors eventually discovered how to make them not only come alike on stage but become popular.  The same process should be allowed to happen to Shaw’s other plays.  Once a director hits on the secret of one of these plays, as happened with Allen Moines’s King Charles in 1997, it changes the audience’s perception of the work completely.  Commissioning an adaptation already assumes there is a difficulty with a play that cannot otherwise be solved.  This is a negative way to begin and certainly not the way to rehabilitate the lesser-known works of the canon.  The 18th century assumed their view of what should happen in a play was superior to what Shakespeare did--their King Lear and Hamlet with happy endings.  Let’s not make that same faulty assumption about our own superior aesthetic sense in relation to Shaw’s plays.  

Michael Healey’s present version of On the Rocks provides an excellent example of a play by Shaw in no way improved by adaptation.  Healey has the bizarre idea that the play should begin with what is Act 2 in Shaw’s original and stop before its conclusion.  After intermission he then gives us Shaw’s Act 1 and, after a lighting cue shift back to the rest of Shaw’s Act 2 and continues to his own new and weaker ending.  How this re-ordering of the action makes the play “accessible and contemporary” as the online notes claim is a mystery.

In Shaw’s play London is wracked with riots by the unemployed and the government is directly implored by a deputation from the Mayor of the Isle of Cats to take immediate action.  Unfortunately, the present prime minister, Sir Arthur Chavender, is best known for the orotund voice he uses to utter platitudes and for never doing anything.  The pressures of office have put him under a severe mental strain and his wife orders him to go n a retreat into the Welsh mountains to regain his peace of mind.  Shaw’s Act 2 shows the effect of this retreat.  The PM has switched from being a capitalist to an ardent communist and has just given a speech that has electrified the nation.  One by one the various members of Chavender’s cabinet enter to give their reactions to such a radical change in government policy. 

Healey’s adaptation obscures rather than clarifies the action since we see all the ministers’ reactions to the speech without ever knowing why the speech was given or what provoked it.  In the subplot concerning Chavender’s children, we see the Earl of Barking propose out of the blue to Chavender’s daughter without having seen how they met. 

That the play works well in spite of, not because of, Healey’s alterations is entirely due to the admirably clear direction of Joseph Ziegler and the animated performances of the entire cast.  Peter Krantz is ideally cast as Chavender.  He makes it all too believable that someone who looks and sounds great, yet knows nothing, could make it to such high office.  Steven Sutcliffe is suitably waspish as Sir Dexter Rightside, the intractable leader of the opposition, whose true colours come out when hurls a racial slur at a prominent Sri Lankan woman.  He would be more effective if he lost the funny walk he affects.

As the Mayor of the Isle of Cats, Anthony Bekenn is fine representative of the common man who approaches the urgent situation with more practicality than colleagues the Earl of Barking (Martin Happer) and Aloysia Brollikins (Marla McLean), both new-born communist enthusiasts.  David Schurmann makes an intriguing character of the Duke of Domesday, who becomes more interested in Ms. Brollikins as a woman the more forcefully she argues against him.  Thom Marriott creates a genial portrait of Sir Broadfoot Basham, the Chief of Police, while Guy Bannerman’s Mr. Hipney serves as a strangely powerful raisonneur figure to the clueless Chavender.                          

        

On the distaff side, Mary Haney is very funny as Chavender’s secretary Miss Hilda Hanways.  The scene where she tries to keep Chavender on track in dictating his speech about the importance of the family is hilarious.  Cherissa Richards gives a fine performances as Dame Adhira Pandranath, whom Healey has created from Sir Jafna Pandranath of the original.  Her serene bearing and her speech praising her heritage and denouncing the English are most impressive.  Catherine McGregor does her best as Lady Chavender, whose animosity to her children is not sufficiently explained.  Claire Jullien fully coveys the mystery and magnetism of The Lady, the woman who runs the Welsh retreat, with a quiet intensity that draws us in as much as it does Chavender.       

Christina Poddubiuk has designed and elegant, uncluttered set and costumes true to the natures of all the characters.  Louise Guinand’s lighting is highly effective, especially in the sudden appearance of the Lady causing us, like Chavender, to wonder whether she actually is real or not. 

This is absolutely the right time to revive On the Rocks.  With its discussions in the original about rampant unemployment, the growing apart of political parties, the proroguing of parliament, the political machine controlling politicians rather than politicians the machine, antisemitism used as a political ploy and the prescient view that the East will overtake the West in wealth and power--the play seems to be torn from today’s headlines not those of 1933 when it was written.  Given the host of vital performances that Ziegler has inspired, you can’t help but wonder why anyone at the Shaw Festival thought this play needed fixing in the first place.  And, in light of Healey’s unhelpful adaptation, you can only hope that in future the Festival removes its nanny costume and allows us to decide for ourselves whether Shaw’s lesser-known plays are too “challenging”.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (clockwise) Cherissa Richards, Martin Happer, Steven Sutcliffe, Thom Marriott, Peter Krantz,Anthony Bekenn and Marla McLean. ©2011 David Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.