Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✭✭✩
by Oscar Wilde, directed by Peter Hinton
Shaw Festival, Festival House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
June 8-October 19, 2013
Lord Darlington: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”
Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) is Oscar Wilde’s first successful full-length play and it presents most directors with the difficulty of combining the epigrammatic familiar from Wilde’s later play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) with the kind of domestic melodrama he had completely expunged from Earnest. Few directors manage to get the balance right between these two styles in Wilde’s early plays, but Peter Hinton manages it beautifully in his production for the Shaw Festival. Hinton does have some peculiar and unnecessary notions about how to frame the scenes of the play, but luckily these do not affect the impact of the cast’s remarkable performances.
The play begins with Lady Windermere (Marla McLean) preparing for her coming-of-age birthday ball that evening. She has a visit from Lord Darlington (Gray Powell), who is happy to be Lady Windermere’s confidant but intimates that he would like to be much more. Lady Windermere, however, repulses the suggestion saying that she is something of a Puritan and sees the world as black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. While Darlington represents one attack on Lady Windermere’s absolutist stance, another comes from the Duchess of Berwick (Corinne Koslo). She has come to apprise Lady Windermere of what all London society is saying about her husband, Lord Windermere (Martin Happer). The Duchess has it on good authority that Lord Windermere has been seen visiting the infamous Mrs. Erlynne (Tara Rosling), an outcast from society who supposedly sees male friends at all hours. Lord Windermere has even been seen giving Mrs. Erlynne money.
Shaken by this news Lady Windermere searches her husband’s study and discovers a chequebook showing that Lord Windermere has regularly been paying large sums to Mrs. Erlynne. When Lord Windermere returns, she confronts him with the news, but he refuses to explain and instead says that Lady Windermere must help Mrs. Erlynne get back into society. Worse, he insists on his wife inviting Mrs. Erlynne to the ball. When she refuses, he does so himself. At the ball Mrs. Erlynne’s appearance stuns everyone and only increases the ardour of her greatest admirer Lord Lorton (Jim Mezon). Lady Windermere is scandalized and Lord Darlington, noting her distress, suggests that she leave her husband and baby and run away with him the next morning. When Lady Windermere appears at Lord Darlington’s residence and he returns with men from his club, her reputation faces destruction.
The point of Wilde’s play is thus to place the woman with the most absolutist morals in the most morally compromising position. We along with Lady Windermere come to see that the world cannot be divided into neat categories of good and bad as she initially believes. In discussing with his male friends whether people are all good or all bad, Lord Darlington replies with the most famous line of the play, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.
The reason Peter Hinton’s direction makes the play work so well is that he sees the connection between the melodrama and the wit. Both points emphasize the hypocrisy that society is built on. While the melodramatic plot manoeuvres the virtuous Lady Windermere into a compromising situation society’s witty banter is a glittering cover for its moral bankruptcy. When Cecil Graham (Kyle Blair), a stand-in for Wilde himself, is trading epigrams with Darlington’s friends, Darlington exclaims, “What cynics you fellows are!” and defines a cynic as “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”. The melodrama and the comedy of the play no longer jar against each other because Hinton makes us see them as two sides of the same coin.
Hinton’s set designer Teresa Przybylski highlights the nature of the play as a type of fable by the non-realist look she creates. The first scene is not set as per Wilde’s description in Lord Windermere’s morning-room, but rather in a woman’s area, Lady Windermere’s morning-room, made abstract through minimalist decoration. There are chairs, a large window opening onto a terrace and a toy piano downstage – a constant reminder that Lady Windermere is a mother.
Hinton and Przybylski use side panels and a drop to create the effect similar to that in silent movies of irising in on a scene. They iris out of the morning-room on stage left and shift the scene, contrary to Wilde’s stage directions, by irising in on Lord Windermere’s private study on stage right, a male precinct, which has a bookcase with books and documents reaching way up to the ceiling where no one could reach them. When Lady Windermere climbs up to search the bookcase for any information about Mrs. Erlynne, Hinton places her in the same position as Alice in Tenniel’s famous drawing of Alice climbing into the mirror in Alice in the Looking-Glass. And, indeed, Lady Windermere’s discovery leads her to think her world is now the opposite from what she thought it was.
Przybylski contrasts the wide open spaces of the terrace where the ball takes place in Act 2, with the claustrophobic rooms of Lord Darlington in Act 3 that Louise Guinand has lit as if they were a barely civilized cave. In Act 4, as in comedy, the various tensions are resolved as they are here between husband and wife. To emphasize this unity, Hinton and Przybylski now show us both the male and female precincts of the set of Act 1 simultaneously.
It’s curious that Hinton, who has so much insight into how the play works would indulge in pointless imagery before the play begins and during scene changes. Before the play begins Hinton has five women in William Schmuck’s gorgeous period costumes step out in front of the curtain one by one and assume a series of poses as if for a fashion magazine of the time. This silences the audience for a while since they think the action has begun, but this display goes on so long, they soon forget about it. This pointless scene seems to suggest only that women of the time were meant to be beautiful but silent and nothing more. Hinton then has the odd notion explained in the programme that he wants to relate each of the play’s four acts to reflect one of the artists who were Wilde’s contemporaries. Act 1 is meant to show the influence of Whistler, Act 2 of John Singer Sargent, Act 3 of Paul Gauguin and Act 4 of Mary Cassatt. Some may find this intriguing but it is still completely extraneous to the play itself. Unlike a fully fledged concept production, these flights of fancy may affect the look of the costumes and lighting but, luckily, do not influence the onstage action or dialogue.
Hinton has drawn extraordinarily precise acting from the entire cast. The title role is perhaps the most difficult, but Marla McLean makes Lady Windermere absolutely believable. She makes it clear that the woman is a very young, unworldly wife and mother who has always been protected and whose black-and-white view of the world is a sign of her naïveté. Lady Windermere is not quite 21 when the play opens and the action is meant to show her transition from innocence to experience.
Martin Happer does not avoid making Lord Windermere appear patronizing to his young wife. It’s a necessary ploy that suits the period and builds our sympathy for Lady Windermere. Happer knows how to make Lord Windermere’s gruffness take on the appearance of bullying and a brusque attempt at concealing guilt without our ever being certain that it is.
Among these comically hypocritical women is the exceedingly amusing Corinne Koslo, whose Duchess of Berwick seems like an early sketch for Wilde’s Lady Bracknell. She never allows her “talkative” daughter Lady Agatha (Kate Besworth) to speak but once the Duchess pulls off her daughter’s engagement to a rich Australian (Evan Alexander Smith), we’re not surprised that Lady Agatha is only too happy to leave England and her controlling mother behind. Donna Belleville has a brief but important scene as Lady Jedburgh, who instantly deplores Mrs. Erlynne upon seeing her but who completely falls under her spell when Mrs. Erlynne pays her just the right compliments.
Among the men, Gray Powell manages to seem dashing as Lord Darlington but still convey an aura of loucheness that undermines his appeal. Jim Mezon is very funny as the aged Lord Lorton, who can barely disguise his unbecoming sexual attraction to Mrs. Erlynne. Patrick McManus well plays the aptly named Mr. Dumby, whose main role is to phrase his thoughts in the most embarrassing way possible. Kyle Blair is all coolness and suavity as Cecil Graham and delivers his series of some of Wilde’s best epigrams with natural aplomb. The one failure is Will Lamond as the Duke of Berwick, a silent character Hinton has added to the play in terribly highschoolish old age makeup.
Notwithstanding Hinton’s peculiar scene-setting, this is the best production of this early play by Wilde you are ever likely to see. People who know only The Importance of Being Earnest have a distorted view of Wilde. The mixture of comedy and melodrama comes much closer to Wilde’s other work and to Wilde’s own personality than wit alone which Wilde often used as a kind of mask. Because of Hinton’s keen insight this production of Lady Windermere’s Fan does not merely hold up well in performance but triumphs.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (top) Marla McLean and Martin Happer; (middle) Tara Rosling as Mrs. Erlynne. ©2013 Emily Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2013-08-25
Lady Windermere's Fan