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by G.B. Shaw, directed by Lisa Peterson

Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

July 12-October 11, 2014

Grace: “A woman belongs to herself and to nobody else”

When the Shaw Festival last presented Shaw’s second play The Philanderer (written 1893) in 2007, my primary criticism was that the director fell into the strangely common fallacy that something must be done to older plays to make them funnier.  Seven years later the Festival’s new production of the play falls prey to the same problem.  In 2007 director Alisa Palmer felt she had to exaggerate two of the four main characters to increase the humour.  This year director Lisa Peterson feels she has to exaggerate the physical movements of all the characters besides adding a mishmash of would-be comic notions that do not hang together.  As usual this type of directorial meddling detracts rather than enhances the storytelling and distances us from the characters.  This is really a pity since the play has an excellent cast who would thrive under less gimmicky direction.

Shaw’s original play had three acts, with the third act taking place four years after the action of the first two and making extensive criticism of England’s divorce laws.  After the strong disapproval of Lady Colin Campbell, Shaw discarded the original third act and replaced it with one taking place immediately after the action of the first two acts.  In 2007, the Festival gave the choice of seeing the play in three acts with Shaw’s revised third act, or in four acts with Shaw’s revised third act followed by his original third act.  This may be the fifth time the Festival has presented The Philander but is it the first time it has presented that as Shaw originally wrote it before Lady Campbell’s criticism.

No matter which third act is used, the play begins the same way with Leonard Charteris (Gord Rand), the self-confessed philanderer of the title, in the midst of what he believes is his first serious love affair.  The woman is the young, widowed Grace Tranfield (Marla McLean), a self-proclaimed “New Woman”.  Charteris sets their modern anti-marriage principles on end by proposing to her.  The problem is that his previous romantic conquest, Julia Craven (Moya O’Connell), who also claims to be a “New Woman”, will not give him up.  In an attempt to escape from Julia, Charteris tries to manoeuvre Julia into marriage with a Dr. Paramore (Jeff Meadows), who is treating her father for an unusual disease.  There is little secrecy to be had since all the characters are members of the Ibsen Club, a forward-looking private club for “unmanly men” and “unwomanly women”.

Act 2 ends when everyone exits to have tea at Dr. Paramore’s having allowed him enough time alone with Julia to propose before their arrival.  Shaw’s original third act begins four years later when Paramore has already grown tired of Julia and is thinking of a legal separation from her.  He would prefer a divorce but England’s divorce laws are so restrictive that any proof required – brutality or extramarital affairs – would ruin his medical practice.  In a reverse of the usual pattern of comedy where young people succeed in deceiving their elders, here the older generation helps the younger generation solve the problem of how to circumvent the law.

For unknown reasons director Lisa Peterson has moved the action forward from the 1880s to the 1920s.  Her direction has no negative effect on the actors’ verbal interactions.  The difficulty lies instead with their physical movements.  She establishes a pattern of rush-and-pose that continues throughout the play.  An actor will typically rush to an entrance, pose, then rush to a chair and pose again.  Whether standing or sitting, if an actor shifts position it is not a natural movement but a shift from one pose to another.  While actors’ speeches may be measured, their gestures are exaggerated.  The overall effect is of seeing the type of overemphatic acting that people often associate with silent movies, a point which is reinforced by Mark Bennett’s music that accompanies these movements.

In complete contradiction to the silent film conceit, Peterson also has the actors directly address the audience when characters in the text make general statements about humanity.  Both techniques are non-naturalistic, but silent film movements suggest a self-enclosed world while direct address does not.  Peterson should really decide what she is trying to achieve with the text and choose one mode or the other.  This is especially important for this play since the original third act contains a section where Paramore and the theatre critic Joseph Cuthbertson (Michael Ball) discuss what constitutes naturalism on the stage.

One suspects that Peterson is heading toward the directorial no-man’s-land of doing anything for a joke.  Why else would she have the page of the Ibsen club deliver messages while wearing roller skates?  Why else would she decide to cover the scene change between Acts 1 and 2 by inventing a character called “The Spirit of Ibsen” (Guy Bannerman) to sing the song “A Woman Is Only A Woman (But A Good Cigar Is A Smoke)” from the Victor Herbert musical Miss Dolly Dollars (1905)?  Neither makes any sense.  Peterson is just hoping for a laugh, which is a sure sign that she does not trust in the inherent humour of the text.

This is not too surprising since Peterson shows right from the start that she does not understand the text.  Peterson has Shaw’s first stage direction projected over the stage: “A lady and gentleman are making love to one another in the

drawing-room ....”  In her Director’s Notes, Peterson says, “It’s awfully fun to take GBS at his word”.  But when the lights go up we see that Charteris and Grace are in the throes of having sex.  Peterson is clearly not taking Shaw at his word because until the mid 20th century “making love” meant simply flirting or wooing, not having sex, and could be entirely verbal. 

Peterson’s confusion about what she is after is evident in the design.  Sue LePage creates realistic sets for Acts 1 and 2.  Her set for the Ibsen Club is especially witty with a mask of the master poised over an eternal flame with masks of the heroines of The Wild Duck, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder on ether side. (Note to the Shaw Festival: Why in 52 years is Hedda the only one of these classics you’ve ever staged?)  Then for Act 3, LePage has designed a completely abstract set of empty porticos and overturned chairs whose unreality Peterson emphasizes with flowing dry ice.  The design suggests we are

to regard the original third act as not really part of the play.  Yet, of course, it was part of the play in Shaw’s original conception of it and that is what Peterson is supposed to be directing.  So why sanction such an extreme stylistic change from Act 2 to Act 3?          

If one can ignore Peterson’s miscellany of directorial ideas, the acting itself is excellent.  Gord Rand makes a convincing Charteris by combining a dissolute appearance with strong animal attraction and biting intellectual wit.  We see immediately why women fall for him and why they are foolish ever to believe he will commit himself to anyone.

Julia Craven is a difficult role because of the character’s mercurial nature and contradictory actions.  Moya O’Connell makes the character believable by emphasizing how much of Julia’s seeming fickleness is really game-playing.  If one strategy doesn’t work, she tries another.  By doing this O’Connell shows that love is not really Julia object.  Winning is, and she will do anything she can think of to hold Charteris’ attention even if it means marrying another man.  O’Connell is marvellous in her ability to change from vamp to slave to tigress in an instant.       

As the woman Charteris thinks he loves, Marla McLean is a perfectly sensible Grace, who has no illusions about love or marriage and is not willing to waste her energy in pointless struggles as Charteris and Julia are.  As played by Jeff Meadows, the ironically named Dr. Paramore is both a red-blooded young man easily stirred by Julia’s flirtations, but one whose concern for reputation and science threaten to make him a bore.  Harveen Sandhu well plays Shaw’s caricature of a New Woman in the person of Julia’s sister Sylvia, who wears male attire and adopts male mannerisms.  Between the game-playing of Julia and the posturing of Sylvia, Grace comes off as the one woman in the play who most fully and naturally embodies the ideal of the New Woman.

Michael Ball and Ric Reid are thoroughly delightful as the two fathers – Ball as Grace’s father, Reid as Julia’s.  These are two witty, worldly-wise old men who are not at all as stuffy as their children would like to think them.   

Whatever the flaws of the production, fans of Shaw will want to see The Philanderer as Shaw originally wrote it.  It should be no surprise how right it feels with its clever reassortment of couples and its acceptance of immoral relations shows that Shaw was far ahead of his time.  Still, it’s too bad Peterson has Charteris and Julia making out in various positions at the end to hit us over the head with the idea.  Peterson says she’s “so happy to be mucking around in Shaw’s original third act”, but then she has mucked around throughout the whole play.  She does seem to understand the characters, but she hasn’t settled on a satisfying method of presenting the play as a whole.  Let’s hope that next time around the Festival finds a director who realizes that it’s more worthwhile bringing out Shaw’s humour than subjecting us to her own.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Gord Rand as Leonard Charteris and Marla McLean as Grace, ©2014 David Cooper; Gord Rand as Leonard Charteris and Moya O’Connell as Julia, ©2014 Emily Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.