Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✭✩
by J.M. Barrie, directed by Lezlie Wade
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
June 27-September 12, 2015
Lady Sims: “It must be delightful to be able to do something, and do it well”
Few professional theatre companies ever showcase classic one-act plays, but the Shaw Festival is an exception. The Festival’s lunch-time slot is a place where these gems of theatre that tell their stories in an hour or less have a chance to shine. They are a perfect way for newcomers to make a first acquaintance with the Festival and this year’s offering is especially fine. The Twelve-Pound Look, written by J.M. Barrie – yes, the same one who wrote Peter Pan – is only 35 minutes long, but it has the same pithiness of a great short story and it is very funny.
The story is very simple but combines a nexus of ideas that are still valid today. Harry Sims (Patrick Galligan), a wealthy businessman, is about to be knighted and we first meet him practicing how to approach the King (since it is 1910 and Edward VII is on the throne), kneel, rise and gracefully glide backwards. His second wife, Lady Sims (Kate Besworth), is trying on the gown she will wear at the ceremony and is taking on the role of the King, using a poker from the fireplace in lieu of a sword, to knight her husband. After Sims exits, the butler Tombes (Neil Barclay) announces the arrival of Kate (Moya O’Connell), a woman sent by a secretarial agency to type replies to Sims’s voluminous number of congratulatory letter.
Lady Sims, whose entire life revolves around her husband and being beautiful for him, is fascinated at the chipper though plainly dressed Kate, who has a skill, makes money with it and is so efficient she anticipates exactly what Sims has said each letter of reply should contain. She tells Lady Sims how only £12 invested in buying a typewriter helped her become independent.
When Lady Sims exits and Sims enters, we discover that not only do he and Kate know each other, but that Kate was the first Mrs. Sims. Why Kate left Sims and how this affects the new Mrs. Sims is the hilarious nub of the play.
Director Lezlie Wade prefaces the action with the song “If Eve Had Left the Apple on the Bough” from Victor Herbert’s Eileen (1917) delightfully sung by Barclay and Harveen Sandhu as the Maid. When sung by Barclay, the song blames Eve for the fall of man from paradise in the Garden of Eden. When sung by Sandhu, it blames Adam for being so easily tempted. Meanwhile, we note the inequity between the two as Barclay commands Sandhu to do all the heavy lifting in readying the room while he does only the lightest work.
Patrick Galligan is the perfect incarnation of the success-driven gentleman who is convinced that a woman’s role is simply to look beautiful and that her happiness comes from reflecting her husband’s glory. He is not a villain. Rather, he can’t recognize that a woman might have aspirations for self-fulfilment beyond acting as a living doll for her husband.
Moya O’Connell’s Kate can only look on her former husband and his wife with pity for their unenlightened state. Even her precise posture and gestures indicate a woman who revels in a discipline she has imposed on herself as opposed to one imposed by others on her. Kate Besworth’s Lady Sims at first seems to fulfil Sims’s view of what women are – lovely brainless creatures whose role is to be agreeable and decorative. Besworth shows that Lady Sims’s encounter with such a different woman as Kate reveals a possibility for a woman’s life that had never before occurred to her.
William Schmuck has provided a quite a lavish deign for such a short play, a study that exudes both masculinity and stuffiness. Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (1879), where a wife leaves her husband and his narrow view of women behind, was already 30 years old when Barrie wrote The Twelve-Pound Look, but it’s revolutionary effects were still being felt as Barrie’s comic look at it with Kate and Sims makes clear. The Twelve-Pound Look is a short but excellent introduction to the Shaw Festival, both to its original mandate of works written during Shaw’s lifetime (1856-1950) and the themes of the period and to the Festival’s high artistic levels of production and performance.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Kate Besworth as Lady Sims and Moya O’Connell as Kate. ©2015 David Cooper.
2015-08-08
The Twelve-Pound Look