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by W.S. Gilbert, directed by Morris Panych

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

June 30-October 30, 2016

Belinda: “Before I actually consent to take the irrevocable step that will place

    me on the pinnacle of my fondest hopes, you must give me some definite

    idea of your pecuniary position”

The reason why Richard D’Oyly Carte brought W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan together to create their immortal series of comic operas was because he knew that each was outstanding in his field – Gilbert as a playwright and Sullivan as a composer.  In 1995 the Shaw Festival presented The Zoo (1875), one of Sullivan’s one-act operettas without Gilbert.  Now, at last, the Festival has got round to presenting Engaged (1877), the best-known and most influential of Gilbert’s plays.  In its online description the Shaw’s Artistic Director speaks of it as part of the Festival’s “literary archeology”.  In fact, the play has long been known as an important antecedent of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and a vital link between Wilde and 19th-century comedies still influenced by the previous century like Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance (1841).  But the play’s historical importance is not the reason to see it.  Engaged happens to be an uproariously funny play and it is superbly performed. 

Act 1 of the comedy is set in the garden of the cottage of Mrs. Mcfarlane near Gretna Green on the border between England and Scotland.  Mrs. Mcfarlane (Mary Haney) and her daughter Maggie (Julia Course) make their living by having Maggie’s sweetheart Angus (Martin Happer) block the railway tracks so that that passengers stop by the cottage for refreshments while the crew clear the tracks.  The particular train Angus’s work stops has a volatile group of passengers.  We first meet Belvawney (Jeff Meadows), who wants to marry Belinda Treherne (Nicole Underhay).  Belinda would like to marry Belvawney but she’s not happy that his income depends entirely on keeping his friend, the wealthy Cheviot Hill (Gray Powell) from marrying.  Hill suffers from the habit of proposing marriage to every good-looking young woman he meets.  Hill is, at present, engaged to the daughter of his advisor Mr. Symperson (Shawn Wright), but as soon as Hill spies the bonnie lass Maggie and later the lovely Belinda, he proposes to both.  Worse, according to the simple methods of marrying in Scotland, where a couple merely has to declare themselves man and wife, Hill and Belinda find that they have accidentally married. 

The next two acts are set in London where Mr. Symperson’s daughter Minnie (Diana Donnelly) is awaiting her marriage with Hill to take place in an hour.  When Belinda tells her of her anguish in having married a stranger she hasn’t seen now for three months, Minnie is rather put out to find that this stranger is none other than Hill.  The circuitous ways in which everything works out to everyone’s benefit is as much a pleasure as Gilbert’s extraordinarily witty dialogue.

Those familiar with the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas will know that Gilbert constantly undermines the notion of romantic love.  In The Sorcerer (1877) a magic potion causes villagers to fall in love with the very first person of the opposite sex that they see.  In Patience (1881) a man auctions off his love in a lottery.  In The Yeomen of the Guard (1888) a woman marries a stranger condemned to execution to grant his last wish and gain some remuneration.  One of the main sources of humour in Engaged is the contrast between the extremely florid and formulaic ways that characters express romantic love and their undisguisedly mercenary view of marriage.  As Belinda tells Belvawney about marriage, “Business is business”.

The characters of Engaged consistently express themselves in a hyperbolic fashion as if excess of verbiage will compensate for their lack of profound emotions.  Morris Panych’s greatest achievement in directing the play is to have the entire cast act at exactly the same level of self-conscious theatricality.  Any weak link would ruin the effect, but the cast works together so beautifully as a ensemble that we feel we enter a world where the characters are constantly acting what they feel both to themselves and others.  It is precisely this king of artifice that one finds later in Wilde’s Earnest.

To correspond with the exaggerate modes of expression in the play, designer Ken  MacDonald has exaggerated the look of the sets.  Act 1 set in Scotland is dominated by thistles (the symbol of Scotland) as high as trees.  In Act 2 and 3 set in England, the wallpaper of the Symperson residence is covered with gigantic roses (the symbol of England).  It would be good if Panych let the sets be, but he tries to gets laughs in Act 1 by having characters gasp as the size of the thistles.  The play is funny enough.  It doesn’t need shtick to make it funnier.

Panych wants to set the action in another period but seems confused about when that should be.  A miscellany of 1960s pop and rock plays over the speakers before and after the show and at intermission, but Panych precedes the action on stage with Billy Bennett’s famous musical hall monologue, “My Mother Doesn’t Know I’m on the Stage”, expertly delivered by Shawn Wright.  When the curtain rises we see Maggie at her spinning-wheel sporting sleeve tattoos and punk-style combat boots just like Angus wears.  So in the space of fifteen minutes Panych has taken us from the 1960s to the 1920s and now to the late 1970s. 

Charlotte Dean’s costumes for the English characters take Victorian silhouettes but fills them with 1960s-inspired clashes of colour and pattern, like mixes of magenta and green for the men.  In Act 2 the gorgeous wedding gown for Minnie and the outré mourning gown for Belinda are both purely Victorian, but eventually the Victorian-Sixties mix takes over.  The bad aspect of the design is that it makes no sense.  The good aspect is that it has little influence on enjoying the play.

All the parts are well cast and well performed.  The most difficult role is Cheviot Hill, but Gray Powell does masterful work at making Hill’s habit of proposing to every pretty women he meets perfectly believable.  Since Hill is proposing marriage rather than sex, he is rather like a Victorian parody of Don Juan.  Powell plays Hill’s habit as a type of mania over which Hill has no control.  Hill is struck with a woman’s beauty, falls into a trance, forgets all previous promises and launches into his set formulae of admiration capped by a proposal.  The fact that Hill uses the same terms to woo every woman suggests it is womankind in general he is in love with rather than any specific woman.  Like the rest of the cast, Powell knows that to make his character funny he has to play him with absolute seriousness.

Nicole Underhay’s character Belinda is the polar opposite of Hill since she is in a continual state of consternation.  If Hill keeps proposing to women, Belinda keeps jilting men.  She is on the ill-fated train because she has left a Major McGillicuddy (Ric Reid) at the altar.  Yet, when she finds that her new fiancé Belvawney’s income is not stable, she is ready to drop him.  Like Hill, Belinda has a store of stock phrases she uses to express her love, but her tone turns cold when the subject turns to money.  Underhay manages these shifts perfectly and shows that Belinda has no awareness that her mercenary goals undercut her romantic declarations.

Gilbert’s three Scottish characters are a parody of the Victorian notion of the humble but honest peasant.  They speak of caring for the distraught railway passengers as if they had no hand in causing their distress.  Gilbert comically goes overboard in giving them heavy Scots accents, especially since the three live on the very border with England.  Of the three Julia Course as Maggie is the most difficult to understand.  Martin Happer is very funny as Angus, who despite his stature and muscular build is the most given to tears at the slightest provocation.  Mary Haney is amusing as Maggie’s no-nonsense mother. 

Diana Donnelly and Jeff Meadows draw laughs as the pleasant but rather dim-witted Minnie and Belvawney.  The one character in the play least prey to confusion or attacks of emotion is Minnie’s father Mr. Symperson, and Shawn Wright makes his coolness and practicality just as humorous as the others’ overheatedness and irrationality.

Despite the peculiarities of the production, Gilbert’s Engaged shines through as one of the great English comedies and one that deserves to be performed much more frequently.  The fact that Oscar Wilde pillaged the play for so many ideas in The Importance of Being Earnest can only be taken as a sign of admiration.  It is clear the the humour of Gilbert’s “topsy-turvydom” points directly towards Wilde’s reversal of the “serious” and the “trivial” in his comedies and in subsequent British comedy through Noel Coward and even Joe Orton.  Engaged is such enormous fun it will make you hope that the Shaw Festival investigates some of Gilbert’s other plays.  It will also make you wonder why the Shaw has allowed Stratford to be the prime custodian of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas when they do, in fact, lie directly in the original mandate of the Shaw Festival.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Nicole Underhay, Gray Powell and Diana Donnelly; Julia Course and Martin Happer; Gray Powell and Shawn Wright. ©2016 David Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.