Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Tim Carroll
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
June 24-October 7, 2017
Emperor: “None of us can feel quite sure what he will do next”
Tim Carroll has missed a major opportunity in directing Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion this year. In Androcles he has a play about the persecution of a religious minority and about the relation of politics to religion, subjects that could hardly be more relevant. Yet, Carroll has decided to present Shaw’s 1913 comedy as a meaningless romp that is all about having “fun” rather than any of the serious topics Shaw covers.
In his “Director’s Notes”, Carroll says that in Androcles Shaw “mixes romantic comedy, social satire, political commentary, religious rumination, children’s pantomime and vaudevillian slapstick.” Carroll sees no value in trying to “solve” the play and asserts that “Androcles is, irreducibly, a crazy mishmash, and so is this production”. Carroll is certainly right that his production is a crazy mishmash, but he has not looked very closely at the play.
Instead, of assuming that the multiple genres the play involves is a “mishmash”, Carroll could have assumed that Shaw knew what he as doing and created a synthesis of these genres. Shaw’s Preface clearly shows that Shaw felt he was portraying serious matters in the form of comedy. Why does Carroll refuse to see that? Carroll says, “Whatever happens, we intend to have a lot of fun”. The play is a comedy, but like most of Shaw’s plays deals with important issues. Carroll, thinking the play needs further goosing up, so emphasizes its “fun” that its significance goes missing.
The short play, far from being a “mishmash” is a tightly told parable, dating from classical times and known in the Middles Ages as “The Shepherd and the Lion”. Shaw knows this and gives the play the subtitle “A Fable Play”. One can only wonder why Carroll deliberately ignores this.
In the Prologue to the play, Androcles (Patrick Galligan) is fleeing Roman persecution with his shrewish wife Megaera (Jenny L. Wright), whose name, not accidentally, is that of one of the Furies. The two argue because Androcles is a Christian and Megaera is not and resents having to flee due her husband’s beliefs. The two encounter a lion with a thorn in its paw. Androcles removes it and the lion seems to express gratitude.
In the play proper a Centurion (Shawn Wright) has been marching his Christian prisoners to Rome where they will be thrown to the lions or have to fight gladiators in the Coliseum. The prisoners, who include the patrician Lavinia (Julia Course), are told by a handsome Captain (Kyle Blair) to wait because they will be soon joined by three important prisoners. One is the fierce fighter Ferrovius (Jeff Irving), another is Androcles, referred to as a Greek tailor and sorcerer, and the third is the zealot Spintho (Michael Therriault).
This is thus not a foolish or silly play, much less a “crazy mishmash”. Yet, Carroll undertakes to make the play as crazy as possible. First, when you enter the Court House Theatre, you note the back curtain is not yet arranged and the actors in their street gear are busy chatting with the audience. This is the now tired old trope of beginning the play when the players are supposedly not yet ready to begin. Carroll used this same technique in his Twelfth Night on Broadway, and is using it here now. It has become so widespread that another play at the Shaw is also using the same technique, The Madness of George III. The point, of course, is to show us that the play we have entered the theatre to see is a play, as if we were too stupid to realize it. Breaking the fourth wall was very important in the early 20th century when almost all staged plays were in the realist mode, but this is now the 21st century and we have seen a wide variety of types of plays and have got the point already.
Before the action begins actors try to encourage sections of the audience to compete in which can roar the loudest. As it turns out this is merely an exercise in warming up the audience as would happen for a television audience, since our roaring is never required later in the play.
Similarly, to play the Lion, an actor chooses a member of the audience who goes backstage for costuming before re-entering. On opening night an 11-year-old girl was chosen and it was all very cute how she did or did not follow the stage directions that Shawn Wright read out. The problem is that this is diversion for its own sake. When Shaw requires the same Lion to reappear near the end of the play, Carroll uses a puppet for the purpose. The key point that this is the same Lion is thus undercut just because Carroll wished to waste time embarrassing an audience member earlier.
The actor’s thoughts and stories are totally irrelevant and distracting. Since Carroll has infused the play with the singing of Christian hymns of all periods, the need to sing songs has already been taken care of. Hearing excerpts from Shaw’s Preface, however, is a good idea since then only in this production do we see that Shaw’s comedy has a serious purpose. Much better than random expostulations would be purposeful insertions of parts of the Preface at key points in the action since so much that Shaw says is so fascinating.
A smart play made to seem foolish by an insightless director is never a good experience. Carroll’s distracting “fun” adds nearly a half hour to what could have been a tight, intermissionless 90-minute-long play. It’s Carroll’s hubris to think his additions have any place in Shaw’s play, especially when it’s only the passages by Shaw that hold our attention.
What helps to redeem Carroll’s production of Androcles is the fine work of his indomitable cast. Apparently the role of Narrator (not in Shaw) who does introductions and reads Shaw’s stage directions goes to different cast members at different performances. Opening night saw Shawn Wright as the Centurion and Narrator and he was hilarious. His opening monologue may have added about 10 minutes to the show, but Wright is so good at funny off-the-cuff remarks that you felt you be as happy seeing his stand-up routine as the play – another sign of how little interest Carroll has in the play itself.
Patrick Galligan is wonderfully warm, reasonable and compassionate as Androcles. His character’s steadfastness is the touchstone against which all the others actions are measured. If goodness is supposed to be difficult to play on stage, you would never know it by how much variety and interest Galligan brings to this character.
If Galligan’s Androcles is warm, Julia Course’s Lavinia is rather cold and her wittiness rather brittle. Yet, in Lavinia’s best-known speech about not catching a mouse in her hand, Course lends Lavinia an thoughtful inward life that we wish had been present earlier along with her defiant outward façade.
Jeff Irving makes us see both the comic and painful sides of Ferrovius’ struggle with his violent nature. His characters is clearly not by nature meek and humble as Androcles is and it is amusing to see him fight against himself to be so. Yet, Irving, who plays the strongman as somewhat benighted, also draws sympathy as a person who in a real, physical way is trying to force himself to fit an ideal. Michael Therriault’s Spintho is quite the opposite. Therriault makes him a cowardly opportunist who embraces Christianity simply as a way of hedging his bets for the afterlife.
Among the Romans, Kyle Blair is suitably dashing as the Captain. Though we know Blair mostly through his work in musicals, here he shows how good he is in a straight acting role. His imperious, resonant voice and excellent phrasing makes him the most formidable and seemingly inflexible of the Romans. Yet, Blair allows shifts in expression and an occasional softening of tone to reveal that the more the Captain debates with the lively Lavinia, the more he is falling in love with her.
Jenny L. Wright is very funny both as Androcles’s hard-hearted, self-involved wife Megaera and later as the Menagerie Keeper whose dentures seem on the verge of slipping out. Neil Barclay is well cast as the Emperor, who proves as so often in Shaw, that the man at the top is often less strict about rules than those, like the Captain, who serve him. Barclay gives the Emperor a regal presence but also an intelligence and sense of practicality that makes his alterations of policy completely believable.
Patty Jamieson, who has fun playing a lecherous male soldier, and Kristi Frank both had the distinction on opening night of being thrown the ball calling for them to recite an excerpt of Shaw’s Preface. Both spoke Shaw’s complex prose so eloquently that they each received a round of applause for their efforts. Let me give an excerpt from the passage one of them spoke:
In this play I have represented one of the Roman persecutions of the early Christians, not as the conflict of a false theology with a true, but as what all such persecutions essentially are: an attempt to suppress a propaganda that seemed to threaten the interests involved in the established law and order, organized and maintained in the name of religion and justice by politicians who are pure opportunist Have-and-Holders.
The director really has not come to terms with a statement like this that clearly shows the play is not a “crazy mishmash” at all. The idea expressed here should pervade the play, not pop out as a random extract.
Given how relevant the play is to ongoing conflicts between religion and politics around the world, it is surprising the Shaw Festival has staged Androcles only twice before – in 1963 and 1984. It is therefore a terrible waste that the play’s rare appearance this year should be ruined by a director who is more interested in it for its possibilities for farcical game-playing with the audience than in its still pertinent meaning. I sincerely pray that the Festival does not wait another 33 years to present Androcles and hope that when it does it receives a production sensitive both to its humour and its import.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Patrick Galligan as Androcles and Neil Barclay as the Emperor; Shawn Wright as the Centurion leading the Christians; Jeff Irving as Ferrovius; Kyle Blair as the Captain, Julia Course as Lavinia and Patrick Galligan as Androcles. ©2017 David Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2017-06-25
Androcles and the Lion