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by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Philip Akin

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

May 26-September 9, 2018

Lady: “The truth is the one thing that nobody will believe”

In the absence of a full-length play by its namesake playwright, the Shaw Festival is presenting a double-bill of two of Shaw’s one-acters which together make a very satisfying evening.  Both plays concern love-triangles, missing documents and attempts at deception.  In How He Lied to Her Husband of 1904 a man tries to deceive another man.  In Man of Destiny of 1897 a woman tries to deceive a man.  In both plays Shaw sends up the notion of romantic love and in both the intended deception does not go as planned.

First on the bill is How He Lied to Her Husband set and staged in the time of its writing.  Ideally, the play would be presented in the same season with Shaw’s Candida of 1894, since Shaw uses the one-acter as a riff on that play and Candida is the play that is said to have inspired the two lovers to flout convention. 

The young Henry Apjohn (Shawn Ahmed) is in love with the married woman Aurora Bompas (Krystal Kiran), and has been writing her love poetry, as does the character Eugene to the married woman Candida in Shaw’s earlier play.  The problem is that Aurora has misplaced the poems and suspects that her sister-in-law Georgina has stolen them and will show them to her husband Teddy (David Adams).  Henry thinks they should proudly reveal their affair to Teddy and be unashamed of their love, but Aurora doesn’t have the same moral conviction as Henry and urges him to lie if Teddy brings up the subject of the poems.  Teddy does, but what happens is hilariously unexpected.

Shawn Ahmed is very funny as the elegant, romantic Henry.  Director Philip Akin makes him as much concerned about his appearance as about his high moral stance.  Ahmed is perfectly adept at making Henry’s obsession with both appearance and ideals believable and lends his character an ardent voice and graceful gestures as if he really were above the tawdry concerns of the bourgeois world.  His consternation when Aurora asks hm to abandon his ideals and lie is thus even more amusing.

Shaw describes Aurora as ‘hopelessly inferior in physical and spiritual distinction to the beautiful youth”.  This is only half-true in Krystal Kiran’s case.  In good looks she is certainly Ahmed’s match, especially in the lovely gown by Tamara Marie Kucheran that uses sari material and decoration with a Victorian silhouette.  Kiran does show us, however, that Aurora is no match for Henry in idealism.  Her anger at her sister-in-law grates against Henry’s perfect world in which only they two exist.  Kiran gives Aurora a wonderfully subtle way of looking enchanted with whatever Henry says without fully understanding what he means.

After seeing so many young people made up to be old people this season, it’s a real pleasure to see an authentic senior actor like DavidAdams on stage as Aurora’s practical, quick-witted husband Teddy.  His understanding and playful treatment of Henry hilariously confound every expectation that Henry and Aurora have set up about him.  How He Lied is a delightful gem of a comedy that shows there are at least two ways of looking at every circumstance, even including a young man’s being in love with your wife.           

After intermission we return to the same set as that for How He Lied to Her Husband and the actors repeat the final lines.  In a clever move Philip Akin then has the actors retake their bows and proceed to turn the walls of the set about to reveal the new set for The Man of Destiny.  Not only does this highlight the theatricality of both works but it’s simply fun to watch and pays tribute to the ingenuity of set designer Steve Lucas. 

The Man of Destiny is also set and played in its given period, namely May 12, 1796, in a small town in Italy two days after the victory of the French at the Battle of Lodi, the first battle in which Napoleon Bonaparte, then merely a general, showed his genius in strategy.  Napoleon (Kelly Wong) is dining at an inn and chatting with the innkeeper Giuseppe (Martin Happer) when a Lieutenant (Andrew Lawrie) bursts in to say that the dispatches he was carrying have been stolen by a young man who tricked him.  He says he can hear the voice of the young man upstairs but it proves to be that of a woman known only in the text as the “Lady” (Fiona Byrne).

The Lady claims that the young man who stole the dispatches was her twin brother.  Napoleon does not believe her and wishes to interrogate the Lady alone.  At this point the two engage in a battle of wits where Napoleon has to apply his gifts of strategy to finding out the Lady’s secret and she uses her similar powers in deflecting and misdirecting Napoleon’s inquiries.  The subject turns out to be a love triangle, but unlike the previous play, two of the three participants are not present.  Napoleon surmises that the Lady is English which leads him into a humorous disquisition on the English character and habits of self-justification, including Shaw’s famous statement, “The English are a nation of shopkeepers”.                 

In 1796 Napoleon would have been only 27, so a young man like Kelly Wong is ideal for the role.  Wong gives us the picture of an vital, intense soldier who has an innate ability to command but, crucially, has not yet lost his sense of humour and given into pretence, although Wong shows that Napoleon’s tendency towards it is already present.  Wong’s Napoleon is a man who is happiest in the throes of battle and shows us how the general throws off the sullenness that had overcome him when his encounter with the Lady finally becomes a war.

Fiona Byrne is perfectly delightful as the Lady.  She skilfully demonstrates how the Lady’s protestations of innocence gradually acquire an aggressive tone which leads the Lady to her intellectual struggle with Napoleon that she clearly enjoys as much as he does.  Both Wong and Byrne have had long experience with Shaw and it shows in how clearly they speak his long, complex sentences and how well they imbue them with layers of emotion.  The Man of Destiny provides an ideal example of how a battle of wits can hold you on the edge of your seat.

Martin Happer is not the first person one might think of to play an aged Italian innkeeper, but he does so very well and with an infectious spirit of good humour.  Andrew Lawrie plays the Lieutenant as the most pretentious character in the play – a major irony considering that he is in the presence of Napoleon.  The Lieutenant is given to bluster, but so is Lawrie which means that he does not quite fit in by playing his character much larger than do his three cast-mates.

In 1904 Shaw wrote How He Lied to Her Husband to be a curtain-raiser for a New York production of The Man of Destiny, so pairing the two not only works well in itself but has the backing of history.  While the double-bill makes an excellent introduction to Shaw, there are other of his one-act plays that might be more significant given that this is the centenary of the end of World War I. 

The Festival is staging Shaw’s O’Flaherty V.C. (1917) as a lunchtime show, but there are two other one-acters it has neglected that both have the Great War as their theme.  One is The Inca of Perusalem (1916), where the fictional “Inca” turns out to be an analogue for Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.  The other is Augustus Does His Bit (1917) where a female spy attempts to steal an important document from a British aristocrat who has three German brothers-in-law.  Now would have been the perfect time to revive these two along with O’Flaherty V. C. since they haven’t been seen at the Shaw since 1985 and 1987 respectively.  Let’s hope the Festival doesn’t wait too long after the commemoration of the war’s end has past to stage them.                       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Krystal Kiran as Aurora, David Adams as Teddy and Shawn Ahmed as Henry; Andrew Lawrie as The Lieutenant, Martin Happer as Giuseppe, Kelly Wong as Napoleon Bonaparte and Fiona Byrne as the Lady; Fiona Byrne as the Lady and Kelly Wong as Napoleon Bonaparte. ©2018 Emily Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.