Reviews 2001
Reviews 2001
✭✭✭✩✩
by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Allen MacInnis
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 23-October 28, 2001
“Short-Changed”
According to Bernard Shaw “the quality of a play is the quality of its ideas”. Often, especially in his later work, the quality of his ideas is better than the quality of the play they are meant to inform. “The Millionairess” (1935), now making its fourth appearance at the Shaw Festival, is a case in point. After watching this play with its monomaniac title character and its dissatisfying comic conclusion, one leaps to the programme notes to find out what it’s all supposed to mean. There Ronald Bryden helpfully explains that Shaw meant to write a comedy à la Ben Jonson using the character Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga Fitzfassenden to represent the type of people who become the Hitlers and Mussolinis of this world. The famous monomaniacs of Jonson or Molière are either purged, punished or isolated. Shaw’s Epifania, however, gets everything she wants.
The play finds Shaw in one of his more garrulous moods. Only at the end of the second act does the play reach any dramatic nub. Dissatisfied with her husband and her would-be paramour, Epifania, the richest woman in England, meets an Egyptian doctor and instantly must have him. However, Epifania’s father and the doctor’s mother have each required that their children set a test for any intended spouse which must be fulfilled before they may wed. Epifania’s test requires that her future husband turn £150 into £50,000 within six months; doctor’s requires a future bride to live on 200 piastres for six months. Shaw explicitly compares Epifania to a fairy-tale princess. The third act, the most concise of the four, finds Epifania trying to find work in a sweat shop. To reveal how or whether she and the doctor successfully pass their tests would ruin what little dramatic suspense the play has. Suffice it to say that by the conclusion, contrary to what we would like to see happen, Epifania’s character, like that of all the others, remains unchanged. We are left to wonder why this fairy-tale princess is so much like an ogre. In “Arms and the Man”, “Major Barbara” and “Pygmalion” Shaw is able to blend fairy-tale with satire and social criticism. Here the disparate elements don’t gel.
A play is this unfocussed requires incisive direction to make it cohere. Allen MacInnis, who did such a masterful job with “In Good King Charles’ Golden Days” in 1997, here seems clueless. He adds silent movie-like credits, location intertitles and irising in and out of scenes. This is diverting enough but has no interpretive function (and besides, the play takes place in the sound era). He really doesn’t know what to do with the talky first act except to have the actors switch chairs periodically and cross their legs in synch. He manages the middle two acts well enough, helped by John Stead’s great fight scene in Act 2, but still reveals no particular take on the action. The final act is again a muddle where MacInnis resorts to having actors give their longest speeches directly to the audience as if this will somehow clarify the play’s meaning.
William Schmuck has design four highly distinctive sets—a grandiose lawyer’s office, a seedy pub restaurant, an grungy sweatshop (the most impressive of the four) and a hotel lobby, the first good art deco set I’ve seen all year. Why, however, the first should be nonrealistic with its see-through walls, the third wonderfully exaggerated and the second and fourth highly realistic is hard to understand, the different styles only underscoring the director’s lack of a point of view. Schmuck gives Epifania delightfully outré costumes that appropriately set her apart from the plainness of the other characters. Michael Kruse’s lighting aims for realism despite the differing styles of the sets.
The primary reason why this not top-drawer Shaw continues to be produced is that it offers a superb showcase for an actress in mid-career. It’s hard to think of many plays other than Brecht’s “Mother Courage” or Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit” where a woman larger than life, both symbolic and realistic, so dominates every scene. The challenge of this character is to make this profoundly egotistical materialist fascinating who in real life would be insufferably obnoxious and to give nuance and variety to someone who does not change. Sarah Orenstein gives a superlative performance, especially fine in highlighting Epifania’s strength, cruelty and quicksilver temperament. Yet ultimately, when charisma or charm are called for she tends to substitute guile or coyness. To make the ending work there has to be some suggestion that she wants some escape from her prison of money despite all she says. But an actor can’t be expected to supply a subtext when the director hasn’t noticed.
Shaw intends the meeting of Epifania and the Eygptian Doctor to be a meeting of equals as their parallels tests suggest. But he has makes things very difficult for the actor who appears only in part of two acts while Epifania blazes through all four. The Doctor’s humility and devotion to Allah is meant to counter her self-centredness and devotion to Mammon. Nigel Shawn Williams does very well at portraying a calm that withstands her tantrums but ultimately he needs to project far more clearly a mystical inner strength to counter her outward force.
The other characters, all well played, exist solely as foils to Epifania. Peter Millard (the lawyer Julius Sagamore) gives cool reason and practicality to counter her rage and whims. Peter Krantz (her husband Alastair Fitzfassenden) is quite funny as the dim-witted male to counter her quick-wittedness. Severn Thompson (her lowly rival Patricia Smith) shows the simple, domestic love to counter her all-consuming passion. David Schurmann (Adrian Blenderbland) shows a sickly fascination with what great wealth can buy while for her it has lost all interest. John Clelland is effective as the Hotel Manager who delivers a paean to Epifania’s greatness.
William Vickers and Donna Belleville give excellent performances as the two most realistic characters of the play, the owner of a sweatshop and his wife. Only in their scene when they agonize how to confront a woman who threatens to dominate them does the play strike any notes that ring true.
The programme notes at the Shaw Festival are always exemplary, but the implications of a play should be discernible in the performance itself, not only in the notes. Superficial direction is the last thing a problematic play like this requires.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Sarah Orenstein. ©Gary Goddard Agency.
2001-08-16
The Millionairess