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by St. John Hankin, directed by Christopher Newton

Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

May 25-October 5, 2002

"A Prodigious 'Prodigal'"

Last year at the Shaw Festival an unknown play by an unknown author became the hit of the season.  This year the Shaw has brought back that play, St. John Hankin's 1905 comedy "The Return of the Prodigal", and its entire run is nearly sold out.  Why is this?  The play is a real find, the direction and design are excellent and the cast is superb.

"Prodigal" by the short-lived Hankin (1869-1909) is a play poised neatly between Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw, combining the epigrammatic wit of the former with the social conscience of the latter.  It concerns the Jackson family happily ensconced in their family home in Gloucestershire.  The patriarch Samuel and his first-born son Henry have recently electrified their textile mill and as a result have tripled their income by having their employees work longer hours to produce cheaper quality cloth.  Five years before the action begins, Samuel had sent his ne'er-do-well second son Eustace to Australia to make his fortune and remove his embarrassing presence from the family's tidy life.  But just as Samuel is preparing to run for parliament, who should suddenly turn up muddied and disheveled on the family doorstep but Eustace.  As long as he seems ill, the family is sympathetic toward him, but once he has recovered and appears to have no plans to leave, the old animosities of Samuel and Henry toward the good-for-nothing Eustace resurface.  From  amidst the satire of the first two acts serious questions of feminism and socialism emerge, frivolity begins to fall away and the play ends on a note far removed from comedy. 

The play was revived for John Gielgud in 1948 but it has had to wait for Christopher Newton to revive it for us today.  To bring renewed interest to unjustly forgotten work is exactly what theatre festivals were initially established to do.  Newton has directed "Prodigal" with all the clarity and wit of his best work.  He has perhaps overembroidered some scenes compared with last year (Dr. Glaisher's bird-calls do nothing to further the plot), but a tautness and tartness remains to the whole enterprise with the shading into the more serious mood of the second half expertly managed.  Designer William Schmuck has created a set that handsomely evokes the self-conscious modernity of the Edwardian period with rush matting, creams and beiges.  His period costumes perfectly complement the very different natures of particularly the female characters.  Kevin Lamotte's lighting casts a warm glow over the first two acts moving into a suitably starker contrasts in the final two.   

With the exception of the two Footmen, the entire cast from last year has returned--a good thing since it's hard to imagine a better one.  Returning to their roles after the winter hiatus, the cast is so familiar with their parts they have become second nature to them.  The naturalness of their interactions creates, even more than last year, the sense of observing a real family in a real community. 

Ben Carlson is excellent as Eustace.  He lets us glimpse the underlying anger and resentment in Eustace's flippancy that paves the way for the more serious debate later on about what a rich father owes a useless son.  Patricia Hamilton, Carlson's mother in real life, is hilarious as his mother in the play.  Her Mrs. Jackson doesn't have selective hearing as much as selective understanding.  Any information that might upset her neat and narrow world she lets slip past as if it hadn't been uttered.  Bernard Behrens  is forbidding as Samuel, yet he suggests that the strictness of conduct he promotes is a relic of the past generation.  In the acrimony of his argument with Eustace we sense that he feels that not just his position as a father is under attack but the beliefs that define how he understands life.  It is rare that the defeat of the father in comedy can also move us as it does here.

           

Blair Williams and Kelli Fox are very plausible as Eustace's brother Henry and sister Violet.  Henry is the unquestioning follower of his father's traditional and capitalist views.  Williams makes Henry's narrowness more comic by making him obsessive compulsive besides, constantly arranging objects and tidying any mess.  Fox has seemingly little to do in most of the play except to be ignored by everybody.  But, as if turns out, that is precisely Hankin's point.  The suppressing energy Fox has suggested throughout the majority of the action suddenly bursts out when Eustace supposes Violet must be happy with her life.  Then in a remarkable protofeminist speech she shows that her comfortable, predictable life is really a prison that prevents her form ever knowing the outside world.  The fervor of Fox's delivery is key in shifting the tone away from simple comedy.

Hankin has peopled the play with characters who reveal the limitations of the life the Jacksons have chosen.  Brigitte Robinson makes Lady Faringford a younger, meaner version of Wilde's Lady Bracknell.  She's meaner because though her family is upper class they have no money.  This makes her outrageous remarks about the "lower orders", regarding even the wealthy Jacksons as mere "tradesmen", only more ironic.  Christopher Blake is her ineffectual husband Sir John, whose stutter and inattention sum up Hankin's critique of the aristocracy.  (From August 26 on the role will be played by Newton himself.)  Susie Burnett is their daughter Stella, who is more attracted to Eustace than to Henry, whom all suppose she should marry.  The youthful radiance Burnett gives Stella makes us rue the fact that her life will be bartered away.

In smaller roles Sharry Flett and Anthony Bekenn are the Reverend and Mrs. Cyril Pratt, whose politeness and little jokes show that Mrs. Jackson has no monopoly on selective understanding.  This is more obvious in the family physician Dr. Glaisher, a fine comic portrait by Roger Rowland, who has got through his entire practice with minimal examinations and a few set phrases.  Even the rigid propriety of the Jacksons' butler Baines as played by Terrence Bryant is a symptom of the self-satisfied world Eustace's arrival disrupts.          

         

"Prodigal" is just the latest in a long series of discoveries the Shaw Festival has made, revealing the period from 1900-1950 in English drama to be far more varied and exciting than textbooks have lead us to believe.  The play and this production deserves the widest possible audience.  A tour would certainly be in order.  Now that the Shaw has whetted our appetite, let's hope it plans to examine Hankin's other surprisingly modern comedies.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Ben Carlson as Eustace Jackson. ©2002 Shaw Festival.