Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✭✭
written by George Bernard Shaw,
directed by Tadeusz Bradecki
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 9-October 11, 2009
“A Divine ‘Disciple’"
Often we need to have someone from outside look at familiar works to give them a new perspective. That is exactly what has happened with the Shaw Festival’s fourth production of Shaw’s “The Devil’s Disciple” (1897) directed by acclaimed Polish director Tadeusz Bradecki. Bradecki is, of course, no stranger to the Festival. This is the ninth production he has directed here and third Shaw play after “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” in 1997 and “Heartbreak House” in 1999. What he has achieved is to find exactly the right tone between melodrama and satire to make this 19th-century play fresh, exciting and very funny.
Previous productions of “Disciple” have tended to emphasize how different the play is from Shaw’s other works. Bradecki succeeds by emphasizing its similarities. Shaw always satirizes humanity’s propensity to romanticize its own activities. Just as he satirizes heroism and romantic love in “Arms and the Man” (1894), so he does in “Disciple”. What Bradecki makes so clear is how Shaw maintains the structure of 19th-century melodrama while mocking it at every step with his content.
The play is unusual for Shaw in that it is set in America, specially in new Hampshire in 1777 during the War of Independence. Dick Dudgeon, the title character, has received his nickname because he proudly proclaims he honours the Devil not God, because it is clear what happens on earth is the Devil’s work. He returns to his family home where is mother is mourning, at least in show, the death of her husband whose will is about to be read. When it turns out his father has left everything to him, Dick invites his despised orphaned cousin to stay and states he is a rebel against the British unlike the rest of his cowardly family. Right from the start Bradecki makes the link clear between Dick’s mother’s concern for propriety and order with tacit support for the hierarchy that creates the status quo.
What happens when that hierarchy is corrupt and repressive? Surprising reversals and revelations of character are the result. In Act 2, Dick visits the Reverend Anthony Anderson and his wife Judith at the Reverend’s request, in what would seem to be a meeting of opposites. When the Reverend is called away and British soldiers raid the house, Dick allows himself to be arrested as the Reverend. Now in Judith’s eyes, Dick seems the hero and her own husband the coward. But there are more surprises to follow.
The play has been very well cast. Evan Buliung may be the best Dick Dudgeon the Festival has seen. Previous incarnations like Gordon Rand in 1996 or Jim Mezon in 1984 have had an aura of latent heroism about them despite all the rude things they say and do in Act 1. Buliung, however, seems like a scoundrel and wastrel from his first entrance. He exudes contempt for all the “proper” folk around him and Bradecki makes sure the “proper” folk visibly bristle with disapproval and fear in his presence. Yet, Buliung makes it perfectly believable that he would allow himself to be arrested as the Reverend. It is not some sudden urge for self-sacrifice but seems simply a part of his contempt for authority that he will allow them to persist in their mistake.
For her part, Fiona Byrne is excellent as Judith. Her loyalty to her husband and the laws of propriety are innate reflexes but not hypocritical like those of Dick’s mother. It is wonderful to watch in Acts 2 and 3 how Byrne shows the raging battle inside Judith between attraction and repulsion for Dick. He initially represents everything her husband is not and she is necessarily curious what kind of person could be like this. But when Dick allows himself to be arrested her turmoil increases. It is an extremely nuanced performance that finds the subtle comedy in Judith’s crisis of character.
Peter Krantz gives Reverend Anderson an appropriate earnestness but it is clear that he is much less hidebound than his parishioners. Krantz lends Anderson an air of unconventionality that explains his invitation to Dick and looks forward to his transformation at the end. Donna Bellevile is pleasure as Dick’s mother, too preoccupied with seeming pious to realize how thoroughly hypocritical she is.
As the American rebels‘ opponents Jim Mezon and Peter Millard reflect the same divisions we see in the American populace. Millard as Major Swindon unquestioningly espouses whatever the received wisdom is on any subject. Mezon’s General Burgoyne, however, is a realist and ironist, a kind of upper class British parallel to Dick, who sees the political motives behind patriotic poses and holds to the realities on the ground rather than the unfeasible order from London. Mezon, who has played the role of the Shavian rationalist before, has completely mastered the tone, timing and gestures of this character to create the maximum wry comic effect.
In smaller roles we should also note Jonathan Widdifield as Dick's clumsy, benighted Christy Dudgeon, Anthony Bekenn and Guy Bannerman as the comically stolid William and Titus Dudgeon, Lorne Kennedy as the unflappable rationalist Lawyer Hawkins, young Lucy Campbell as the frightened child Essie and Richard Stewart, who shows the humanity in the British Sergeant.
Peter Hartwell has given the play a clean, spartan design, with much beautiful use of wood. While the spareness reflects the character’s humble dwellings, it also gives the play a very modern look, composed as it is of neat rectangles and squares. The lovely curves of the period costumes contrast with these lines to make it look like historical characters are placed within a modern context, which, of course, being in Shaw’s play, they are.
Bradecki takes a page out of the late Neil Munro’s brilliant direction of “Misalliance” in 2003, by having some of Shaw’s copious stage directions spoken by British soldiers as a kind of chorus. He even inserts his own writing in to point out that Fort George in Niagara-on-the Lake was built when the British were forced to withdraw from Fort Niagara across the river. Strange but true that it should take a foreign director to make Shaw’s play immediately relevant to the audience watching it. This imaginative move is only one of many in a production of Shaw’s play that may never be bettered.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Evan Buliung in black and cast members of The Devil’s Disciple. ©David Cooper.
2009-08-07
The Devil’s Disciple