Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✩✩
by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Eda Holmes
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 25-October 27, 2012
“[She] Wants adventures to drop out of the sky.”
The Shaw Festival’s current production of Shaw’s comedy Misalliance (1910) has the misfortune to be the first to appear at the Festival after Neil Munro’s revelatory production of the play in 2003. Not only did Munro’s production show the play in a completely new light, but it was also perhaps the most radical vision of a play by Shaw that the Festival has ever staged. Therefore, it’s no surprise that Eda Holmes’ rather conventional reading pales in comparison.
What Holmes tries to bring out in the play are its various themes. What Munro brought out was the very self-reflexiveness of structure. Many people, especially in England, strangely enough, tend to think of Shaw’s plays as talky, arid debates disguised as comedies. Regular attendees at the Shaw Festival will have noticed, however, that frequently a director will come along who finds the key to revealing even some of Shaw’s more supposedly intractable plays as daring and new. Recent examples include Allen MacInnis’s production of In Good King Charles’s Golden Days in 1997 that made Shaw seem like a precursor to Tom Stoppard. Tadeusz Bradecki’s production of The Devil’s Disciple in 2009 made it seem less like a melodrama and more a gripping tale of moral decisions. Getting Married had always seemed like simply an extended debate about marriage until Joseph Ziegler’s production in 2008 revealed it as a hilarious intellectual comedy.
Misalliance happens to be one of Shaw’s more experimental plays, one in which he makes fun the public’s perception of him as a creator of debates disguised as plays. The very subtitle for Misalliance is “A Debate in One Sitting”. In his note Shaw states, “As the debate is a long one, the curtain will be lowered twice” suggesting that the play is in three acts. The first act consists of all talk and no plot, the second of all plot and less talk and the third of a resolution of the two.
As the subtitle suggests Misalliance is not merely a comedy but also a self-parody. One of the first things said in the play is “Let’s argue something intellectual,” an offer that’s turned down but nevertheless leads to a series of debates about age versus youth, the merchant class versus the upper class and the role of women in society. In fact, plot versus ideas is one of the topics. Johnny Tarleton tells his father, “I like a book with a plot in it. You like a book with nothing in it but some idea that the chap that writes it keeps worrying, like a cat chasing its own tail.” Later, Johnny expands the notion to plays, “If I buy a book or go to the theatre, I want to forget the shop and forget myself from the moment I go in to the moment I come out. That’s what I pay my money for. And if I find that the author's simply getting at me the whole time, I consider that he's obtained my money under false pretences.” Hypatia Tarleton, the central figure of the play sums up her frustration when she exclaims, “Oh, if I might only have a holiday in an asylum for the dumb. How I envy the animals! They cant talk.... It never stops: talk, talk, talk, talk. That’s my life. All the day I listen to mamma talking; at dinner I listen to papa talking; and when papa stops for breath I listen to Johnny talking.” The main reason Hypatia can’t stand all this talking is that “old” people have past adventures to talk about, whereas she has had no excitement now and is not likely to have once she’s married.
Shaw uses the self-consciously talky first act of the play to reflect a world in need of new ideas to give it impetus to move forward. John Tarleton (Thom Marriott), who has made himself a millionaire from selling men’s underwear, wants his only daughter Hypatia (Krista Colosimo) to marry the aristocrat Bentley Summerhays (Ben Sanders), so that she will have both wealth and a title. Hypatia’s brother Johnny (Jeff Meadows), all brawn and no brain, can’t stand Bentley (all brain and no brawn) and neither can Hypatia. Since Hypatia is named after the Greek neoplatonist philosopher who was martyred by a Christian mob, we can assume Shaw, means her to represent an intellectual woman brought low by bourgeois respectability
As the first act reaches this impasse, Tarleton says of Hypatia, “There, you see! She's not satisfied. Restless. Wants things to happen. Wants adventures to drop out of the sky.” Indeed, adventures do finally start to happen when an airplane crashes into the Tarleton house and machinations of the plot begin.
The impasse is broken by a deus ex machina, or, since they are aviators not gods, by “aeroplanigae ex machina”. The two represent the New Man and the New Woman. Joey Percival (Wade Bogert-O’Brien) has both brains and brawn and, as the son of three fathers – a faddist, a non-believer and a freethinker – mistrusts wild impulses. His passenger who saves his life is Lina Szczepanowska (Tara Rosling), a Polish acrobat superior in brains and brawn to everyone in the house. These two inject energy into the play and cause new couples to form by the end. A threat also arrives in the form of a Gunner (Craig Pike), who seeks revenge on Tarleton for having had a fling with his mother.
Neil Munro’s production emphasized the deliberate artificiality of the play. When characters had long speeches he had them seem to read them from one of two podia at the back of the set. Characters would often read Shaw’s stage directions about their nature and appearance. Actors would enter the stage as often through the walls of Peter Hartwell’s abstract set as through its doors. In Munro’s hands the playful, deconstructive self-consciousness of the production only enhanced its humour.
Eda Holmes never makes use of Shaw’s self-referentiality at all. Instead, she makes the mistake of moving the action forward from 1910 to 1962, the year the Shaw Festival was established. While this might make a fine tribute to the Festival, the ‘60s setting robs the text of its novelty. Shaw was ahead of is time in noting the generation gap and in demanding equality for women. Set in 1910 these unconventional views surprise. Set in 1962 these view have become mainstream clichés and we have to keep reminding ourselves we’re watching a play written 52 years earlier. When Shakespeare is updated, the Elizabethan poetry provides a constant clash with modern trappings. Shaw’s prose, except for words like “aeroplane”, does not yet seem so antique to provide a knowing contrast with a new setting. The one time at the Festival that this worked, and worked brilliantly, was in 1993 when Neil Munro set Saint Joan at some unknown time in the near future, and even there the subject matter more than the language established the contrast.
With a ‘60s setting blunting the text of its frisson of novelty and without addressing Shaw’s self-awareness, Holmes can’t manage to find the full humour of the first act or make it sound like anything more than the “talk, talk, talk” Hypatia complains of. The secret to directing Shaw is to reveal the characters’ debating positions as manifestations of their personalities. This Holmes fails to do so. Luckily, however, once the aviators arrive she is on steadier ground with a plot to hold on to and guides the action with moderate efficiency to its conclusion.
Two of the actors give particularly praiseworthy performances. Tara Rosling is absolutely superb as Szczepanowska. She plays her like an alien from another world who looks down with a mixture of amusement and pity on the benighted underdeveloped creatures around her. She delivers her lines with an imperturbable calm and glows with an innate superiority that she seems knowingly to keep in check in order not to overwhelm the household of her hosts.
Thom Marriott, looking quite dapper and certainly not as old or stout as he says he is, perfectly captures the self-confidence of a self-made, self-educated man, proudly showing off his knowledge and power with the reading recommendations that pepper his speech. Until the appearance of Szczepanowska, he seems the most powerful and controlled person on stage, but one of the points of her arrival is to reveal a stage of existence beyond anything Tarleton has imagined.
Other fine performances come from Krista Colosimo and Craig Pike. Colosimo makes one completely sympathize with Hypatia’s situation, while Pike accomplishes the difficult task of making the gunner, John Brown, appear dangerous, fearful and foolish all at once. Catherine McGregor’s Mrs. Tarleton serves as a fine foil to Colosimo’s Hypatia, a woman seemingly quite happy in the adventureless role of wife and hostess, though I wish she’d rankle just a bit at being called “Chickabiddy”, Tarleton’s infantilizing pet name for her. Uncharacteristically, Peter Krantz seems at a loss of what to make of Lord Summerhays and as a result he seems only a vague figure and hardly one to have governed an East Asian country. Both Ben Sanders and Wade Bogert-O’Brien turn in rather overheated performances as Bentley Summerhays and Joey Percival. To some extent it is understandable with the easily agitated Summerhays, but one expects a rather greater sense of control with Percival.
Designer Judith Bowden has cleverly found 1960s equivalents for Shaw’s detailed description of the set and has captured the period well especially in the women’s costumes. The outfit and hairstyle for Szczepanowska is wonderfully imagined as if she were a James Bond villain he would never conquer. Lighting designer Bonnie Beecher and sound designer John Gzowski work together to make the plane crash at the close of Act 1 extremely effective.
Anyone who has seen previous Shaw productions of Misalliance will know that the play can be much sharper and much more amusing than it is here. Neil Munro’s version set the bar almost impossibly high for any subsequent production of the play. Nevertheless, those new to the play will find it has enough virtues, especially in the performances of Rosling and Marriott, to make for an enjoyable entertainment.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Thom Marriott and Tara Rosling. ©2012 David Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2012-08-30
Misalliance