Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✩✩
by Robert E. Sherwood, directed by Albert Schultz
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
January 30-March 1, 2014
Irene: “We are the little people—and for us the deadliest weapons are the most merciful. . . .”
Soulpepper begins its new season by taking a leaf from the Shaw Festival’s playbook and engaging in some literary archeology. Artistic Director Albert Schultz has resurrected the all-but-forgotten play Idiot’s Delight by Robert E. Sherwood (1896-1955). The play, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama from Sherwood in 1936, is most notable for predicting the advent of World War II and its major players three years before the war began. The play is one of those large-cast American plays from the 1930s and ‘40s that used to be the specialty of the late director Neil Munro and were often the highlights of the Shaw season. Examples include Detective Story (2002), The Man Who Came to Dinner (2001), You Can’t Take It with You (1998) and Sherwood’s own The Petrified Forest (1995). Schultz, however, does not have Munro’s gift for taming such behemoths and giving them shape and focus. As a result the play in Schultz’s hands is an interesting but unengaging curiosity that with more incisive direction could easily have been much more effective.
The setting is the slightly tawdry Art Deco cocktail bar of the Hotel Monte Gabriele in Italy. The hotel had earlier been a sanatorium in Austria until the Treaty of Versailles gave that part of Austria to Italy. The room now has huge windows (the fourth wall of the stage) that afford a view of Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Germany. As is The Petrified Forest (1934), the plot concerns a group of diverse people forced to interact with each other because they are all trapped in a single location. In The Petrified Forest the characters are stranded in a diner in Arizona and held hostage by a gangster and his men. In Idiot’s Delight the characters are stranded in the hotel because they are held captive by a different sort of gangsters, the military of fascist Italy. They won’t let the passengers’ train cross the border into Switzerland without orders from higher up.
The hotel, located ominously near an Italian airbase, has an international staff – a disenchanted American social director (Jeff Lillico), and efficient Italian head waiter (Tony DeSantis) and a sympathetic middle-aged Austrian waiter (Evan Buliung). Among the guests are a German doctor (William Webster) trying to find a cure for cancer; British newlyweds Mr. and Mrs. Cherry (Gordon Hecht and Mikaela Davies); a French communist (Gregory Prest); and American entertainer Harry Van (Dan Chameroy) and his troupe of singer/dancers called Les Blondes (Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, Steffi Didomenicantonio, Katherine Gaulthier, Hailey Gillis and Oyin Oladejo). The last to join them is the infamous French arms manufacturer Achille Weber (Diego Matamoros) and his mysterious Russian associate Irene (Raquel Duffy).
The action basically covers the interactions of this menagerie of people over the course of two days until they receive permission to continue their travels. Some of the characters are primarily serious like the German doctor, the French communist, the French arms maker and the Italian soldier (Paolo Santalucia) who watches over the group. Others like the hotel manager, the Austrian waiter, the Cherrys and Les Blondes are primarily comic.
Somewhere in between are two figures – Harry Van and Irene. An opening night audience in 1936 would know immediately that these two were the lead characters since they were played by the famed husband and wife couple of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Most people coming to the Soulpepper production will not have this extra-theatrical knowledge and will find that one major flaw in Albert Schultz’s direction is that for almost the entire first act we don’t know whom to focus on until the very end when Dan Chameroy and Raquel Duffy are left alone downstage.
This confusion is indicative of several other flaws. Although the action should build in tension to the literally explosive conclusion, Schultz’s direction is completely flat. The pacing is so pedestrian that actors seem to enter more because they hear their cue lines than that their characters have any necessity to be on stage. The world is supposed to be plunging headlong into war, but the action lacks any sense of urgency.
As the Lunt and Fontanne characters, Harry and Irene should be the most complex characters on stage. Everything in the play should point to the disturbing conclusion that involves these two, yet, Schultz seems to have missed this point. It should be evident long before the end of Act 1 that Harry is profoundly unhappy with his life as the escort for five airheads with whom he can’t have a serious conversation. He is able to get along with everyone because he feigns indifference to the unsettling events occurring all around him. The key, however, is that we should see that his indifference is only a pose to cloak his more serious side. This is what should make the role rich. This is exactly what Schultz misses and Chameroy for all his attractive suavity does not show.
In her “Background Notes”, Schultz’s Assistant Director states, “We can’t wait to share this rollicking ride of a play with you”. Yet, how can a play that includes the offstage execution of a young man concludes with a massive bombing attack be considered “rollicking”? Just because the play includes comic exchanges and song-and-dance numbers does not mean it is any more “rollicking” than the musical Cabaret. Indeed, the play’s ending is not unlike that of Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1919) about the coming of the previous world war.
Lack of focus, pacing and tone are three major counts against the production, but so is lack of precision. Diane Pitblado is listed as the Dialect Coach, but except for the Italians, British and Americans, her efforts seem to have fallen on deaf ears. The accents of Irene, the doctor and the communist sound so false that we assume that their characters are putting them on as a disguise. Pitblado has everyone pronounce the name of the Frenchman Achille Weber as “a-kéel wébber” when it should really be “a-shéel vay-béhr”. With such a multinational dramatis personae such details are important.
The most memorable performances are left to the lesser characters. Buliung is utterly charming as the waiter who resignedly accepts the whimsical nature of fate. Newcomers Hecht and Davies are delightful as the stereotypically dotty British couple who so clearly will become stodgy before they’re thirty. As the French communist Prest bursts with an intensity no one else seems to possess. And Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster makes a fine impression as the savviest member of Les Blondes.
At least designer Lorenzo Savoini has understood the nature of the play even if Schultz has not. Sherwood’s stage directions stage about the setting that “there is something about this place that suggests ‘a vague kind of horror’”. Savoini achieves this by making the cocktail lounge look runs down and by casting it in a sickly green hue that most closely matches the colour of the tunics of the fascist soldiers. If only Schultz could have driven the idea of the play as “rollicking” from his mind and instead concentrated on how to generate this vague sense of horror in the action, horror that comic interludes would only heighten, then he might have been able to make us see why Sherwood’s play so impressed the 1936 Pulitzer committee.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Dan Chameroy and Raquel Duffy; Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, Hailey Gillis, Gregory Prest and Dan Chameroy. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.
2014-02-01
Idiot's Delight