Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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by Alan Bennett, directed by Kevin Bennett
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 26-October 15, 2017
George III: “I am not going out of my mind. My mind is going out of me”
Alan Bennett’s 1991 play The Madness of George III could well have been one of the must-sees of the Shaw Festival’s 2017 season. It features a fantastic, no-holds-barred performance by Tom McCamus in the title role and the set and costumes are stunning. The problem is that young Canadian director Kevin Bennett (no relation) applies a mishmash of inappropriate concepts to the play which one must rather too strenuously overlook in order to enjoy McCamus’s performance.
The play is probably best known to audiences from the 1994 film based on it entitled The Madness of King George directed by Nicholas Hytner to a screenplay by the playwright. While many North Americans know that George III went mad, few before Bennett’s play had much idea of the Regency Crisis of 1788-89 in Great Britain that George’s incapacity caused. The play’s central question of how people can judge that a ruler is so incapacitated that he can no longer rule is one that other governments have since faced even when they have only a president rather than God’s anointed as their head.
While George (1738-1820), the first Hanoverian ruler of Britain born in England, was of a generally ebullient temperament, certain subjects, such as the loss of the thirteen American colonies caused such anger they could not be mentioned in his presence. His dislike of his future heir the Prince of Wales seems justified since the Prince was interested only in fashion rather than in preparing himself for government.
These eccentricities were nothing compared to George’s first serious outbreak of mental illness in 1788. He had bouts of rage and lewdness, non-stop talking and prolonged silence, insomnia and hallucinations along with a variety of physical pains, cramps and rashes. It is always difficult to diagnose the illnesses of historical figures so long after the fact, especially when they exhibit such a complex list of symptoms. For a long time historians said George suffered from porphyria, a metabolic disease affecting the skin and nervous system. Later, the view was of manic depressive syndrome. Yet neither accounts for all the symptoms noted at the time and we have to realize we will likely never know.
The point, however, is that the medical practitioners of the time were completely unable to understand or deal effectively with mental illness. Bennett shows us George's doctors prescribing purgatives, emetics, bleeding and cupping, which George dreaded most, all without effect.
George's mental and physical incapacity led to jockeying for political power. Tory Willian Pitt the younger (1759-1806), George's Prime Minister during the American Revolution, stood by the king and most avidly sought his cure since his political future depended on it. Pitt's Whig rival, Charles James Fox (1749-1806), supported the claim of the Prince of Wales to become regent since then Fox could pursue his agenda without opposition. Thus, George was seen by Whig doctors who reported no improvement until Pitt, at the suggestion of Queen Charlotte's Lady of the Bedchamber recommended treatment by a Dr. Francis Willis (1718-1807), one of the first doctors to specialize in mental illness.
Willis's methods, consisted of "breaking" the mad patient's temperament rather as one might break a horse to tame it. Though administered out of genuine kindness, Willis's techniques still strike us as barbaric. His idea was to punish the patient for his "bad" behaviour by physically restraining him in a straight jacket or by binding him to a chair and even gagging him for foul language.
Though the House of Commons did draw up a Regency bill in 1789, the House of Lords never voted on it because by then George had recovered. At the time people put the recovery down to Willis's treatment whereas more likely the condition resolved on its own.
The two key themes of Bennett's play are the ancient ones of role-playing and reality versus illusion. George is both an ordinary man subject to illness and a king. When is he one and not the other? Characters such as doctors, politicians and royalty believe they have power, but to what extent do they really have any except what others choose to grant them?
To convey these themes director Kevin Bennett uses a mixture of good and bad ideas. His best idea is to have set designer Ken MacDonald make the set on stage look exactly like an extension of the red and gold auditorium of the Festival’s Royal George Theatre. It's a brilliant effect. On the stage there are two levels of boxes so that we see an audience on stage reacting to the play. As we enter the auditorium Tom McCamus as himself is lolling about the stage in a partial costume of hose, breeches and blousey shirt. When the play begins actors gird and load him with layer upon layer of royal regalia until McCamus appears as George III would at his coronation. The actor thus through costume becomes king.
Besides this many of the other actors play two or three roles regardless of gender simply by a change of Christopher David Gauthier's sumptuous costumes. If Kevin Bennett had only stopped at this to reinforce the play's themes and focussed on Alan Bennett's play, the evening might have been a great success.
Instead, Kevin Bennett has somehow got into his head that Alan Bennett's play has to be made as funny, read as farcical, as possible even though Alan Bennett does not portray George's madness or his recovery from it comically in any way.
One technique the director uses is to have the actors interact with both the on- and off-stage audiences in order to keep the fourth wall continually broken as is common in comedy but not in tragedy. Worse, he has Martin Happer as the Prince of Wales wear pancake makeup and two round rouge spots on his cheeks as if he were a clown and, indeed, directs him and Andrew Laurie as his brother the Duke of York to act as fools rather than real people. As anyone will recall from the film version, the humour of the King's male heirs is not that they act stupidly but that that they are so self-obsessed. No portrait of the Price of Wales as a youth or as Regent shows him so artificially made up as the director does so we have to assume the look is the director’s own conceit.
The worst crime Kevin Bennett commits against the play is to have most of the actors turn their secondary roles as doctors or politicians into gross caricatures that one might expect to see at a poorly directed high school play but certainly not at the Shaw Festival. André Sills, who is so imposing and dignified as Pitt, acts like a giggling ninny when he plays Dr. Warren. Andrew Lawrie, who exudes earnestness and speaks in a fine Scots accent as Dundas, suddenly becomes a cartoonish idiot when he plays the Duke of York. What is perhaps most insulting is that Kevin Bennett imagines the Prince’s companions as mincing and effeminate as if those qualities had anything to do with being a dandy. Just think of the dashing Beau Brummel (1778-1840), the Prince Regent’s best friend, though not in the play, and you will how misinformed the director’s conception is.
Several actors do not play their roles well as they could. Marci T. House is much too exaggerated as Baron Thurlow, Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, and is even worse as excrement-obsessed Dr. Pepys. (Kevin Bennett has decided, contrary to evidence, that people of George’s time used glass chamberpots. This is obviously so that he can push Alan Bennett’s more refined humour into gross-out territory.) George’s German-born Queen Charlotte is an underwritten role, but Chick Reid makes little impression in it, especially since she does not always remember that she should use a German accent. Martin Happer is sadly miscast as the Prince of Wales. The Prince is repeated referred to as fat but even padding cannot make the tall, muscular Happer look remotely “fat”. Happer is also most subject to the director’s idea that the Prince and his faction are flaming idiots.
In general, the more closely Kevin Bennett focusses on the story itself without exaggerations and cartoonish characters, the more impact the play has. Then we can see clearly the three levels of combat in the play. The outer level is between the willy Fox, forcefully played by Jim Mezon, versus the more sympathetic Pitt of André Sills. Affecting that outer struggle is the personal struggle between George himself, who in lucid moments tries to muster a sense of human if not regal dignity versus the strict tactics of Dr. Willis, played with a rigour that still reveals an underlying compassion by Patrick McManus. The central struggle of all, of course, is that within George himself that Tom McCamus so heart-breakingly plays – the terror of an intellectual man acutely aware of his growing loss of mental control. McCamus’s portrayal of George’s fits of complete madness are frightening in their rawness and savagery.
If only Kevin Bennett had taken the whole play seriously as he does its central figure, the surrounding portrayal of George’s world would help support rather than undermine McCamus’s great performance. One wonders, in fact, how so important a play with such a well-known actor at its centre could have been assigned to so inexperienced a director who still lists high school directing credits in his programme bio. If you are more capable of focussing than the director is, then do see The Madness of King George to enjoy a great story and a masterful performance. Others with less selective abilities will find the unevenness of the direction too great an impediment to enjoyment of any kind.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Chick Reid as Queen Charlotte and Tom McCamus as King George III; Rebecca Gibian as Greville, Tom McCamus as King George III and Chick Reid as Queen Charlotte; Tom McCamus as King George III and Patrick McManus as Dr. Willis. ©2017 David Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2017-05-27
The Madness of George III