In the Shaw Festival’s program for Engaged, we read the “Notes” of director Morris Panych on this play by W.S Gilbert of ensuing G&S fame. Panych comments how “we are all subject of the ongoing farce” and how “the characters in this play will last forever, slipping on the banana peels of time. …. reinterpreted, replayed…their words respoken by generations of actors to come; not from some sense of duty or academic curiosity… (or) as an exercise in nostalgia … but because they are funny and life is not.”
Theatre, we conclude, doesn’t avoid life or forgive it, but it sure allows us to mine the absurdities and occasional beauties that we are. We can relax as ourselves sometimes without too much judgment and laugh as well, for that too is what we do. And thanks to Panych, his well-brewed cast, his well-seasoned production team, we laugh a great deal during Engaged. Who wouldn’t, when we begin with two in your face music hall numbers, the first confessing “My mother doesn’t know I’m on the stage.”
The second number, performed somewhere between broad and floozy by Diana Donnelly, mentions “witin’ et the cherch” which you’ll easily translate for yourself and includes the offer to a chap in row three “You married? Busy after?” And where do you think we go after that? Nope, not a room in Soho- we are off to Scotland!
There we get to hear Comin’ through the Rye. It is sung timid at first by the timid Angus, endearingly underplayed with oozing sincerity by Martin Happer, along with Julia Course’s captivating Maggie. Then it is sung ballsy with heels dug into the earth, as only Mary Haney, here as Mrs. McFarlane, can do it. We find we must speak Scottish here – eee for eye, pairidge for porridge, hairts for hearts, — and we also discover that country folk shrewdly mess with the trains so the “well paying passengers” will need lodging as a result.
These latter folks include some of the starchiest from London society. Jeff Meadows’ Belvawney is a contained but wired fellow who makes his 1000 pounds by keeping Cheviot Hill single. The latter arrives with his broadly dramatic Belinda . She is a lady of “impetuous passion” who, though not “mercenary,” does insist on a husband with substantial income. Alas for Belvawney, Cheviot tends to propose to every woman he meets, a la running gag.
Cheviot then arrives with Sean Wright’s Mr. Symperson at which point he shows himself as broad in emotion and over the top in declarations of love for Minnie back home. Cheviot is a self-dramatizing romantic playboy to whom Gray Powell brings charm and a hilarious ongoing dash of not quite tongue in cheek rote. We eagerly await his next proposal. He knows it by heart.
So we have the country poor, blunt in gesture and, like Angus, of innocent values, matched against the moneyed Londoners. Money certainly is the raison d’etre for both these rich and poor except for Cheviot. It’s the ladies who make him into a man of instant turn on. In a few minutes he is blown away first by Maggie and then he is smitten with Belinda, partly because Belinda seems an ever-ready body lurking for another.
What’s a fellow like Cheviot to do but a romantic spiel, some faux poetry, some smoother than smooth convincing, some anxiety, all with exaggeration as his driving force. And, of course, a kilted Ric Reed as Major Mc Gillicuddy arrives sporting not one but two pistols in pursuit of Cheviot. Meanwhile Angus, adoringly bumpkinish and innocent, speaks with his ever ready axe in hand.
While in Scotland, in the “garden of a humble cottage near Gretna on the border between England and Scotland,” Cheviot may now be multi-betrothed or even, thanks to a local custom, unintentionally wed, and then we next find ourselves in a London home. We meet Minnie, who sits on a sofa whose cushions are punitively garish, before friend Belinda enters to ask as she gorges on prepared desserts, “What have I in common with tarts” This must be an in joke – we think of prostitute Mrs. Warren also played by Nicole Underhay. Belinda tends to endlessly rattle off all the possibilities of a situation and this she does as Cheviot enters to worry about marriage as 50 years with one person. An air of idleness prevails in all these Londoners.
With Cheviot, Claire Julien’s maid Parker sends out a mercilessly flirtatious invitation to lust, one so brightly projected that it is probably seen in Buffalo. Cheviot is not unreceptive throughout his rote routine yet pulls back, to which Parker complains “not so much as a shilling and that man is worth thousands.” We also find, cheap as he is, that his wedding cake is made mostly of wood. Minnie and Cheviot discuss their impending marriage and sound horribly dull, no matter that she declares how happy she is, albeit while he remembers that “girl in Scotland.” But being cheap, he will marry so as not to waste the already spent 25 pounds.
As we can see, most of these folks are self-serving, gung ho in artificiality, shallow of purpose, and adaptable. Belvawney will love one of two women and it doesn’t matter which. Cheviot sees himself engaged to two women and will “share” himself with both. There is much “incessant crowing over money” throughout and everything is business. Minnie is called a “mercenary little donkey.”
What makes this production so engaging, entertaining, funny, lively and for all its exaggeration and stereotyping, not unbelievable? Partly it’s the uncondescending tone established by director and cast. Partly it’s the relish of the latter as they inhabit their parts. Yes, these often purposeless and pointless individuals could be poo-pooed in a sententious quest for deeper human values, but save Angus and Mcfarlanes up in Scotland, these folks are quite incapable of them.
These folks are played as absurd but without self-mockery in the mix, played as shallow as the only game in town, and we come to take them for what they are – funny and funny again. Otherwise, they are stuck with themselves and we with them. If Engaged is not “a well-known play” it should be, when done so cleanly and clearly delightful as this. Again the Shaw company proves itself outstanding.