I think it was 1968 on one of my first trips to the Shaw Festival, situated at the time in the charmingly tiny Court House of Niagara-on-the Lake, when the announcement was made that Frances Hyland was too ill to perform that day. Ergo, much disappointment, and home we went. Leap ahead to COVID of 2020 and the cancellation of the whole Shaw season. Keep leaping and it’s now 2021 and my first live play in two years, Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. Am I thrilled to be here? Let me count the ways!
I’m having a coffee in the Festival Theatre’s courtyard when the Shaw company’s Patrick Galligan and Neil Barclay walk by. “Hark, do I see actors” says I. “We’re glad to be back, says Galligan. “I am so glad that you are back,” says I, this to an actor whose performance in Edward Bond’s The Sea a few years ago still haunts my memories of the Festival. If you’re in the mood, check my review of that production and my interview with playwright Edward Bond elsewhere on this blog.
The theatre is a tent in the Festival Theatre’s parking lot, one that holds an audience of 100, 50 observing the play from one side of the stage and 50 observing from the other. We are all of us separated according to the shifting sands of Ontario’s guidelines and actors must climb a few stairs to the stage. Fresh air is all around us and it’s weird indeed to see actors attired a la 200 years ago of revolutionary America making exits behind the bushes.
But it’s also a thrill, truly a thrill, to have imaginatively accomplished actors collaborating with my imagination to create a reality that soon becomes my own. A few words into the play and already I share the seething inner turmoil Chick Reid’s Ann Dudgeon. I’m soon suspicious of the self-assured decency of Graeme Somerville’s Reverend Anderson, soon intrigued by the lifetime-tested and hip wisdom of Tom McCamus’ General Burgoyne.
The key dramatic tension is a delightfully compelling one between Martin Happer’s Richard Dudgeon and Katherine Gauthier’s Judith Anderson, the former being both a dynamic everyday guy plus a ‘Devil’s Disciple’ quite at home in Shavian dialogue and the latter being the minister’s duty-bound wife plus a woman of awakened multitudinous urgings that gallop through her attempts at piety and composure. We are hooked as both Happer and Gauthier negotiate the inner shadings and ambiguities that propel them.
But this is the Shaw Festival and the whole cast, as expected, represents a company of sharply-honed and wide-ranging depth that makes for memorable productions. Small parts thus possess the inherent weight and substance of large parts, and over the years I’ve come to maintain that each character as portrayed according to the Festival’s high standards could easily be fleshed out into the focus of his or her own play. Of course, having an insightful and incisive director like Eda Holmes, ensures that a playwright’s text deftly and subtly melds our hearts and our minds.
Thus, to name a few, we have Kristopher Bowman’s Major Swindon, Jonathan Sousa’s Christy Dudgeon, and Shauna Thompson’s Essie as individuals who seem, each one, trapped in a box of some kind. Some, like Peter Millard as Uncle William or as Sergeant, seem to create a world around them, a world made of brushstrokes that no other hand can erase. When Sergeant orders his soldiers to march, his unforced but unbending authority takes command of all of us and we know, if even for a few seconds, a real life unfolding through art before our eyes. That’s one reason why the Shaw Festival is so important to me.
