Last Sunday during the first interval of Too True to Be Good, I was reading the play’s program and realizing again how the Shaw Festival has long provided an unending treasury of theatrical riches in my life. My first memory, oddly, was when, around 1968, it was announced just before curtain that Frances Hyland was unable to perform. This was at the Courthouse Theatre which, in the beginning, was the Shaw Festival. And back then, there was certainly no vegan food available in town!
The Shaw – we’ll talk about Stratford another time – fueled my passion for events theatrical and after a summer practical course in theatre I switched majors and did a two-year program for an M.A. in Drama at U of T. Before the second year, however, my wife and I did five months of backpacking through Europe which ended with yours truly sitting in a balcony in a London theatre, with my now only pair of shoes falling apart, and watching John Gielgud in The Battle of Shrivings by Peter Shaffer for six shillings.
The point is this: on my return to Canada, I gradually found the Shaw Festival to be something of a continuation of London’s West End, a Canadian mecca where challenging and delightful drama, incisive direction, inspired acting, and top-notch production values offered a unique art form at very high – often highest – standards. Not all members of the audience turned out to be of such quality, however, and artistic director-actor-director Christopher Newton once complained to me about some reaction to a production of Lulu: “How can some people criticize theatre when all they know is painting on velvet and comic books?”
But, yes, I felt lucky about seeing Shaw’s play last week. After all, some years before I had sat in the living room of Michael Holroyd to interview Shaw’s – in four volumes, no less – biographer. Around then, folk singer Ewan MacColl had told me that the only advice he received from Shaw, when invited for a weekend, was this observation: “The more you help people, the more they hate you.”
So, I did read the first volume of Michael’s densely detailed bio and I did acknowledge after visiting Ewan for a lunch-interview that some of the people I had helped over time were a bunch of ungrateful shits. And I did feel all the while that Shaw, the human being, was becoming some part of my life. I was feeling closer to the man, his mind, and his artistry. Not only Shaw, of course, but Granville-Barker, Ibsen, Strindberg, Tennessee Williams, Wilde, Feydeau, Noel Coward, Emlyn Williams, and the list does indeed go on. Talk about a treasure house of modern theatre and you had a unique one at the Shaw Festival.
We have to remember that creating and maintaining an impressively accomplished company is one of the Shaw Festivals’ unwavering traditions. As a result, one usually comes to trust the company to deliver the playwright’s intention with committed artistry that helps to fuse the watcher’s imagination to the goings-on on stage. One experiences the arts in full bloom while, at the same time, taking an inward journey of personal realization and growth. After many a play at the Festival, one reflects on what it means to be human, for a very long time. And sometimes the artistry there inspires awe.
And here I was, watching another imaginatively produced, freshly surprising, inherently buoyant while deeply serious, theatrically inviting while challenging, performance. Many of the cast were long-time residents at the Shaw whose work I had often reviewed, come to appreciate, respect, and eagerly anticipate – and let me count the years they have been Company members: Neil Barclay (32), Jenny L. Wright (26), Graeme Somerville (20), Patrick Galligan (19), Martin Happer (17), Marla McLean (16), Jonathan Tan (12), Travis Seetoo (8), and Donna Soares (2). That’s 152 years of experience in theatre for three hours of Too True to be Good, and I haven’t even mentioned actor-director Sanjay Talwar (8)!
Yes, I have been theatre-starved these long COVID days, but this was a production full of endless theatrical gems to remember: Jenny Wright’s pushy, meticulously annoying, and potentially hysterical Mrs. Mopply; Donna Soares’ defiantly and dangerously spoiled Miss Mopply with an understated edge; Travis Seetoo’s fascinating, mysterious, and agile Microbe; the ever-versatile and always captivating Martin Happer skillfully drawing us inside two lives, those of a soldier and a doctor; the subtly alluring, cute-with-depth, always driven by perky scheming and always unpredictable Nurse/Countess, from Marla McLean.
And there was more! The emotionally elusive and strangely touching humanity of Graeme Somerville’s Burglar/Bagot that kept us locked in to his every move; the wealth of implied human complexity in Neil Barclay’s Colonel Talboys laced with nuances of inner pain; Jonathan Tan’s one hundred per cent accuracy in nailing the magical heart and precise gestural existences of Private Napoleon and Meek; the implicitly volatile yet always humanly wounded and exciting presence of Patrick Galligan’s Elder, a man of unsettled and almost god-like energy.
Theatre does establish a special place in our lives, one where we witness creations of distinct pulsations and meanings. I always know a play has made my life richer when, while leaving the theatre, I think – as I did with Cyrano de Bergerac, Everybody, and this production, so far this season, that I want or need to see it again, to savor its nuances one more time. Every performance is different and we never tune in to all its wealth of information and creativity on offer at any given time, of course. Which doesn’t say much for the value of one-performance reviews, does it?
After the performance last Sunday, two of the actors seemed moved when they commented to me about the “good” receptive audience they had just had. Theatre is made from collaborative effort, and the involvement of the audience produces a vibration of sorts in reaction to the performance, a “vibe” that feeds and inspires the actors. Maybe that’s why theatre can be such a gripping experience, because we’re all in it together. We are putting preconceptions aside, opening our minds and our hearts, reacting to both a performance and our own reactions to it. We are moving into to another dimension of our lives.
I feel so lucky to have the Shaw Festival just one hour from my home.
