ENCHANTED APRIL
“Would only that such enchantment would step in for us all,” says Moya O’Connell’s Lotty, a youngish, maritally-frustrated, and life-frustrated woman. This is her dreamy response to “a small ad placed discreetly in the Times” regarding a potential holiday in Italy. And during the next two hours of Enchanted April at the Shaw Festival, it does, all under Jackie Maxwell’s insightfully judged direction and with a top-notch cast each able to speak volumes in a word. As a challenging and liberating enchantment comes to prevail on stage in the lives of both men and women, there is constant delighted laughter in the audience as a result.
Moya O’Connell’s Lotty is a frazzled, bedazzled, and full of need to be alive because, as she explains, “I have done everything that is expected of me all my life”. While her cheeriness later draws the reaction, “Honestly, Lotty, you would make Pollyanna ill,” her husband Mellersh, played by Jeff Meadows, summarizes their airless marriage with “case closed” in both words and attitude. New friend Rose, played by Tara Rosling, is reserved, resolved, unforthcoming, decidedly calm, a woman of inner rules and married to a writer to whom she declares, “One should not write books that God would not like to read”. Thus we have another marriage of emotional distances. Her husband, Patrick Galligan’s Frederick, however, is a decent and energetic fellow always reaching out to her.
The trip to enchanting Italy also incorporates Marla McLean’s Caroline, a young woman used to speaking with lofty bemusement. She obviously knows how to stylishly inhale a cigarette and her delicate dress obviously has legs in it, and so it is remarked, “You have nothing on underneath it!” The speaker is the fourth member of the party, Donna Belleville’s Mrs. Graves, an unbending and very old school lady who is accustomed to dictating her own terms and whose character references include the Archbishop of Canterbury. Like Caroline, she expects the world to serve her, in her case as she makes the world a rigidly unpleasant place.
All four women are disenchanted with men, but this does not prevent consistent cattiness among them. The villa’s owner, however, is a freshly pleasant fellow with sunshine in his step and manner, one who is able to charm the severest of women, as he does. He is played by Kevin McGarry. The servant of the house is Sharry Flett’s Costanza, who flitters about like an earthy butterfly, all the while vocalizing O Mio Babbino Caro and taking no guff from anyone. She speaks only Italian and some of the others try to. The text, at least the parts in English, by Matthew Barber is fresh and lean, full of poignancy and humour, delivered at a delightful clip by all.
Barber’s play, based on a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, concerns how people suffocate one another, shut one another down, cover up their own inauthentic lives and genuine pain, and run away only to be confronted by themselves. Happily, it also shows how married couples in dead end marriages can once again connect. The atmosphere of William Schmuck’s charming and sunny Italian set might be light and airy, but the substance of this play is for real. As the lady beside me exclaimed after Act I: “I’ll tell you why this is delightful. All those women with their distinct personalities are in every woman. I don’t know if men can understand that. This play isn’t light stuff at all. This is deep shit!”
FAITH HEALER
“She told the same story, but it was different” The speaker is one of two middle-aged men standing in the lobby of the Shaw’s Royal George theatre and discussing, with some hesitation, the first half of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer. It is a beautifully devastating production, one that weaves deep for feelings in the audience and our speaker seems surprised and embarrassed at his confessed involvement. He laughs a nervous laugh, the kind some men laugh when they reveal they have feelings. Director Craig Hall has advised in the program notes that we listen carefully to the play and these men have. Indeed we all exit at the end, shaken by truth.
We meet three characters over two hours in a sequence of monologues, first Jim Mezon’s titular Faith Healer. He seems made of mystery, wonders if he has a god-given gift or if he is a con man. We are thus set up to ask likewise as we gradually realize that reality is the issue. Mezon as the Faith Healer is a mountain of a presence, perhaps because, as one senses, he has much pain to conceal within. We also sense in him an undercurrent of savoring the past, of surprise, of curiosity, of resolution, of regret, of realization, of relishing his memory and gobbling it up – or maybe none of these. In any case, he relives his past, feels its weight and textures and meanings and unanswered questions. No wonder he asks, “Why don’t we leave that until later”. The next solitary presence is a woman seated at a table who declares “I am making progress….. I can open some memories now…. I can receive certain memories and respond to them.”
She is a life worn down, soul-weary, but also a woman with a gift for chat and, to us, a gift for more mystery: “God, I remember him like that, I hate him again, ”she declares. As the past ebbs and flows in her mind, we sense co-existing sadnesses in her and also an earthy decay in her presence, one that might very soon break. And from her words, we begin to doubt those of her husband, Frank, the Faith Healer. She tells, with an ongoing cackle, of leaving him and we note that she delights in some of her deeds. She drinks whiskey, pouring after pouring of it. She declares, “O my God, I don’t know if I can go on without his sustenance”. Theirs is a very complex union.
Friel’s play concerns three intersecting lives delivered in monologues that are rich with minute shadings in their words. We hang onto the tale unfolding before us in a dark and dirty room, one into which light extends through a window with shadows of sunset also creeping in. But here, as in these three damaged souls, it is never light. In this non-specific world of chairs and time-used walls, we meet the third character Teddy played by Peter Krantz. He seems a man of shallow- brained self-satisfaction whose eyes widen for emphasis as he speaks. He is a man of self- propelled self-indulgence who feel that silence is his to fill, one so convincing in his drunkenness that we feel partially pissed with him in our sympathetic listening. We are very entertained by him and we feel unwashed as a result. He speaks with a yarn teller’s cadences and hints at insight, shapes his anecdotes for accumulated effect. His eyes betray a worn out desperation of one who must drink to make it to the end of the day. We in the audience sit at end of his intimate conversation. It’s a stunning performance and we are involved.
These three characters -magnificently played by Jim Mezon, Corinne Koslo, and Peter Krantz- cannot escape their torment of living and as a result of this production, directed for potency of pain and mystery by Craig Hall, neither can we. Throughout, each monologue is linked to the others by rich and ragged and plaintive strings masterfully created by composer James Smith. These help to create a continuum of hopeless but vital existence that we experience in Frank, Grace and Teddy. These help give us, in ultimate effect, the knowledge that we in the audience too cannot escape ourselves. This is profoundly moving theatre and not to be missed.
LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA
In the second of the Shaw Festival’s Italian-English offerings this season, we again have characters who, in search of an Italy that extends the dreams of their troubled hearts, find perhaps not escape but a deeper meaning in themselves. Again, a substantial enough part of the dialogue of The Light in the Piazza is in Italian so, as a result, we in the audience feel much like the English-speaking tourists presented here do, like cultural outsiders in Florence. We have to adjust to another world and we too struggle to understand what’s going on.
Jacqueline Thair’s Clara, who speaks no Italian, is wide-eyed, “very young for her age” according to mom Margaret played by Patty Jamieson, a quintessential twinkle of a person who always beams. She is thoroughly enthusiastic and somewhat mentally undeveloped because of a childhood accident, so we do worry about her maturity, even as we care about her. Meanwhile, Jamieson gives a nuanced take on emotion as Margaret, with deep feeling in her developing, or perhaps revealed, and not simply a given. She’s a protective mom and we sense the burden of responsibility on her and also her burden of guilt as she tries to keep a complicated situation involving her daughter in the real world of compromise. It’s a moving performance.
Jeff Irving’s splendid Fabrizio, who speaks no English, is impassioned and bursting with declarative energy with a hint of sob in his voice, a voice of inner vigor. He securely negotiates a variety of emotions with a charming energy and, like Clara, is inherently likeable, so we all along want them to make it. His father, Signor Naccarelli, is tall, elegant, paternal and suggests a hidden life within him, one with emotional depths on the verge of eruption. He has dramatic presence and is human enough to find the suppressed life in Margaret. Meanwhile, Kaylee Harwood as daughter Franca exudes rich warmth and an inner explosive fire made outer, especially when jealous.
A piano, violin, cello, bass and harp ensemble under Paul Sportelli’s direction support this mini opera of sorts with its solo, duet and ensemble writing and its enlarged emotionality. Adam Guettell’s creation is a harmonically and rhythmically compelling work, one full of big feelings that this fine cast in turn delivers with natural ease. Guettell uses musical elements to pinpoint specific aspects of characterization and, as the music shapes inner emotion and conflict, the cast seems at home in emotional transitions with quick interval leaps that require versatile voices. Melodic lines with assertive punctuation and accents help create overall a textured momentum of operatic composition. This is very theatrical stuff, sometimes full of unsettled inner frenzy, although Jay Turvey’s direction is at times too busy and thus distracting from the emotional undercurrents of the characters.
OUR BETTERS
In Ken MacDonald’s set of high-backed-sofas and tall windows, the high society creations of W. Somerset Maugham in Our Betters are a mostly bored bunch. They are also often manipulative or sad or socially predatory, and they seem to excuse one another for each transgression and thus somehow excuse themselves. There is all manner of aggression in their chatter, for these are people who want to “get into society” and then get higher in society. Director Morris Panych skillfully shapes these unhappy lives, made sometimes of acidic hues, with soft bristles of a water colour brush. They go about wanting love like inhabitants who play by the rules in an insulated world. They “have too much money and too few responsibilities,” ergo their boredom.
We have, here, a mix of social climbing gentility of one mold/mould (either meaning will do) who worry about “playing the game,” a world in which American money buys a title for these lives of chatty desperation. The greatest sin in their relationships is to have one’s relationships found out, according to Pearl. Maugham’s worldly-wise text moves ahead on each implication and gives these people a richness as wit is dropped casually everywhere, life truths sprinkled here and there. There are Charlotte Dean’s gorgeous dresses on the ladies, textured with a variety of fibers beads, and strings. These people have money and certainly this feels like another world of another time, all fashioned to compelling individuality by Panych in this finely-done production.
Claire Jullien’s Pearl efficiently uses what people are to manipulate them. She is solidly woman, cheeky, and not too serious. She is the “most powerful woman in London,” accepts scandal but not ridicule, and declares “men are such foolish trivial creatures”. Husband Arthur, played with expertise and poised vigor by Lorne Kennedy, calls Pearl “his girly” and maintains idealized notions about her which are ultimately tested. Julia Course as Elizabeth/Bessie is somewhat animated with an implied quality of bubbly efficiency in her. She is self-dramatizing in a pointless way and with vowels flattened as they do in America, naively asks of Pearl, “What do you see in him, he is nothing but rich?” Her issue is whether to marry into a titled world and do so without love. Lord Bleane, played by Ben Sanders, is a squeezed kind of person, one who is more not happy than unhappy, a man of decency with “with a sad heart” who wants to marry Bessie.
Laurie Paton’s Duchesse is another undeniable room-commanding presence who walks with studied poise. She speaks in a voice of gliding chirpiness in elongated phrases oozed out slowly. Her spiteful nastiness emerges against a discovered Pearl and Tony, but she is still willing to buy Tony back, as it were. Wade Bogert-O’Brien’s Fleming is a straight ahead sort of fellow, unpretentious and something of a touchstone by which we gauge the shallowness and unhappiness of the rest. Of course he can’t understand how others can expect to be happy if they marry simply for a title. As Princess Della Cercola, Catherine McGregor is a bird-like creature of confidence and quiet elegance, while Neil Barclay’s Thornton is another room-commanding presence, a socially chatty gossip of a fellow. The butler Pole, played by Anthony Bekenn, is delightfully and tersely efficient, cool in his indifference that speaks volumes in evaluation of these self-indulgent individuals he serves.
LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN
Under Peter Hinton’s precise direction, Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan is a freshly-told and touching tale of sacrifice, maturation, and sexist bias in a world of airheaded formalities where people, who live unthinking by the rules, are components. Whatever goes on, one must be witty yet, because conversations feel like extensions of character here, the witty banter seems quite natural, especially during the men’s drunken chat. One also detects a sense of ordinariness at the heart of these folks and a deliberate quality to delivery of lines as if they are activated from afar. This meticulously-paced and dramatically unfolding production thus seems otherworldly, especially with the confident and unsettling intensity of Teresa Przybylski’s quietly breathtaking set, the solidly elegant costumes by William Schmuck and threatening menace of Louise Guinand’s lighting.
This is certainly a visually creative production of tableaux arrangements, curtains that rise or move sideways very slowly to reveal a scene in new rectangular framings that are confined or enlarged, projections of Beardsley et al, seductive harmonization of blended colours on many a surface, stiff poses at the party that dot the scene with Dali-ish isolation of characters in space, light and airy scenes of pleasing grey offset by a huge white and blue vase, and the dark study of Windermere where a black bookcase rises perhaps threateningly to the ceiling. This is a visually brilliant setting and I could look at it for hours.
As Lady Windermere, Marla McLean shows an air of clarity of characterization and an undercurrent of youngish inner delight. She is not as much projected for the audience to react to, but more like a light that opens and recedes of its own intent. Her prudishness is not so much indignant as unknowing of life and she is rigid because she knows nothing else but her rules She declares “I am afraid to be myself” and she certainly discovers this self as she jumps the gun out of insecure jealousy and confronts Mrs Erlynne in a dual initially of ices. From protected innocence she learns to bend her principles to find greater ones. Lord Darlington, played by Gray Powell, is full of inherent charm and boyish directness which double as sincerity. He implies life experience with matter of fact ease, is somewhat low key, and from the chat of both Lady Windermere and Darlington, we immediately like these people.
Martin Happer’s Lord Windermere, on the one hand, carries the pain and tension of the tense situation and later seems inhuman in his bullying contempt of Mrs. Erlynne who, ironically carries a deeper pain from the same situation. Tara Rosling’s Mrs. Erlynne, in striking black, is a commanding womanly presence, a compelling blend of the protective maternal and assertive no- nonsense survival skills. She is instinctively pragmatic and decisively self-sacrificing, the one who, in the course of her demands and then her sacrifice, is the drama’s turning point. Corrine Koslo certainly claims attention as the Duchess of Berwick, since she is inwardly propelled to meddle and gossip. She’s a woman who wants to do damage, with her daughter tacked on to her presence as a lifeless toy, with her jerky chattiness and slightly staccato delivery. Kyle Blair’s Cecil also delights as a Wilde-ish chap with long flowing hair and many witticisms. So too do Jim Mezon and Guy Bannerman and, in fact, it’s fine performances all round.
During the posh evening gathering, we slowly catch on that the flicking of fans sounds like indiscreet farts and very quickly catch on that the pinched and slurry vocal whine on the soundtrack is decidedly out of place here. The play does not need a commentary nor a mirror of this ilk to bring it up to date, if that is the intent, since hypocrisy is humanity’s middle name whatever the age we live in. This stuff is jarring, out of place, and perhaps patronizing since, after all, Wilde nails human behavior and we do get it. The Satie at et al, on the other hand, maintain a most appropriate surreal atmosphere, one that mirrors this production as a whole, and we have the constant haunting effect of paintings that vibrate subtly with lives and with life in this deeply intriguing production.