If The Sea, though first produced in 1973, is set in 1907, the rarely produced The Charity that Began at Home by St John Hankin, another theatrical gem at the 2014 Shaw Festival, was actually mounted on stage a year before in 1906. Here it is directed, with acute awareness of social milieu and its conventions, by Christopher Newton, not as a forgotten relic of the past but as a very relevant criticism of social cruelties that prevail today. Here Newton and cast realize their insights with the incisiveness of a keenly honed knife and this too is a production one must see.
The play depicts an idle bunch from the privileged class of society with its implicit condescension for the lower classes, here represented by servants. If the uppers are indifferent to the lowers, they often can be snarky to their equals and say whatever they mean, however hurtful, as a matter of course. Their small world lilts along with insignificance as they assume that their trivialities should matter to the whole world. When they help others, they treat them as types not individuals and often find their sufferings an inconvenience. They are a class out to lunch or, rather, out to tea. When they deign to help the unfortunate, they abide no complexities. They are rather simple folk, albeit designed into textures and colours of elegance by William Schmuck.
Newton’s production, with its study of the chaos that ensues when one is ill-prepared to implement one’s charity, is both pointed and shaded in characterization. With all the superficiality in the air here, one starts to feel stuffed and claustrophobic from all the shallowness in thinking or feeling. One craves retreat into life’s realities, although this very superficiality here is one. We are reminded through Newton’s subtle guidance that humans too often become a naïve or mean spirited bunch in any circumstances.
Fiona Reid’s Lady Denison is a fussy and hyperactive air head whose remarks, bent with extended vowels as they are, are not filtered by any consideration for others. Laurie Paton’s Mrs. Eversleigh exists in a judgmental and unforgiving mode that condemns in all directions and needs to punish others. Together, they seem to hold standards so as to prosecute others who are not likewise inclined. Add the humourless prune of Sharry Flett’s Miss Triggs, with her pinched bitchiness and indignation at life and the world, plus the broadly dominating manner of Donna Belleville’s Mrs. Horrocks and the haughtily colonial-ish General Bonsor of Jim Mezon, with his loudly tedious, self-satisfied laughs and oft told anecdotes, and if one weren’t so intrigued and entertained by these people, one would crave escape.
And what of the idealists who mean well? Graeme Somerville’s, Basil Hylton is screwed tight in ideals, but when faced with the realities of the world he, like the others, is out of his depth. He is obviously sincere, but sincerity is never enough beyond the confines of a cocoon and he so annoyed the lady beside me that she declared “I want to run up on stage and shake him into some sense”. Margery, played as effervescent with youth and poised in untested ideals by Julia Course, believes that “things go better if one tries to help people.” She is efficient and innocent. The last one like her, whom I met, avoided newspapers and the many descriptions of horrors in them and, instead, ran off to Bible college so she might learn to guide the world.
The Charity that Began at Home is subtitled A Comedy for Philanthropists and if Margery is of “perfect character” to the idealistic Basil who secretly loves her, she is too self-denying for Martin Happer’s Hugh Verreker, a charming fellow who is weathered with life and his past socially-unacceptable deeds. He is not “made for philanthropy” and finds it “boring” no doubt because, “selfish” and “cynical” as he is, he can assert that if one “knows enough about people, one always disapproves of them”. He doesn’t look forward to marriage and perfection with Margery because “marriage isn’t a thing to be romantic about, it lasts too long”.
This production with its politely riveting cast is a thought-provoking gem that gently dumps humanity, mean or idealist, on one’s lap. One can look away but one risks encountering oneself and one’s own foibles in a mirror of others sitting nearby. Happily, St John Hankin creates richly realized characters, very entertaining ones at that, and appalled as one is at the mean-spirited and deeply unfair social structures here on view, one does not look away because this is very entertaining theatre. Newton certainly knows how to bring this distasteful world to gripping life and his cast is exceptional in demonstrating the social inequities that are becoming more and more a reality of the modern world.