Apparently. according to Jay Turvey and Paul Sportelli, Maria Severa’s creators, hand-to-mouth poverty in the slums of 19th century Lisbon was certainly a happy gig to live. No matter the survival through prostitution and the humiliating class structure, it was like an MOR heaven where nothing challenges, nothing offends, and singing takes care of any trial of existence.

 In their melodically pleasing score and their evocative and carefully conceived lyrics, there isn’t much that conveys the idiomatic spirit of Fado. One feels that any story about anything could fit in and replace the account of Maria Severa about whom, in truth, not much is known.  On the other hand Maria Severa offers a good number of musically compelling songs that allow for characters to project their quirks and hearts. 

 Unfortunately, the fact that each character gets an extended solo to explain who they are structurally weakens the show.  The story is of Maria Severa, the mother of  Fado, but we get life enumerating solos from Jasmine, Clara,  Armando and a café  performance from Maria’s Mama. The icing on the cake of safe and secure is the death of Fernando who goes down singing. So add death to the list of feel good experiences.

 The book does offer a number of touching moments and the peppy dialogue throughout sounds fresh.  But the show seems more made for the stage than made from the streets and we never feel dirty.  Yes, raunchiness is intended, to be sure. “Where are you, you horny husbands, where are you, you filthy bastards” asks Maria who, later is described as “just a whore who can sing”.  When Mama says, “Clara looks like she never smelled a bad smell in her life,” we get the point. But when Maria philosophizes “the world throws shit at us….but we have to choose,” she has not been written or directed as a woman whose hard experience has learned this truth. It sounds like a good line.

 Maria Severa is very entertaining, very accomplished as a creation, but not very believable. Nevertheless, both production and cast provide a number of pleasing experiences. Sherri Flett’s wealthy Constanca is an icy manipulative bitch, albeit with her own fear of poverty driving her on.  Neil Barclay’s Father Manuel is rotund, humanly wise, kind and likeable without effort.  Jacqueline Thair’s solo as Clara, like her whole characterization, is heartfelt and it lures one into its underplayed charm.

 Jasmine, played by Saccha Dennis, is a creature of show-stopping athletic presence at every turn, a physical agility and an expressive face, dynamism through and through. At times she does seem too big for this chamber setting. As Fernando, Jonathan Gould covers his aching love for Maria with a wounded sneer and brings some complexity and unresolved nuance to the production. As aristocratic bull fighter Armando, Mark Uhre has a warm ring in his voice and is endearingly unpretentious, though not too grandiose or intense in his passion

 The problem with this production is this: its immaculately realized but too polite style is simply not in tune with the raw nerves of its subject. If Julie Martell’s Maria is foolhardy in defiance, feisty, street smart pragmatic, and sexy, if she is forward in manner in order to survive, she also has too unblemished a shine to her and she doesn’t sing from an inner darkness. She has a facial scar, we are told, but her manner doesn’t reveal deep emotional scars. As a result, we feel that the book and the lyrics are pretending, slumming, out of their depth, for they do likewise.

 Of course, any attempt to depict a female singer who happens to be the soul of a musical culture is very tricky business, especially because the art of these singers is rooted in their guts. For example, listen to Edith Piaf, La Nina de Los Penes, Chavela Vargas, Soteria Bellou, Billie Holiday, Om Kholthum, Bessie Smith, and, yes, Fado’s own modern deity Amalia Rodrigues, and you won’t be able to take this well-crafted show all that seriously.

 Although several people have enthusiastically recommended this production to me, I offer the following account in desperate response. About ten years ago, the Fado singer Mariza explained to me that “Fado is like breathing, a way of living.  It’s not me here and Fado there, separated, because we always walk together.” I wonder if anyone who buys into Maria Severa can understand Mariza’s meaning that Fado is life itself and not just a pretty diversion.

At the end of Michel Tremblay’s play from the 1973, Hosanna stands before a nine foot three-sided mirror and declares “ Cleopatra is dead”  as she removes her makeup. Hosanna turns in full frontal nudity as Claude and is embraced by lover Cuirette. Afterwards a young lady outside remarks, “It was great. I’m waiting for it to unravel a bit before I know why I think so.”

Although Tremblay’s groundbreaking exploration of sexual ambiguity now seems prolonged, seems a subtlely preaching two acter waiting to emerge from a theatrical closet in a more compact one act format, it is still decidedly relevant in the real world. Sexual identity and sexual relations are certainly contentious issues in the morally simple-minded and inhumanly discriminating rigidity of North America’s social climate.

 There is much talk of stink in Tremblay’s play and set designer Michael Gianfrancesco  heeds this cue with a set that looks worn and cluttered in dirty hues and cheap furniture. Some of Tremblay’s devices, like blending a dialogue into Hosanna’s second act monologue are quite effective. At the same time, the lengthy monologue starts to feel like a Taylor Swift cosmetic commercial on endless repeat of points already made -or perhaps that is a point the play is making.

 Tremblay does want to teach his audience about the transvestite world and, if the play’s humanity seems too forced at times, we do have many subtle shifts both internally within these two characters and in their dialogue, and also the potent use of implication. Tremblay’s mot du jour is “shit” often repeated and its use adds despair to this theatrical brew.

 Gareth Potter and Oliver Becker inhabit their characters with unobtrusive skill and in turn with and touching results. Potter’s Hosanna speaks with a lispy precision and almost elegantly negotiates his ass wiggles, cross legged posing, wrist flicks and graceful use of limbs.  He complains about makeup that runs down his cheeks, a broken nail, and that it takes three hours to put “shit” on his face to look like Elizabeth Taylor. Oliver Becker plays Cuirette as a less overtly present fellow who implies in fewer words but as much as Potter an unstated complexity and richness of human life.  

 Their sharply played relationship has the give and take nuances of any pairing of two people, with alternating moments of submission and aggression, rituals of belittlement, control games, tenderness, and attack.  “Every night for two years you have done exactly the same thing” says Hosanna/Claude. She/he also says “I need you to stay; I don’t want you to stay” so, yes, this is a very relevant play and under Weyni Mengesha’s sensitive direction, deeply moving. It asks who and what a human being is, gives us clues, and leaves us to resolve ambiguities.

Like all great comedy, Moliere’s The Misanthrope, with its incisive take on social hypocrisy, amorous complications, and ensuing disenchantment, explores humanity’s darker side. Appropriately, sound designer Jim Neil introduces David Grindley’s production with the darker tones of viols, while John Lee Beatty’s setting of ornate and metallic brownish shapes and Michael Walton’s subdued lighting all indicate that Moliere’s levity will dwell to some degree in darkness of spirit.

 Grindley maintains a competitive and sometimes hostile undercurrent and he allows hypocrisy and meanness sometimes diluted into mere nastiness to spice Moliere’s text, though some might prefer more sparkle in the language, more indication of the unspoken, more going over the top. Nonetheless, it is a pleasure to hear translator Richard Wilbur’s rhymes spoken with confident emphasis on each speaker’s meaning, to hear these rhymes so ably support the thrust of conversations and the inner momentum of situations. Grindley’s production is  full-bodied and unforced, and the comedy arises naturally.

 Ben Carlson’s Alceste has a face of substantial crabbiness and brows furrowed deep. He includes “all mean in one dim view,” wants to “break with the whole human race,” and wants to live in “some desert land unfouled by human kind.” According to Alceste, “man’s villainy is too much to bear” and among others Alceste is constantly self-indulgent in his misery. Carlson does disenchantment with a solid, natural ease that makes his plight quite involving.

 On the other hand, his pal Philinte, a compelling a charming creation by Juan Chioran, is a man of benign levity and slightly wrinkled elegance who “takes men as they are.” Philinte is a flexible foil for the variety of humanity about him, a peacemaker whose glances bind others together, and although he agrees with Alceste’s view that “man’s a beastly creature” he also asks, “must we abandon their society?”  The pairing of Carlson and Chioran is an appealing combination that gives the play its philosophical centre.

 Alceste’s love, Celimene, is played with some reserve in social bite by Sara Topham. She is petite and snippy, like a feisty crystal glass, and digs into her dismissals of others with enthusiasm. She loves to verbally demolish others but at times she seems just too nice and not a threat.  Kelly Fox as Arsinoe, on the other hand is a worldly woman of well brewed bitchiness who is haughty is her dismissive manner, stabs with nuance and proves to be the most polished game player on the block. 

 Peter Hutt fills in with distinction for the ailing Brian Bedford as Oronte. This poet of mediocre verse is self-consciously correct, boldly average, surly and unmovable.  Hutt is especially funny with his trademark scoops and dips of the text for comic effect. Brian Tree as Dubois adds variety to the show with some effective rough edges in manner and voice. All in all, this production gives the issues presented a compelling human form. Robin Fraser Paye’s striking costumes are each one sewn together into elegance and beauty.

The Homecoming presents a familial battleground in which conversation is a slew of verbal attacks and counter attacks. The family members, all male, are bound in toleration of one another. They sit apart like persons made of human debris. Conversations consist of innuendo, non sequiturs and absurd turns, but it does fill space and time, both of which wrap around these suspended lives. No one expects a response; they ignore the words of others in order to control the speakers and then plan tactics as they respond. The air is tense with the feeling of lies being spun.

With Pinter, the playwright, people speak and mean something else, and use words, whatever their meaning, as weapons. Much is suggested and over time we wonder, for instance, who the whores in the life of this family are and who the fathers are. We wonder who is what they seem. It is a play written, and here immaculately directed by Jennifer Tarver, for undercurrents of menace and overt aggression. It is a play about survival. I once had a college student repeatedly call the play stupid until, when asked why, he blurted out, almost in tears, “It is just like my own family.” On the other hand, I have viewed Peter Hall’s production several dozen times and to me the play is like existential music.

Brian Dennehy plays Max with commanding presence, at least when seated, less so when standing and leaning on his cane. In either position, nonetheless, Max the father has a need for nastiness. His words reveal him, past and present, as a boorish bully, while his rare expression of humanity is merely the manifestation of a sentimental but manipulative heart. With the arrival of Ruth, he seems lighter and younger and more fluid of speech. Stephen Ouimette plays his brother Sam, with many subtle touches, as a man of gentle and delicate manners and inherent dignity. Sam, however, seems battered by his brutish family and their rituals of hostility.

The three sons include Aaron Krohn’s Lenny, whom Krohn aces as a squeezed personality of slime in a snit. He is quick to react, tightly wound up and volatile, and acts as if he is enduring the others. He likes to intrude whenever he can in a menacing way.  Joey, ably played by Ian Lake, is slow, absent minded, vain in his illusions of himself as a boxer, and an unquestionably brain-pummeled lad. The returning son, Teddy is played by Mike Shara with a nerdy, toothy grin and a distant manner. He is pixie-ish in dark rimmed glasses and, as an academic, mentally elsewhere. His pontifications have a clueless tone. 

With Cara Ricketts as Teddy’s wife Ruth we have the pivotal catalyst in the play’s narrative. Like the others, she too seems to have created an inner space immune to intrusion. Her manner is initially rigid and who knows what she thinks of her male company? She picks up on each game with ease after cool consideration, lets the potential opposition reveal itself, and cooly decides her course. Her manipulative spreading of her legs is aggressively luring, for she will now take control and the family will now serve her. In the end she wins and Max sobs “I am not an old man,” for now it is Ruth who decides what lie is a fact, the latest truth.

The Homecoming is a modern masterpiece and the actors here offer top notch creations in the Pinter idiom. You might be surprised after reading this account that the play is uniquely hilarious, but so it is –we are seduced into laughing at the mundane brutalities that people can be.  Without exception the actors blend and negotiate menace and humour with meticulous ease and, as a result, we feel that our world has been turned inside out.

At the outset of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the music track – Monk, Bird et al- seems to sweat within Sue Lepage’s  evocative, domineering, asymmetrical, and life-worn set.  And so does Moya O’Connell’s Maggie who, kept at a distance by husband Brick, also sweats emotionally with pain, frustration, indignation, and aggressive hopelessness.  Maggie is alone in her marriage and has become “frantic, hard and cruel”. She exudes both sexual and existential need and Brick is decisively cool. Theirs is a war of the unspoken on one level and if Maggie feels “punished” by the man she desires, he suggests that she “take a lover”. O’Connell neatly gives the role an intense but unforced undercurrent of frustration.

Maggie must endure her sister-in-law Mae’s petty competitiveness, for the latter has children and Maggie does not. Both Nicole Underhay as Mae and Jay Turvey as her husband are accusing, snooping, predatory, greedy, and sycophantic, and both actors give their presence a clammy potency. Mother-in-law Big Mama is loud, shrill and repugnant in Corinne Koslo’s compact characterization that is volatile with its own confused pain.  Big Mama doesn’t accept privacy and we ourselves, very soon, feel trapped and attacked in this household, thanks to cast and director.

There is naked flesh on display and we are also made to feel open to both the physical and emotional presence of Maggie and Brick in their dual of solitudes. The “one good thing” in Brick’s life was his friendship with pal Skipper and this fact fuels Maggie who is predatory with her pain, especially when Brick asks “how are you going to have a child by a man who can’t stand you?”

The great unresolved issue on all sides is Brick’s relationship with Skipper. Brick broods with inner torment, drinks himself into more of an inner hell which, in Act Two, Big Daddy attempts to reach and, in his own way, understand. Jim Mezon plays Big Daddy with massive and brutal animality, one that dominates everyone. He erupts with savage self-assertion, calls his years of marriage to Big Mama a hypocrisy, and each outburst by Mezon is truly disturbing.

Big Daddy is crude and vulgar—we even hear him piss – and he goes at Brick with unrelenting attacks. Brick has “a real liquor problem” and is “throwing his life away” but Brick only remarks “I try to look like I listen, but I don’t”. Big Daddy is big-bellied, easily enraged, and struggles for breath with a son who is distant and seems haunted and afraid. But Big Daddy too is another life – and this is Williams’ forte—that cannot escape it’s self.

At over three hours, this production remains charged with electricity throughout. Director Eda Holmes is incisive and insightful as she explores Williams’ knack for mundane exchanges that imply profoundly felt pain.  Big Daddy, Big Momma, and Maggie especially show how inner motives shape contours in the words they speak. We feel in both Williams’ writing and the performances a spontaneous selectivity for appropriate words that reflect the hopeless reality of each speaker’s life. Both Williams and cast make colloquial seem fresh and both suggest that a volatile undercurrent of the unspoken twists these characters at every turn.

Gray Powell plays Brick in a distinctly subdued key -the way Jay Turvey plays Dr. Baugh, his brother- as effectively dynamic in his sulking withdrawal. Although some might prefer more overt signs of inner torment and frustration from Brick, we must remember that both sons are the offspring of Big Daddy who doesn’t give anyone else room to have a life or a voice.  In fact, his lower key tends to enhance and display the wounded madness of the others. In all, this is a very powerful production and both the playwright and his memorable writing are well served.

Lorne Kennedy as Norrison declares, “I look forward to shutting off my brain,” but we then notice that most brains don’t function as fast as his Norrison speaks in The President. He takes enunciation and cadences at illegal speeds, even tosses in knowing looks about sex after marriage at the audience, but before we even begin to laugh he’s already done three more pages of the play. Kennedy is one special reason why I’ve seen this fifty minute show several times, and there are many like yours truly, fans of screwball comedies of the thirties, who have made return visits.

 Next, add Julie Martell’s Lydia, a busty bimbo with pouting lips who swings her hips when she says “body and soul” and as a result we think “body”. Even her commas are suggestive. Meanwhile, Norrison wants her “soybean king” father as an investor. Lydia’s “dahling” is Jeff Meadows’ doltish Tony, a member of the Communist party who seems a leftover worker from an Eisenstein film. Tony is not the quickest lad on the block and only initially resists his makeover from proletariat to surface capitalist. He is told, “Stop meddling in your own affairs,” but eventually he embraces the capitalist lingo and attitude. Tony perhaps will learn that money doesn’t solve everything –for example, Norrison’s ballerina mistress, Begonia, dumps him which causes much heartache inside that tailor-made suit of his.

 You have to pay close attention to this rapid fire farce, because lines like “Tristan and Isolde, I’ve seen it thirty-two times…it’s so depressing” fly by like trees seen from a speeding train window. The cast are smoothly wired into the frantic pace, all with idiosyncrasies succinctly placed into the frenzy for us to enjoy on the run. The cast include many Shaw Festival stalwarts like Peter Millard as efficient and obedient and compliant Bartleby. Many of the rest do double or triple roles and each one make s a major comic point in their few seconds.

The Arts, in the person of travelling theatrical actors doing their society-shaking repertoire, have upset the status quo in the Irish seaside town of Inish. The acting is “too good” and now “queer things are happening” as a result of this exposure to sophisticated, demanding drama. Folks who were “nice and ordinary” two years before now seem suspicious and everyone now assumes a shady past in everyone else. There’s even been an “accumulation of incidents of a slightly criminal nature,” all because the circus wasn’t turning a profit and it was decided to try “serious stuff like Russian plays” instead.

 Although Annie, wife of John, opines to offspring that “You’re taking those plays too seriously,” her son Eddie, for one, has succumbed to angst and despair fuelled by the works of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, the latter who sounds “like a cold in the head” according to Annie’s spinster sister-in-law Lizzie. Seeing such heavy duty drama causes “reflection and ideas” and Eddie, who is now “beginning to realize what life means,” in turn rages at his parents. It seems that “one learns by suffering” and Eddie is no longer “jolly” after a dose of Ibsen. And he is not the only victim of culture, as it were.

 Jim Clancy has thrown himself off the pier and Lizzie, albeit her melodramatic approach to truth, reveals a long-concealed secret that she was jilted way back when by Peter, now the local political rep. Moloney has set fire to his business and a couple in town has made a suicide pact, one which has failed because they had only a penny between them and the meter ran out. Slattery, who lives with an unpleasant aunt who will leave him her money when she dies, suspiciously asks to purchase weed killer and then rat killer. Politician Peter, inspired toward integrity after seeing Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, votes against the government.       

 There’s so much here in Drama at Inish by Lennox Robinson that is pleasant, pleasurable, warmly human, and very entertaining. To name but a few delights, we have the musicality of Irish speech as in Maggie Blake’s Helena, the exquisitely self-dramatizing presence of Mary Haney as Lizzie, the melodramatic and arty posturing of Corrine Koslo’s Constance and cape-waving Thom Marriott’s de la Mare, the subtly interwoven marriage of Donna Belleville’s Annie and Ric Reid’s John, the airhead politician of Peter Krantz, and Julia Course as Christine who wants to be more worldly than she is.  

 Director Jackie Maxwell achieves an uncondescending, almost loving, tone throughout and gives us both humanity’s foibles and humanity’s charm in one detail-sensitive stroke. The whole cast delivers distinct characterizations, each one filled with subtle touches of individuality and we see before us vulnerable persons and the society they preserve as a shelter for their unspoken lives. We believe they are what they say and when, of the plays, Annie muses, “Maybe they’re too good for the likes of us or we’re too simple for them,” we sympathize for a moment.

 But then we remember how destructive all round a self-deceiving and willful innocence in people can turn out to be. Perhaps that’s why Lennox Robinson’s Drama at Inish is, after Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, the second-most produced play in Ireland. It doesn’t mock its characters but certainly exposes them, sometimes in their own willing words, for the self-protecting limitations they are. Drama at Inish also celebrates the acting profession and theatre itself, and we in the audience are inevitably made to consider our own response to both. Are we open to the hard lessons of art or do we run away to mindless and unchallenging entertainment as the folks of Inish and most other people ultimately do?

The shipwreck that deposits both upper and serving classes onto a remote island changes everything, of course. But at the outset of J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, we have pampered, wearisome, and condescending upper classes doing pointless lives. Yes, the Earl of Loam, played innocent and appealingly decent by David Schurmann, has a “servants” day when roles are reversed, but the seven uppers have no idea who the sixteen lowers who cater to them are or what the world in which they dwell is like, and their disdain for the servants prevails.

 And the thought of only one maid for three daughters is treated as a catastrophe. After all, “how should we know it is morning if there is no one to pull up the blinds?”  On the island, where the upper classes become even more ridiculous, old habits die hard and Kyle Blair’s precisely realized Ernest remains rude, selfish, spoiled to the max, and must be kept in line. He would even steal his elderly uncle’s boots. Meanwhile Mr. Treherne, played quietly effectively by Martin Happer as a man with a sense of inherent dignity, remains the voice of civility and reason.

 After two years, there are many signs of innovation on the island, all by Crichton, the former household butler, who naturally – or by rule of nature? – is the head honcho. The once pampered Mary, played vigorously jungle wild by Nicole Underhay is now a true creature of the “natural” world. She kills for food, gives an animated account of her hunt, even beats her chest in a send up of savage self-assertion. The other young ladies now compete for their leader Crichton’s attention and approval, while Crichton, who’s become the “superior breed,” is now served at table where he can be fussy about food prepared for him by his former superiors.

The language spoken is hilariously “natural” and Crichton’s proposal to Mary goes like this: “I have grown to love you. Are you afraid to mate with me?” When the rescue ship arrives Crichton knows he “has got to play the game again.” The fact that truth belongs to the upper class is soon hit home, especially when in his published account of life on the island, Ernest claims Crichton’s resourcefulness and achievements as his own. Seeing old island habits dying hard is quite funny with the sisters now seated in a most unladylike fashion.

 Among the performances David Schurmann ably plays the Earl as a man of naïve optimism about social equality, a man who has never inhabited the lower end of society. The ideal of Steven Sutcliffe’s Crichton is that everyone is kept in his place and Crichton here, albeit in his accepted subservience, is an intriguing man of authority, especially since Sutcliff can command the stage with inherently charming ease. Crichton is not an old stuffy we might expect, but more of a young stuffy with the saving grace of a mysterious fire burning through him. Marla McLean’s Tweeny is something of an Eliza Doolittle who works indoors. She is happily full of “vulgar ways and Mclean neatly suggests her inner development over time, from London to island.

 In Morris Panych’s production, we do have a sense of a delicate and humorous play in colorful musical wrapping to make it please more. It is certainly an entertaining show and we have a wolf and a crow as singing narrators, with dance numbers and songs from the 20s interspersed throughout. We tap our toes as we wonder what Barrie’s play, without the compelling but perhaps irrelevant goodies Panych has added, a song by Irving Berlin say, might be. Still, this is a cast that styles each character with theatrically rich touches and it’s hard not to go with the flow and the show.

After the initial brief London run in 1933, Shaw’s On the Rocks was rarely produced in either Britain or North America. In director Joesph Ziegler’s crisp production, it is a play that is entertaining, provocative -but not as much as it could be- and in some ways very relevant to Canada’s political climate. We are told, for example, that “every politician is made worse by a life spent in politics”. This observation gets an enthusiastic hand from the audience. The carefully considered retorts that characters speak throughout are a constant pleasure. My favorite line, I think, is “You have the charm of a majestic ruin.”

 One does sense some loss of potential impact here, though, when the theatrical electricity of complex characters and situations takes a turn toward the simplistic or silly. We get the point that the major political players in Britain are variously lacking -we do keep an eye on Ottawa, after all- and don’t need Steven Sutcliffe sent into exaggeration as Dexter to over-prove the point. Idiocy desperately contained appears more ridiculous, no? Again, see Ottawa.

Even with GBS having fun with several names to lighten GBS doing outrageous and controversial, there are very serious matters still bluntly on the table but sometimes too elusive in realization. Much as I am stirred by Marla McLean as Aloysia giving a very passionate Trafalgar Square oration, I sense that containing the passion might have drawn us even more to an already interesting inner life that she has. Having the icy fury of Cherissa Richards’ Dame Adhira more intimately directed at individuals would be even more scary than her declarative stance. The Court House is a small and intimate space, after all and whispers from an inner world that motivates politics can be deadly here.

Still, even as we feel a missed opportunity to more effectively reveal the play’s implications, On the Rocks remains a thought-provoking play in this production. It addresses the fear of “boiling socialism,” the nationalization of everything, and of course  Bolshevism, especially among those whose wealth is unearned. In due course we have a riot by the working classes, otherwise called “masses of unemployed” and “pacifist cattle” who make speeches on street corners. It is noted that “no one ever throws a rock when listening to a speech,” so ideology and power are here tempered with pragmatism that allows the working class their soap box.

When Dame Adhira is called a “silly nigger bitch,” she gets to respond with “to hell with the lot of you” and we have a potent theatrical scene, one that gives the anti-colonialists and feminists in the audience an opportunity to applaud loudly. When Bemrose, in a carefully measured performance from Norman Browning, calls her a heathen and Sir Arthur, played flexibly but also lacking somewhat in authority of person by Peter Krantz, astutely notes “that one will cost us India,” we sense both the entrenched colonialist mentality of the British, the vulnerability of principles in politics which is all pragmatic and opportunistic maneuvering, and vested interests all about.     

The cast leap into their parts with relish and sometimes with too much hot sauce. Peter Krantz as Sir Arthur seems a self-satisfied man of irritating (to his political foes) self-assured smugness. He speaks with a pinched urgency in his voice and suffers, we are told, from “a common English malady…. an underworked brain.” Steven Sutcliffe as Dexter boils with a self-indulgent frustration and whether you find him too hysterical or delightfully pushed over the top is your call. Tom Marriott’s pragmatic Commissioner of Police, Basham, displays an acute but benign sense of irony that freshens the play whenever he speaks.  Anthony Beckenn’s Mayor is meaty with bull doggedness, while Guy Bannerman is solid in his ways of the world savoir-faire. The Shaw Festival does ensemble so bloody well.

There is much appealingly intense female energy throughout this production and the “Get off the earth” speech from Marla McLean’s Aloysia is the most extraverted of the lot. It is played with touching fierce gusto and sounds like a humanistic canon or cannon. Mary Haney is, as usual, perfectly etched, but with little to do. She is delightfully adept at plasticity in body and voice and shapes many an innuendo nonetheless. Cherissa Richards brings a balancing tone of elegance to the goings-on as Adhira and the lower key Claire Julian as The Lady is quietly serene yet quite threatening.