By George, a Worthy Rival
By WILLIAM A. HENRY III
TITLE: THE SHAW FESTIVAL
AUTHORS: SHAW, CARL STERNHEIM AND HARLEY GRANVILLE BARKER
WHERE: ONTARIO, CANADA
THE BOTTOM LINE: A troupe devoted to one writer dashingly demonstrates the merits of his all but forgotten collaborator.
Perhaps the unlikeliest stage event of the decade will occur next month in ye olde and quainte Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. The tourist haven's Shaw Festival, one of North America's bigger and better theaters and the world's most faithful keeper of the flame for the white-bearded windbag of Fabian socialism, is sponsoring a debate premised on the heretical idea that its patron dramatist should be outranked as a playwright by his colleague Harley Granville Barker. Although recalled chiefly as producer (The Doctor's Dilemma), director (Major Barbara) or actor (Man and Superman) of many Shavian debuts, Granville Barker is being ballyhooed by Shaw Festival artistic director Christopher Newton as "maybe the last undiscovered great playwright."
It is inconceivable that the Barkerites will "win" the debate -- one might as well expect a huzzah for the superiority of Marlowe among the merry merchants who profit from bardolatry in Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon -- but the festival is already making the case. The highlight of its nine-play season is a spellbinding production of Granville Barker's The Marrying of Ann Leete, written in 1899 when the author was 22 and promptly dismissed as "a practical joke" by the Times of London. A century later, it feels startlingly fresh and new, its language conversational rather than expository, its events surprising yet rooted in character, its sensibility feminist yet faithful to its periwigged 18th century setting. Whereas in Shaw everyone seems to be on a lecture platform, Granville Barker's characters appear to talk to themselves alone. Not one speech in Leete is more than six lines long; many are broken into half-articulated reverie. Granville Barker's topics are as relevant as Shaw's: Waste (1907) discusses abortion and was suppressed by censors until 1936. Both writers mix moralizing and pragmatism. But Granville Barker seems observant and compassionate, while Shaw is caught up in paradox and amiable humbuggery.
The Shaw Festival, founded in 1962, is unique in being devoted solely to modern classics. It performs "Shaw and his contemporaries," defined as plays written between 1856, the year of Shaw's birth, and 1950, when he died. Noel Coward has been produced 11 times, becoming a secondary focus, and Granville Barker is scheduled for the same treatment. The one-act Rococo will appear next season in a lunchtime slot on the schedule, traditionally reserved for short Shaw (such as this season's tiresome young-Napoleon foofaraw, The Man of Destiny). A full-length work, Waste or His Majesty, will appear the season after. The Shaw Festival's resurrection began with The Voysey Inheritance in 1988. It has since been mounted by Britain's Royal National Theatre and the Long Wharf Theatre, in New Haven, Connecticut. Says Newton: "It took me a few years to realize what we had in him."
The Shaw Festival has long operated in the shadow of its older rival in Stratford, Ontario, not least because an institution dedicated to Shaw sounds less prestigious than one devoted to Shakespeare. The best of this season's work, however, is competitive with that of any resident troupe in North America. For Shaw fans there is a splendid if deeply conventional Candida, staged by Newton and starring the estimable Seana McKenna, formerly a jewel of Stratford, plus a novel Saint Joan that turns her trial into a modern-day government inquiry cum media event. For popular tastes there are Blithe Spirit, Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and the Jule Styne musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Newton is also directing a Victorian melodrama, The Silver King, presented as a Dickensian panorama. The other novelty is Carl Sternheim's 1911 satire of German bourgeois class anxiety, The Unmentionables, adapted to McCarthy-era America. The laughs it now evokes are mostly sentimental recognition for bygone jingles, not the disquieting humor intended in the original play's dissection of the quest for respectability.
By far the most memorable is Leete, which begins in darkness with an amatory grope in a formal garden and ends in darkness as a new bride goes off to her rough-hewn, rural marriage bed. This journey is made by a daughter of a highborn member of Parliament to avoid being a pawn in political maneuverings by her father (played with poignancy and ruthlessness by artistic director Newton). She rejects a lord in favor of the family gardener, a sweet-natured man whose heart belongs, hopelessly, to her sister-in-law. The deliberately oblique text may frustrate audiences who want to know exactly what is happening. It gathers mounting power in three scenes: the parliamentarian's downfall, a Hogarthian country wedding and the tentative, unhopeful first night of the bride, the groom and the social wall between them. Whether or not Granville Barker surpasses Shaw, he is plainly worth this redemption.