The Divine: Too Much Going On

Fiona Reid in The Divine: A Play for Sarah Bernhardt, the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. (Photo: David Cooper)

In 1905, the legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt brought a troupe of actors to Québec City to perform three plays in repertory. She was already in her early sixties, but according to the nineteenth-century traditions that still adhered into the early twentieth, great stars were thought of as ageless and inhabited their vehicles for decades. So the idea of “The Divine Sarah,” as she was popularly called, continuing to play ingénue roles like Marguerite in Camille by Dumas or the title role in Scribe and Legouvé’s Adrienne Lecouvreur wouldn’t have seemed bizarre to audiences or critics – though realists like Strindberg and Chekhov were breaking ground by challenging this and other implausibilities in a theatre that still clung to the vision of the Romantic age. (Arkadina, the actress in The Sea Gull, is a second-tier diva of the Bernhardt school, and Chekhov has some fun at her expense.) Bernhardt’s visit incited a furor when the archbishop, representing a still feudal and repressive Catholic church, objected strenuously to her appearing on a Québec stage. He would have had many reasons for trying to shut her down: she played male as well as female characters, she didn’t shy away from lurid and controversial subject matter, her offstage lifestyle was unconventional and scandalous, and – not least among the qualities that would have made her an unsavory figure in the eyes of the church – she had been born Jewish, though she’d converted to Catholicism.

This historical incident was the starting point for The Divine: A Play for Sarah Bernhardt, a new work by the Québecois playwright Michel Marc Bouchard that the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake is premiering this season (in a translation by Linda Gaboriau). Bouchard has added several narrative layers. The protagonist isn’t Bernhardt (played by Fiona Reid) but a young seminarian named Michaud (Ben Sanders), the son of a cabinet minister and a devotee of the actress, who is sent to deliver the archbishop’s letter denouncing her but winds up writing a play for her. The hero of his drama – the role she is eager to play – is actually based on his dormitory mate Talbot (Wade Bogert-O’Brien). Talbot is a working-class boy whose mother (Mary Haney) has, through considerable personal sacrifice, placed in the seminary (where his classmates are all aristocrats like Michaud) because the priesthood is the only route of escape from poverty for a boy from his background. Mrs. Talbot and her twelve-year-old son Leo (Kyle Orzech) slave in a shoe factory in wretched conditions; children like Leo, whose employment is officially illegal, are especially vulnerable. (Two little girls recently died horrible deaths here when their hair caught in the machine.) And there’s even more plot: Talbot’s entry into the seminary follows his severe beating of a priest who was initially his intellectual mentor and then began abusing him when Talbot was twelve. Brother Casgrain (Martin Happer), the director of the seminary, offers Talbot a scholarship as well as an education for Leo if he agrees not to make an official complaint about the abuse. Casgrain is also Michaud’s protector: the rules here are strict, but Michaud keeps flouting them, and Casgrain lets him get away with it. (Casgrain sees his younger self in Michaud, though his affection clearly has an un-acted-upon erotic component.) The play also covers Talbot’s coming of age, which includes his sowing his wild oats with an actress in Bernhardt’s company (Darcy Gerhart), with whom he visits an opium den and a gambling house before making love to her.

French Without Tears: The Popular Music of Another Time

The cast of French Without Tears at the Shaw Festival (Photo: David Cooper)

French Without Tears at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake comes half a year too late for the Terence Rattigan centennial, but productions of this skillfully assembled entertainment are too rare for caviling – especially considering what a fine job director Kate Lynch and her (mostly) young cast have done with this one. It was the play that made Rattigan famous: the 1935 West End production ran for years and the play was filmed in 1940. To my knowledge he never wrote anything else like it. It’s a distinctly thirties mix of drawing-room comedy, junior division, and romantic comedy; the closest American equivalent would probably be something like Having Wonderful Time, the Arthur Kober play set at a Catskills adult summer camp that was filmed, quite enjoyably, in 1938 with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Ginger Rogers. French Without Tears is about a group of privileged young Englishmen living together in a villa in France over the summer and studying French in preparation for the Diplomatic Corps or international business. Except for the most juvenile among them, Kenneth (known as Babe and played by Billy Lake), whose haplessness at acquiring the language preoccupies him – the opening image, which gets repeated, is of him slamming his head against the dining-room table – the boys’ focus isn’t, of course, their studies, but women. One of them, Brian (Craig Pike), has been paying his attentions to a local (offstage) flirt named Chi-Chi. The others orbit around Babe’s sister Diana (Robin Evan Willis), who is officially dating Kit (Wade Bogert-O’Brien) but enjoys unsettling Alan (Ben Sanders), the most intellectually gifted of the crew, and the handsome newcomer Bill Rogers (Martin Happer), a naval lieutenant-commander a little older than the others. (The title of the play derives from a now démodé promise once offered by language instruction programs.)

Henry James’s Children: Somerset Maugham’s Our Betters

Claire Jullien and Julia Course in Our Betters

Somerset Maugham’s Our Betters, which is receiving an elegant, intelligent and finely acted revival at the Shaw Festival, is a fascinating comedy of manners on an unusual topic: rich American women who travel to Europe to marry poor but titled men. It’s as much about the market economy as Jane Austen’s novels, but the women’s motivations are more unsympathetic than those of Austen’s characters. When Elizabeth Bennet’s friend Charlotte Lucas marries the unappetizing Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, whom she could never love, Lizzy is appalled but we pity Charlotte’s plight; without money, she can hardly hope to get a better catch, and she’s pragmatic enough to consider herself lucky to have found Collins. But the women we meet in the London of Our Betters – Pearl (Claire Jullien), who is married to Lord Grayston; Minnie (Laurie Paton), who is the Duchesse de Surennes (and now a widow); Flora (Catherine McGregor), who left her husband, the Prince della Cercola, after the death of their child; and Pearl’s younger sister, Bessie Saunders (Julia Course), whom Pearl has matched up with the young Lord Bleane (Ben Sanders) – act out of a combination of vanity, restlessness and self-delusion.

George Bernard Shaw, Lillian Hellman and Paula Vogel: Issues

Andrew Lawrie, Sara Topham and Jim Mezon in the Shaw Festival's production of Saint Joan. (Photo: David Cooper)

This article contains reviews of Saint Joan, The Little Foxes, and Indecent.

George Bernard Shaw lays out the argument of Saint Joan with unerring precision. Joan is a French peasant, a teenager, unwavering in her Catholic devotion yet possessed of a country girl’s common sense; when she hears the voices of saints in the church bells, urging her to lead an army to throw the English out of France, she accepts them without doubt or hesitation and her no-nonsense certainty that she is doing the right thing convinces one man after another, right up to the Dauphin, whom she dreams of helping to crown King Charles VII. But as soon as she wins the war for him she finds herself mired in political turmoil that she doesn’t understand and that will end inevitably with her being burned at the stake. She has run afoul not only of the English (obviously) but of the church, represented by the Archbishop of Rheims and the Inquisition, who find in her intimate relationship with God a threat to the Catholic hierarchy. Even the Dauphin, now the monarch, is put off by her arrogance, which earlier he, like the officers she kicked into battle, found inspiring and sensible. The more she insists on being true to the simple faith that got her there in the first place, the more she damns herself in the eyes of the church, which forms an unholy alliance with its secular arm (and the English) to execute her.

Shaw’s Shaw: Pygmalion and You Never Can Tell

Jeff Meadows (left),  Harveen Sandu, and Patrick McManus in Pygmalion at the Shaw Festival. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

Peter Hinton’s production of Shaw’s Pygmalion at the Shaw Festival is set in contemporary London, and for nearly two acts (the play is in five brisk acts) the conceit is great fun. Henry Higgins (played energetically and with considerable wit by Patrick McManus) hovers around Covent Garden in jeans and a t-shirt with a tape recorder or leans on his bike. Clara Eynsford Hill (Kristi Frank), disaffected and entitled, texts blankly while she and her mother (Julain Molnar) wait for their hapless, puppy-eyed brother Freddy (Wade Bogert-O’Brien) to find them a cab in a rainstorm; around them is a collection of raucous street folk including a busker with a guitar, a hooker in cut-offs and a young, wheelchair-bound homeless man. Higgins’ study (act two) is full of TV monitors; Eliza (Harveen Sandhu) catches her reflection in one of them and shrieks in surprise. The study is set up to allow Higgins – and Colonel Pickering (Jeff Meadows), the fellow linguist who moves in with him – opportunities for both research and leisure: a dart board upstage right offers a touch of local-pub atmosphere. When Eliza’s father Alfred Doolittle (Peter Krantz) appears in the middle of the second act, he wears a neon orange sanitation uniform and an earring, and he has to struggle to pull himself up out of Higgins’ beanbag chair.

New Productions: Chekhov, Shakespeare, Wilde

Moya O’Connell and Neil Barclay in Uncle Vanya at the Shaw Festival. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

Uncle Vanya, staged by Jackie Maxwell (in her final season as artistic director), is the crown jewel among the offerings at the Shaw Festival this summer. (At least, among the shows I was able to see; unfortunately, I arrived too early to catch either Sweeney Todd or Strindberg’s The Dance of Death.) The production draws you in from the opening moment, where the old nanny, Marina (Sharry Flett, infusing the character’s grandmotherly warmth with ironic humor), calls Dr. Astrov (Patrick McManus) on his drinking, and you don’t break free of its spell until long after you’ve wandered out of the Court House, the ideal Shaw venue for Chekhov’s delicate, impressionistic “scenes of country life” because of its intimacy. (It’s where the company also performed a memorable Cherry Orchard in 2010.)