Stratford and the Shaw Festival II: Shaw

Gabriella Sundar Singh as Barbara Undershaft in the Shaw Festival's current production of Major Barbara. (Photo: David Cooper.)

Is Major Barbara Shaw’s masterpiece? The main contenders would be Heartbreak House and Man and Superman, but when I saw Joseph Ziegler’s centennial revival of Major Barbara twenty years ago – with Diana Donnelly as Barbara, the young Salvation Army major, and Benedict Campbell as her estranged father, Andrew Undershaft, co-head of an armaments empire given the complexly ironic name of Lazarus and Undershaft – I was staggered. Ziegler’s gorgeous, immense production – it unfolded in three hours and twenty minutes and was riveting throughout – was a luminous rendering of Shaw’s brilliant, endlessly surprising dramatic argument that you can’t save the soul without feeding the stomach. (That sly thief Brecht rephrased it for the second-act finale of his Threepenny Opera: “First feed the face / And then talk right and wrong.”) In Major Barbara, Undershaft first proves to his daughter that her beloved Sally Ann is as dependent on the generosity of the warmongers and liquor salesmen as any other institution; then he seduces away her fiancé, the Greek scholar Adolphus Cusins, to become the heir to his business; and finally he sells Barbara herself on his factory, a model socialist community whose workers are beaming with health and pride. In Shaw’s witty and perverse social comedy, Lazarus and Undershaft, purveyors of death and destruction, are the heroes. No wonder Cusins calls his father-in-law-to-be Machiavelli and the Prince of Darkness.

Ziegler’s was the fifth Major Barbara at the Shaw Festival; this season the company mounted its seventh (at the Royal George Theatre), with a splendid cast in command of some of the most magnificent dialogue ever written for the stage. But the director, Peter Hinton-Davis, has introduced a Brechtian esthetic to the proceedings. The company announces each new act and scene, though there isn’t much to shift – Gillian Gallow has designed a simple, symmetrical unit set with a small staircase on each side of the stage, a handful of chairs for Lady Britomart’s (Barbara’s mother’s) library and, representing a communal table in the West Ham Salvation Army shelter, a thin wooden plank downstage that bifurcates the height of the space. (Gallow has added a few more physical details for the final scene, at Undershaft’s factory.) Any object that runs the length of the stage close to the audience has the effect of reinforcing the separation between us and the actors. And that’s precisely what Hinton-Davies is after – it’s an alienation effect. So is the use of the Salvation Army band to frame the scenes and the presence of a musician, played by Patty Jamieson, downstage right in the third act. The staging tends to be symmetrical, too, with actors facing each other off in two-character exchanges, and since the size of the cast has been cut almost in half – except for Patrick Galligan as Undershaft, Gabriella Sundar Singh as Barbara and André Morin as Cusins, everyone plays two roles – finally there isn’t much to look at. I didn’t mind the chamber-play feel, especially since the actors who are double-cast handle the challenges impressively, and there’s no reason why Major Barbara has to be elegant. But I don’t think it has to be visually monotonous. Besides, applying Brechtian style to Shaw is both repetitive (Shaw is already didactic, so adding Brecht into the mix doubles down on the lesson), and reductive (because Shaw’s political and philosophical treatises are more complex than Brecht’s).

Galligan digs into the enormous role of Undershaft, which draws on his superlative vocal technique as well as his gift for ironic humor. There’s a touch of the nineteenth-century showman about this actor – a grandeur – and Shaw wrote Undershaft as a grandstanding performer whose consciousness of the effect he’s making is part of the treat of watching and listening to him. (I’d love to see Galligan as James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night.) Morin is as sharp and funny as any actor I’ve ever seen in the part of Adolphus Cusins. Byrne is a supremely high-comic Lady Brit, so it’s great fun to see her reappear in act two as the working-class Rummy Mitchens, one of the drop-ins at the West Ham soup kitchen. (She’s equally adept in the two roles.) Sepehr Reybod plays the likable idiot Charles Lomax, who’s engaged to Barbara’s sister Sarah, and the bully Bill Walker, whom Barbara undermines with consummate skill; Lindsay Wu is Sarah and sweet, timid Jenny Hill, who works alongside Barbara in West Ham; Taurian Teelucksingh is her brother Stephen (a pumped-up young aristocrat whom Shaw can’t help pinking mercilessly) and Snobby Price, another regular at the mission who, like Rummy, represents his conventional working-class background in lurid melodramatic terms for the benefit of the Salvation Army prayer meetings. Byrne and Teelucksingh make it obvious that Shaw had a wonderful time writing their wised-up working-class characters. Jamieson doubles as Mrs. Baines, the high-ranking officer whose unquestioning acceptance of Undershaft’s financial offering devastates idealistic Barbara. The cast is rounded off by Ron Kennell, who plays three roles, the most rewarding of which is the proud socialist laborer Peter Shirley.

The only member of the compact cast whose performance doesn’t come off is Singh’s. She’s good as Barbara in the first act and most of the second (intermission arrives at the conclusion of act two), conveying the character’s merry wit and resilience and her distinctly British crusading spirit. But for most of the second half she reads her lines with tears in her voice and manages to turn Barbara into a dishrag. By the time she finds her footing once again at the end of the factory scene, we’ve more or less stopped listening to her. Otherwise the cast manages to rescue this fabulous play from the misguided impositions of the director.

Graeme Somerville and Marla McLean in Dear Liar.

One of the delights of the Shaw season is Dear Liar, which Jerome Kilty adapted from the correspondence of George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the actress who created the role of Eliza Doolittle in his Pygmalion in 1914 as well as starring in productions of Candida, Saint Joan and The Doctor’s Dilemma. Shaw and Mrs. Pat, as her fans called her, had a complex and fascinating relationship, much of which was carried on through their affectionate and often teasing letters over a period of four decades. (She passed away in 1940; Shaw, who was nine years her senior, held on for another ten years and died at the age of ninety-four.) Dear Liar marked the last Broadway venture for the legendary actress Katherine Cornell, who co-starred in it with Brian Aherne in 1960. For years it was a repertory staple but I don’t believe it had been revived in many years until the current production. Here it is performed by two of the Shaw’s most revered actors, Graeme Somerville and Marla McLean, who are married in real life.

A.R. Gurney’s often performed Love Letters has accustomed audiences to the idea of epistolary plays read by sedentary actors, but McLean and Somerville act Dear Liar (which they have also staged), and they’ve located its dramatic arc. It is an acceptance – though, on his part, a somewhat melancholy one – of the limitations of their relationship. They meet in the 1890s, when both are married to other people. (Her first husband, whose name she retained for the rest of her life, was killed in the Boer War.) He is still a drama critic by profession and an unabashed fan of her work – though always forthright about the performances he finds disappointing and unworthy of her talent. When their friendship becomes romantic, around the time he casts her in Pygmalion (which he also directs), it remains unconsummated and eventually fades back into friendship, though the letters intermittently reveal a tone of longing, particularly on his side, and she is mercurial and easily fussed. She marries George Cornwallis-West, immediately after he receives his divorce from Lady Randolph Churchill (Winston’s mother); in the play, at least, she presents this information to him as a kind of surprise. At the end of her life she is impoverished and suggests publishing their correspondence but he won’t permit it. So this is a most complicated connection.

The show is performed in the Spiegeltent, which the Shaw has imported from Belgium over the last three seasons but will be returning in the fall. (This year it’s located behind the Festival Theatre.) It’s a charming, intimate space, warmly decorated by Aurora Judge and lit by Jeff Pybus; the actors move around and through the audience. The fact that these two fine actors are working their craft at such close quarters is part of the pleasure of watching Dear Liar. It takes a while to get used to their proximity in period costumes; for much of act one the conceit feels a little theatrical. By act two I realized I had stopped admiring McLean’s and Somerville’s considerable technical finesse and been drawn completely into the relationship of the two characters. This is the point at which acting turns into magic.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review, The Boston Phoenix and The Christian Century and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.