Shaw and Stratford Festivals: Twentieth-Century Classics

Julia Course and Martin Happer in Heartbreak House. (Photo: David Cooper.)

The allegorical high comedy Heartbreak House is one of George Bernard Shaw’s strangest plays; it is also, in my estimation, his greatest. (For me the other contenders are Man and Superman and Major Barbara, though I don’t pretend to have seen or read them all: he wrote more than sixty.) Set in a country house in Sussex constructed by its patriarch, Captain Shotover, in the shape of a ship, it brings together a disparate set of characters, a few of whom are related to one or another of the inhabitants but they haven’t seen each other in so long that they don’t always recognize each other. Toward the end some unidentified foreign power begins to bomb England; two of the characters are killed in the midst of attempting to protect themselves by hiding in a storage shed. And though the bombardiers move on, obviously the war goes on and for all we know it will signal the doom of civilization. In the final minutes of the drama Shaw’s characters are as witty as ever, and the mood isn’t Wagnerian, yet the play is a Götterdämmerung. Written in 1916 and 1917 and first produced in 1920, it is the playwright’s response to the First World War – the Great War, as it was called until 1939. The work it feels closest to is a masterpiece from two decades later, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, which was released on the cusp of the war that made that descriptor obsolete. Renoir’s movie doesn’t end in an apocalypse, but the tragedy at its conclusion, the senseless murder of a national hero – a case of mistaken identity – feels like an inevitable final act of carelessness and self-involvement that embodies up the attitude of the French nouveaux riches, the new aristocracy that has replaced the old, inherited one, the death of which Renoir had chronicled two years earlier in Grand Illusion.

Tim Carroll’s revival of Heartbreak House marks the seventh version of the play at Shaw. The last, directed by Christopher Newton, was sixteen years ago, and my enthusiastic review of it enabled me to discuss the play itself in detail, so I will restrict my focus in this piece to the current production. My response was complicated and altered as the show went on. At the beginning it drove me a little crazy, in the way that Carroll’s work often does, though he’s a talented director and sometimes a surprising one. Ximena Pinilla is listed in the program as the designer of the set as well as the lovely period costumes, but the play has been put into the small, experimental Studio Theatre and effectively there is no set, just a series of chairs scattered about the stage, with two hanging from the flies for good measure. And I do mean scattered, because the play hasn’t been staged: the placement of the chairs varies from performance to performance, and during intermission two of the actors, Michael Therriault as a butler and Kristi Frank as a maid, interview members of the audience to determine where they should place these few sticks of furniture. These two domestics also recite excerpts from the stage directions – probably to cut down on our confusion, but the interruption of the dialogue to provide parenthetical information is Brechtian. Peter Hinton-Davis applied Brechtian technique to last season’s Major Barbara with more annoying results.

Perhaps the pared-down production values of both these productions derived from budgetary concerns, but Heartbreak House calls for a set that looks like a ship because its depiction of humanity is changeable and contradictory, like a ship negotiating turbulent waters. The 2013 American Repertory Theatre Glass Menagerie directed by John Tiffany, which made a splash on Broadway, reduced Laura Wingfield’s titular collection to a single animal and omitted the photograph of the absent father that is supposed to dominate the Wingfields’ St. Louis apartment, even though Tennessee Williams’s stage directions indicate that Tom points to it (and Zachary Quinto did so, but of course he pointed at the air). I was reminded of that capital silliness when, in Heartbreak House, the characters referred to the invisible ship. This isn’t concept; it’s affectation, and affectation is distracting.

But as the first act proceeded this facetious embroidery became less intrusive because a remarkable cast sank with little apparent effort into Shaw’s unorthodox rhythms, glided like figure skaters on the unpredictable contours of his long, musing speeches and located both the depths and the high wires of perhaps the most delectably eccentric group of characters ever packed into a single play. (Forgive the mixed metaphor – what Shaw goes for, and triumphantly achieves, in Heartbreak House seems to demand it.) These actors pull you into the text and never distance you – or themselves – from it.

Tom Rooney is Shotover, an eighty-eight-year-old mystic who seems to steer his ship truly by the stars. He renders the captain’s great age with a weightless, floating quality, and he’s been made up to look like GBS himself. His daughters – pragmatic, conventional Ariadne (Lady Utterword), who hasn’t seen her father or her sister in many years, and Hesione, a Bohemian who was partly inspired by the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell – are played respectively by Sochi Fried and one of my favorite Shaw actors, Julia Course, whose performance also invokes the spirit of the women of the Bloomsbury group. (Everyone looks splendid in their clothes, but no one’s frame is more ideal for this period than Course.) Martin Happer is Hesione’s flirtatious husband Hector, a fantasist who strolls through the house in colorful Orientalist robes that he proclaims his wife has insisted on.

Graeme Somerville is hapless Boss Mangan, Shaw’s satiric embodiment of capitalism, whom Hesione has invited to the house in order to break up his relationship with her young friend Ellie Dunn. Ellie has planned to marry him in order to save her beloved father from financial ruin – though even when she learns that Mangan wrecked her father’s business, she remains dedicated to her plan. Mangan, who is driven almost to madness by both the Shotover sisters, is the funniest character on the stage, and Somerville’s performance is hilarious. Neil Barclay’s portrayal of Mazzini Dunn suggests the wry gentleness of the prolific character actor Edmund Gwenn. Jason Cadieux plays Ariadne’s brother-in-law Randall, who adores her and follows her everywhere, though she alternately berates and infantilizes him. Fiona Byrne is Nurse Guinness, the housekeeper whose iron will is masked by maternal warmth.

Sanjay Talwar has the only role Shaw didn’t do much with, a burglar who turns out to be a character we have been hearing about throughout the play and never expected to meet because he sounds like something out of a children’s adventure story. (Productions of Heartbreak House often omit him.) And Allison Edwards-Crewe, as Ellie, is the only member of the cast who hasn’t discovered how her character works. It is, I think, the trickiest role: Shaw wrote her as an ingenue and in a sense the play is, among many other things, her coming of age, but it’s a tortuous and rambling one. Edwards-Crewe has an appealing earnestness but it doesn’t sustain her performance.

Shaw divided the play into three acts; Carroll has eliminated the second intermission, so what is now act two is just short of an hour longer than act one. That decision didn’t work for the badly misconceived Heartbreak House Hartford Stage mounted in 2017 but it does here. The audience thinned out a little after act one but those who stayed were up for the ride, and you could feel that they were in sync with the magnificent play and the extraordinary actors, half of whom have been performing at Shaw for fourteen seasons or more. (Barclay, Byrne, Happer and Somerville have each chalked up more than twenty seasons.) When this company is at its best there’s no finer troupe of actors on the continent.

Lucy Peacock and Tom McCamus in Death of a Salesman. (Photo: David Hou.)

My back-to-back visits to Stratford and Shaw featured a great deal of fine acting. In the Stratford Death of a Salesman Lucy Peacock and Joe Perry are moving as Linda and Biff Loman, and there are solid contributions from Josh Johnston as Happy, Matthew Kabwe as Charley and Chick Reid in the small role of the unnamed woman Willy Loman, the salesman of the title, sleeps with on his trips to Boston during the boys’ adolescence. But I made a special point of seeing yet another revival of Arthur Miller’s ubiquitous play because Tom McCamus, one of my favorite Canadian actors, is playing Willy, and he gives a quirky, baffling performance. His vocal choice is to race through his lines, sometimes tripping over them. One can imagine several psychological motivations for this tic, but it damages the structure of the longer speeches especially, and sometimes you miss the point. (This actor was much better as Gogo in Waiting for Godot, which I caught at the tail end of its run at the Festival Theatre.) He also spends considerable time wandering around the stage. I don’t know whether this idea originated with McCamus or with the director, Dean Gabourie, since the staging overall is random and often is so ill-matched with the dialogue that the effect is like that of watching a movie where the soundtrack is out of sync. Here’s one example among many. Willy is obsessed with Biff, whose inability to find his path through life by his thirties shoots holes in his father’s conviction, since Biff’s years as a charismatic high-school football hero, that he was moving inexorably toward a fabulous future. Yet in one scene, while Willy complains about Biff’s failure to make any kind of success of himself, he’s rooting in the refrigerator for a bottle of milk.

Miller’s most famous innovation in Salesman was the inclusion of expressionistic sequences that convey what’s going on in Willy’s head as he grows more anxious and more confused. But the main style is straight-up American realism. So when you walk into the Avon Theatre and Scott Penner’s set is only a backdrop of claustrophobic apartment houses you wonder if you’ve wandered into the wrong play. Sure, Willy complains continually about the way an apartment complex has closed in the neighborhood and the lack of sunlight that prevents him from growing anything. But the Lomans live in a house with a backyard, and we never see any of it, so when McCamus makes his character’s iconic entrance at the top of the first act, weighed down by his sample cases, it looks like he’s coming home to an alley. Then Peacock appears with a chair so he’ll have somewhere to sit, since there’s no furniture until later on, and when we get it it’s spare and Penner hasn’t thought it through in practical terms. There’s a preposterous moment early in act two when Linda, alone in her kitchen, answers a ringing phone on top of the refrigerator.

The most pressing question of the evening is why Gabourie begins with a trumpeter, Michael Louis Johnson, playing familiar tunes from the thirties and forties and making mild show-biz jokes. The mood he produces couldn’t be more inappropriate for Death of a Salesman, which hardly takes a fond, nostalgic attitude toward the Depression years (it was first produced in 1949) and contains almost no humor. Of course the audience politely applauds the (mediocre) trumpeter, but the next thing we see is Willy with his cases and the shift is jarring. Johnson reappears after intermission and once more we have to pass through this nonsensical transition. What can be on Tom McCamus’s mind when he has to follow a busker?

– 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 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.