Short Takes: Farce and Children’s Theatre at Shaw and Stratford Festivals

Jeff Irving, Damien Atkins, and Travis Seetoo in Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense. (Photo: Michael Cooper.)

P. G. Wodehouse gets the 39 Steps treatment at Shaw in Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense (at the Court House, once more open to audiences until the renovation of the Royal George is completed). The narrative justification for turning this particular convoluted farce into a three-hander is that Bertie Wooster (Jeff Irving), inept as always, wants to write down the story of his latest misadventure but cannot do so without the aid of his indispensable manservant Jeeves (Damien Atkins). Jeeves plays himself and a host of other characters; he enlists the help of another domestic named Seppings (Travis Seetoo) who handles the remaining roles. Bertie remains Bertie throughout, while the breathless shifting in and out of multiple personalities by the other two men, often holding on by the skin of their teeth, gives the knockabout comedy a teetering acrobatic quality. As in The 39 Steps (and of course The Play That Goes Wrong and its sequels), the pleasure is in watching deft farceurs pretend to be fumbling amateurs. The co-authors, Robert Goodale and David Goodale, cite “The Works of P.G. Wodehouse” as their source material, but the plot comes mostly out of the 1938 novel The Code of the Woosters, wherein Bertie’s tyrannical aunt blackmails him into stealing an antique silver cow creamer for her husband from a rival collector. Under Brendan McMurtry-Howlett’s breakneck direction, the three actors are very funny, though the play goes on for about twenty minutes too long.

Neil Barclay and Peter Fernandes in One for the Pot. (Photo: Michael Cooper.)

By contrast, the Shaw season’s other farce, One for the Pot (Festival Theatre), operated on this viewer, at least, like a nagging toothache. It isn’t the fault of the skilled director, Chris Abraham, or of the talented cast (which includes Patrick Galligan, Martin Happer, Fiona Byrne, Neil Barclay and the ingenious clown Peter Fernandes in the showcase role), or of Michael Gianfrancesco’s set, which is quite handsome. It’s the play itself, written by Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton and first produced in the West End in 1961. The premise is the efforts of a couple of scam artists hot to get their hands on an inheritance. (The plot bears a strong resemblance to that of last season’s Tons of Money.) The play winds up on a loop; you might feel you’d been trapped in a revolving door.

From left: Derek Kwan, Tim Campbell, Michael Man, Ijeoma Emesowum and Sara-Jeanne Hosie in The Hobbit. (Photo: David Hou.)

Stratford’s children’s performance, an adaptation of The Hobbit by Kim Selody (Avon Theatre), contains a few engaging visual effects like a silhouetted web spun by a monster spider, but once the director, Pablo Felices-Luna, gets to them he doesn’t have any idea what to do next. The action is so static that the actors look stranded on Lorenzo Savoini’s set, which seems promising when we first look at it. (It contains the depth that’s lacking in the staging.) Richard Lee has an interestingly pensive presence as Bilbo Baggins, but the play doesn’t do enough with it. The children’s show at Shaw, The Wind in the Willows (Studio Theatre), culled by the director, Fiona Sauder, from A.A. Milne’s play Toad of Toad Hall, is much, much worse. The poor actors – there are a dozen of them – work painfully hard, but the movement Jack Davidson has devised for them makes them look like hippies in some misconceived musical from 1970. The script is hopeless and the staging is so chaotic that I sometimes felt the need to close my eyes to keep my brain from pouring out through my ears. Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 classic has a very special pastoral-philosophical quality, and the writing is beautiful. It’s hard to imagine how it ended up in such a clumsy mess.

I’m sure that neither of these directors set out to make bad theatre, but both shows give the sour impression that they’re not taking their young audiences seriously – that if you’re performing for kids you don’t have to think through your ideas. These productions are implicitly condescending.

– 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.