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 Entertainments: The Ladykillers and Getting Married

Chick Reid and Damien Atkins in The Ladykillers at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. (Photo: David Cooper)

Performed by overlapping ensembles, The Ladykillers and Getting Married, comedies of very different stripes, are the most sheerly enjoyable shows I saw at the Shaw Festival this season. The Ladykillers is Graham Linehan’s 2011 stage version of the screenplay William Rose wrote for the beloved Ealing comedy from 1955, starring Alec Guinness – fitted out with hilarious fake incisors that made him look like a cadaverous shark – as the brains of a gang of robbers who work out of his rented room in an innocent silver-haired widow’s house fronting a railroad track. (The Coen Brothers remade it in 2004, with Tom Hanks in the Guinness part.) Getting Married is a George Bernard Shaw comedy of manners that’s little known, at least outside Niagara-on-the-Lake, where the festival has performed it on four previous occasions.

The Playboy of the Western World and The Apple Cart: Flying High at the Shaw

Marla McLean and Qasim Khan in The Playboy of the Western World. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

In the preface to his 1907 masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World, the Irish playwright John Millington Synge writes, “On the stage one must have reality and one must have joy . . . In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple . . .” This dictum explains the play’s unusual style and texture, realism folded in with folk-fable imagination and humor and language so musical that it sings in your ears even when you’re just reading the text. Synge claims that he owes both the wildness of the narrative and the richness of the vernacular to his close attention to the way rural working-class Irish people speak (or did around the turn of the twentieth century).