Roloff Beny in Italy (review)

HUMANITIES 41.7 year, acquiring a splendid new theatre in 1973, without by any means abandoning the Court House, and then, again under Brian's direction, giving a home to the Canadian Mime Theatre at the reconditioned Brock Cinema. Brian is always honoured at Niagara-on-the-Lake: his sculptured bust now adorns the foyer of the new theatre; he is always the 'founder'; and when he ceased to function as director, he began the 'Shaw seminar' which many of us have been honoured to take part in. The Niagara-on-the-Lake Shaw Festival is the second Shaw celebration : some of us will remember the work of Sir Barry Jackson at Malvern in the 1930S. It is indeed excellent that a Canadian town is carrying on the work that Sir Barry began with such distinction. Brian Doherty could hardly have chosen a better setting for his Festival . Niagara-on-the-Lake is well known to us as the first capital of Upper Canada. It is a beautiful town, with many early nineteenth-century houses; it is not yet spoilt, though the hand of success is now lying a bit obviously on it; it is still a place we delight to visit. The book tells a story which does credit to 'the founder: to Niagaraon -the-Lake, and to Canada. The Festival is known all over the world, and the United States give their most welcome support and their esteem. Many Americans and people from England have rightly told me that some Shaw productions they have seen there have been the best they have met anywhere. One looks back with special pleasure on, for example , Misalliance, and on the opportunities of seeing some infrequently performed plays by Shaw and his contemporaries and some later plays that might be said to show the continuance of the shavian spirit. But when will they give us a Granville-Barker play? The title of the book is characteristically light-hearted and well chosen. Who could have believed that this venture would succeed? All the odds seemed to be against it, except the gracious town it took shape in, and of course the vision that Brian had. How many of us knew the old Court House, or Brian in those early days, or the directors who have carried on his work? Well, it has happened and makes us the richer for coming into existence and continuing. Now we have a record in print and picture which must give us all delight. I shall think the worse of any Canadian house that does not have it prominently on display. Since his death, this book and the theatres at Niagara-on-the-Lake will be memorials to a major Canadian. (CLIFFORD LEECH) Roloff Beny in Italy. London : Thames and Hudson; Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 428, incl. 296 plates, $40.00 Gore Vidal, in his amusing if rather chilling epilogue to Roloff Beny's book of pictures, reminds us that it is virtually impossible not to lapse into cliche when describing Italy. The astonishing thing about this volume of photographs is that it does avoid cliche. It should have been impossible , one had thought, to see afresh the most familiar, most photographed sights of Europe, and yet Mr Beny has managed it beautifully: Brunelleschi's great dome is framed in the arched window of a Sangallo loggia (plate 167), the three columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux reflected in the pool of the Vestal Virgins (plate :124), the della Robbia terracottas of La Verna (where have they been anything but the most dazzling white?) golden by candlelight (plates 205-6) . This book, a lavish tribute to a country which its author knows perhaps more intimately than any other he has photographed, is almost too beautiful. Our photographer, even more than the Church, the cinema, and the government, is a dream-dispenser (p 408). There is scarcely a hint of the jarring reality, never shirked by Fellini for instance, that makes modern Italy difficult, even maddening, but piquant as always and worth every moment of the struggle to enjoy (d. Eleanor Clark, 'Return to Rome,' New York Review of Books, 12 Dec. '974, pp 48-50). Contemporary...