Revisionism: The 1995 Shaw Festival

Following the Arts With this issue the JCS!REC undertakes to publish an occasional feature informing our readers of recent developments in the areas of Canadian theatre, dance, art, film and/or music. "Following the Arts" is open to commentary about both more mainstream and alternative institutions and cultural practices, and encourages reviews of community and regional as well as national events. M.L. Revisionism: The 1995 Shaw Festival Revisionism in theatre is not simply a matter of editing texts to clarify allusions, simplifying language, shuffling scenes, or finding period analogues for the external style of pieces. Revisionism is an extension of sensibility; it does not, in its best incarnations, seek to wilfully distort. In a sense, any good director is a revisionist if he breaks down old platitudes - such as a rigid insistence that particular plays or playwrights project only the values and ideas of their specific periods. Modern directors emphasize theatricality that looks afresh at works considered old-fashioned , irrelevant or frivolous. The modem passion is not so much to hear a play as to experience it as a radical vision, perhaps an allegory ofcertain social or ideological upheavals. Certainly, this is the way contemporary directors prefer to treat Shakespeare, Chekhov, Shaw, and even Sheridan. The trouble is that some directors treat distortion as if it were exemplary revisionism rather than a deficiency in taste. At Niagara-on-the-Lake, where Christopher Newton has sought to cast a wide net on Shaw's contemporaries, audiences had to bear extravagance in the company of intelligent adventurism. But there was also the matter of John van Druten. 162 "I cannot think what my mother would have said of it," van Druten reportedly stated a decade after The Voice of the Turtle premiered on Broadway in 1943. Nobody's mother today would suffer any qualms about the shy, awkward blossoming of love in springtime between an army sergeant on furlough and a young aspiring actress, even though the third character the fourth being a New York apartment in the east 60s - is a rather amoral goodtime gal with a funny face, snappy lines and a yen for men in uniform. What was once daring is now merely delicate, at best; after all, what can be gained from a play where the bland heroine by her own admission knows nothing of real life and worries about her radio playing to itselfin her apartment? Is there any depth to the sergeant other than his desire not to be "unhappily in love," a rueful plea not to be shut out by the girl? He purportedly has been to Princeton and Europe, and appreciates things; she is evidently familiar with poems by Dorothy Parker on pain, infidelity and pessimism. Both act guilty or reticent about the attraction, but their coping with comic inhibition is only mildly amusing: sex is preceded by fumbling with a stuck zipper in an absurd foreplay with pliers. In the original Broadway production, Margaret Sullivan and Elliott Nugent capitalized on good humour and tenderness. In Paul Lampert's Shaw Festival production , Greg Spottiswood had charm, timing , and a dry wit, while Ann Bagley lacked personality and style; even Alison Woolridge, in a role that would have been perfect for the late Rosalind Russell, did not point up the comedy with the verve it can bear. The result was a humdrum production that was not helped by grainy, black and white slide projections of Manhattan or by Larry Adler's recorded harmonica versions of The Glory of Gershwin. Indeed, the music was a reminder of the mood and texture so lacking in the acting. Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 30, No. 4 (Hiver 1995-96 Winter) Neil Munro's production of Robert Sherwood's The Petrified Forest swung wildly into allegory; while beginning intriguingly as a sort of melodramatic fairy tale set in a wasteland about a Fair Maiden, Knight Errant, and Black Knight, it degenerated into an operatic extravaganza about irrational violence and destruction. Not that Munro's fundamental vision lacked justification Sherwood 's play is about the collision between love and death in a society that is clearly dying. The setting is a filling-station and bar in eastern Arizona...