Summer Stock: The 1988 Shaw Festival

reflections on the state of the world by Timothy Findley.) As to the hoary question of Eliot's verse, Eliot himself (in The Rock) made a clear association between metre and ideology - free verse for Redshirts, strict metres for Blackshirts - and these are operational in Murder in the Cathedral: in the accented line of the Choruses, or the anapaestic chant of the assassins marching down the aisle, for instance, or in the not-so-sweet reasonableness of the committee prose the Knights use at the end of the play. Of such niceties, the production seemed entirely oblivious, both speech and movement aiming, for the most part, at naturalness and often achieving stiltedness. It was very curious that in the production ofMurder in the Cathedral there was no sense of its importance in its own time, nor in ours. So why present this play? Because it served to designate a modern, Anglo-American, classical tradition? By contrast with Murder, Stephen MacDonald's Not About Heroes was approached with reverence. The piece has had a considerable success since it was first played at Edinburgh six years ago, possibly because it transforms the harshness of its ostensible subject with an appalling self-contradiction. On the one hand it celebrates the passion and poetic achievements of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; on the other it denies both passion and poetry by converting their representation of the terrible pity of war to MacDonald's representation of the rewarding personal friendship of the two men. Without being in any way a critique of Owen's professed attitude to the idea of heroes and heroism, this play is about heroes and an example of the very treatment of war that poor Owen tried so hard to avoid. MacDonald's main method is to recast the poems in scenic and prose terms as, for instance, with the implicit rendering of "Futility" as an encounter between Owen and the wounded, depressed Sassoon. Thus the subject of war is displaced by the subjectivity of 118 Owen, by mere biography. Nicholas Pennell as Sassoon and Henry Czemy as Owen played their roles with feeling and tact, but the insistence of the text itself on the love interest was irrepressible. The audience was gently transported from "War, and the Fity of War" to a theatrical never-never land of fetching uniforms, familiar emotions and old-world manners: to the old England that never was, and that constitutes one of North America's ideas of a classical theatre. MICHAEL J. SIDNELL Summer Stock: The 1988 Shaw Festival Is it too cynical to suggest that great box-office figures have created a smugness ? Am I alone in detecting that Christopher Newton is attempting to rest on well-worn laurels? Is it impertinent to conclude that the Shaw Festival has little on its mind except attracting vacationers who are as fond of musicals and murder mysteries as they are of the roadside fruit-stalls and the Dewdrop Inn? There were, no doubt, successes: the colourful vitality of You Never Can Tell, the almost ageless entertainment ofPeter Pan , the psychological and moral challenges of 17ie Voysey Inheritance, and the startling complexities of He Who Gets Slapped. There were, too, the political audacities of Geneva. But there were certain gross miscalculations: a J.B. Priestley experiment with themes of Time, Chance, and Character treated like a conventional "who-dunnit"; a 1920s Broadway musical showing its mustiness through all the superficial glamour; a 1930s satire on desperate bad taste that fell into the very mode it was meant to criticize; two productions of very loud Shavian overacting; and a comic-strip popularization of a classic Russian epic. It was generous of Newton to give Neil Munro and Marti Maraden opporRevue detudes canadiennes Vol. 23, No. 4 (Hiver 1988-89 Winter) tunities to direct, with Munro getting an almost forgotten Edwardian play, and Miss Maraden a Russian play that needed to be rediscovered. Neither is exactly a novice at directing, but the Shaw productions were certainly their most significant enterprises to date. The Voysey Inheritance came, of course, with its reputation already established as one of the Edwardian era's graces, not simply a literary device for sentimental characters...