Questions of Taste: The 1986 Shaw Festival

sive; I will continue to say so until they stop charging so much." If the Festival is to draw consistently large audiences for productions that will inevitably vary in quality and interest, ticket prices will have to be reduced. Only when houses are full will we be able to say that faith in Stratford has truly been awakened. F.B. TROMLY Trent University Questions of Taste: The 1986 Shaw Festival Taste is a subjective thing, but its roots lie in such considerable factors as cultural background, spiritual and sensory experience, sensitivity to texture, and the compass of mental discrimination . Paradoxically, the 1986 Shaw Festival triumphed in the more difficult, complex, and challenging plays of its repertoire, and failed in the easier, simpler diversions. The failures were due to questions of taste as much as the triumphs were earned by addressing the same issue. One expected Shaw's one-act play, Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction, to be actor-proof. But director Paul Reynolds committed tactical atrocities on Shaw's spoof of melodrama. Shaw's broadly impish humour was turned into lurid rockvideo Gothicism at the Royal George. There is nothing grotesque in Shaw's description of his setting: "the general impression is one of brightness, beauty, and social ambition, damped by somewhat inadequate means." When the cuckoo clock strikes sixteen, the mood is one of theatrical absurdity rather than of Transylvanian horror, but in Reynolds 's production the decor was rudely garish, the sound effects shrill and exaggerated . Phyllis, a dull maid, became in Wendy Thatcher's warped characterization a wizened, doddering Germanic cliche with a fright wig and equally frightening make-up. The plot is riotously wacky, derived 122 as it is from a children's story Shaw had written after reading of a cat which became petrified from lapping up liquid plaster. In the play, impishly subtitled "a brieftragedy for barns and booths," Lady Magnesia Fitztollemache's lover, Adolphus , turns into a statue after swallowing poison from her irate spouse, and then eating a lime ceiling as an antidote. Shaw hoped to keep his actors in training and audiences aware of the challenges ofexaggerated comedy. He would have been horrified by the excesses at the Royal George. Although Donna Goodhand was an appropriately fickle-hearted Lady Magnesia, and Keith Knight a funny Police Constable with a physique reminiscent of the late Oliver Hardy, Guy Bannerman played the diabolical George Fitztollemache like a refugee from Hollywood B-movies, and Ted Dykstra, all at sea with his accent and Shavian style, was effective only in his petrifaction. Sometimes nothing so becomes an actor as the leaving of dialogue. The extravagant celestial choir, comprised of almost the entire Shaw company it seemed, was an entertaining spectacle as it produced the strains of "Bill Bailey," but the best of this play was left unrealized - Shaw's mischievously impossible stage-direction: "A thunderbolt enters the room, and strikes the helmet of the devoted constable, whence it is attracted to the waistcoat of the doctor by the lancet in his pocket. Finally it leaps with fearful force on the landlord who, being of a gross and spongy nature, absorbs the electric fluid at the cost of his life. The others look on horrorstricken as the three victims, after reelirig , jostling, cannoning through aghastly quadrille, at last sink inanimate on the carpet." Taste abandoned some ofthe cast in Black Coffee, Frances Hyland's directorial debut at the Shaw. Agatha Christie's whodunnit sets itself up quickly . Sir Claud Amory, a distinguished scientist who has invented an explosive that could kill hundreds of thousands, discovers that his secret formula has been Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 21, No. 4 (River 1986-87 Winter) stolen from his strongbox. At nine in the evening, he orders his servants to switch off the lights so that the guilty party can return the formula under cover of darkness , thus escaping detection and embarrassment . He warns that he has sent for a lively "rat-catcher," Hercule Poirot, the famous Belgian detective, who arrives to find not simply an unresolved theft but a murder as well, for when the lights come up in the study, Sir Claud is found slumped near a cup...