The 1982 Shaw Festival

Commentary The 1982 Shaw Festival KEITH GAREBIAN First the preliminaries - one dud, one hilariously broad "send-up," and a trite farce that justified itself by a brilliant production. We can quickly pass over the failure of The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, an adaptation by Simone Benmussa of a story by George Moore. Set in Ireland of the 1860s it is a tale of a woman who was compelled by economic and social circumstances to lead her life disguised as a man, and at a fatal price at the end. This is certainly an interesting topic and particularly relevant to the mores of the nineteenth century when male chauvinism was an unhealthy and inexorable condition of life. However, the stage adaptation was ill-suited to the modes of theatre; the result was a tediously static narrative that would have been better suited to radio. Heavily dependent on taped voices and the device of an invisible narrator (George Moore), this tale of tragic desperation was marked by virtually incessant exposition, moments of soundless business, and passages of genial Irish humour and satire. The acting lacked passionate intensity and modulation - with brief exceptions among the performances of the supporting cast - and there were no· peaks or valleys of substantial drama. Nor was there enough genuine anguish projected on stage. Without discernible dramatic shape for a narrative that carried little or no suspense, Albert Nobbs was a production that badly needed a ruffling. Nora McLellan's attempted impersonation of a man was feeble vocally and sometimes even in movement. However, as I have never seen any other actress who could play a man in truly convincing fashion, I am inclined to conclude that the secret must lie in biology - something that even the most vehement feminist must blushingly admit. Compensations for this failure were not difficult to find. Christopher Newton's "send-up" of The Desert Song, and Adrian Brine's sparklingly lunatic version of See How They Run showed clearly that musical comedy and farce are alive and kicking on the Canadian stage. The Desert Song, with book and lyrics by Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Frank Mandel, and music by Sigmund Romberg, is a romantic fable that is too silly to be believed; accordingly, it was absolutely correct for Newton to parody its intrinsic silliness. Originally premiered on Broadway in 1926, it is a tale of confused identities and swashbuckling romance in a Moroccan setting, but although many of the songs are still delightful to our sense of nostalgia, the characters, situations, and dialogue are often ridiculously stereotyped, if not downright 112 bathetic. The Shaw company threw decorum to the winds, and turned Riffian rebels into a finger-snapping, Las Vegas chorus of unlikely entertainers. Mary Kerr's gaudy and kitschy tapestries and gingerbread sets with miniature cut-out camels and muezzin - added colour and craziness to the anarchy on stage, and the doubling of most of the cast - Ali ben Ali as General Birabeau; Sid as Corporal La Vergne; Hassi as Captain Paul Fontaine; Mindar as Corporal Beaupre, et cetera - compounded the slapstick. There was fun to be had almost everywhere, but particularly in the "O Pretty Maid" number, where a percussion was played on a machine-gun and Legionnaire's medals; in the Gallic coquettry of the ladies in "French Military Song"; in Alicia Jeffrey's tempestuous, sultry burlesque of Azuri, all jangling with bangles, beads, and castanets; in Jo-Anne Kirwan Clark's blonde and toothy, squealingly gay Susan, on the make for a man; and in shortstatured Gerald Isaac's gymnastic, bouncy Bennie, which gave stage energy a new standard. The bad jokes, puns, and hyperbole were relished for their awfulness - as were the clumsy plot machinations which had sentimental romance interrupting even the highest moments of intrigue. The deliberate mixture of choreographic styles - Broadway musical, vaudeville, Spanish tango, classical pas des deux, Follies Bergeres, Gallic military marches, and Oriental non-descript were bubblingly insane, and the melodramatic madness was accentuated by the overripe acting styles. Only Terry Harford fell flat. As Pierre, the clumsy, lacklustre son of General Birabeau, he was stiff and pale, and as his secret alias, the Red Shadow, he· did not...