My second show at the Shaw Festival this year was a rather rare production of Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde.
In watching this play for the first time, I was often reminded of a review given to Eric Nicol's play, Like Father Like Fun, when it was performed in Toronto: "It has a lot of funny lines, but I wouldn't call it a comedy." (quoted from memory, please be merciful about any unintentional errors!)
Lady Windermere's Fan was Wilde's first big dramatic success, and many commentators -- perhaps influenced by the subsequent triumph of the more famous Importance of Being Earnest -- have described this play as a comedy. In my humble opinion, it is no such thing. I suppose a director might tilt the piece towards a more comic approach, but this could only be done by nudging the audience to mock the characters and situations. This would be a dangerous mistake.
Indeed, I think it has become rarely performed because it is a near-ideal exemplar of that long-dead genre, the Victorian melodrama, whose only living offspring, the American TV soap opera, is itself now considered an endangered species.
In its own day, Lady Windermere's success was largely due to the novel idea of satirizing the world of the upper classes so bitingly in public. But it goes much deeper than that, portraying a world where people are condemned on the flimsiest of evidence or on no evidence at all beyond that of mere coincidence. The assumptions and condemnations of the "good people" in the play are our own, and exactly mirrored in the snap judgements people make today about the actions and motives of others. Not for nothing did Wilde subtitle this work, A Play About A Good Woman -- although by the end you are left with the unanswered question of whether the good woman in question even appeared, or whether she is just an imaginary compendium of the best aspects of several of the characters.
The play is complex in the sense that the situations involved are only revealed bit by bit, scene by scene, and character by character. The lady of questionable character with whom all the others are concerned only appears in the third scene, nearly an hour into the show -- a risky proposition from the viewpoint of keeping the audience involved! But Wilde manages to sustain interest in the mysterious Mrs. Erlynne for as long as it takes to reach the moment when she appears. The fan is a perfectly chosen symbol of a world where all the characters are making choices about what to conceal and what to reveal, and to whom.
I had to give all this background to set the framework for my reactions to the performance. If the fan is a subtle symbol, the set design was anything but. The setting of the first scene was slowly revealed by the three edges of a black frame retreating to left, right, and up -- but not far. This gave a fine claustrophobic air to the first scene and certainly hit us all over the head with the idea of revealing secrets. Whether it needed to be done so bluntly is questionable. Whether it needed to be repeated at every scene change is an easier question to answer -- no. The slow opening and closing of the scene frames became repetitive and tedious, and dragged the play to a halt each time.
Most of the actors gave effective and realistic portrayals of their characters -- and some did considerably more than that. One of the best was Corrine Koslo as the Duchess of Berwick, by turns motherly, overbearing, friendly, concerned, and judgmental. Jim Mezon did fine work as Lord Augustus Lorton, a part more sympathetic than many I have seen him in. Kyle Blair as Mr. Cecil Graham came across as an over-the-top aesthete, a living counterpart to Oscar Wilde himself -- which was understandable, since his part contains more Wildean epigrams than all the rest of the cast put together.
Marla McLean as the young Lady Windermere, and Martin Happer as Lord Windermere both created their characters effectively.
Tara Rosling, as Mrs. Erlynne, commanded all eyes from the moment of her arrival. This was partly a matter of costume -- black off-the-shoulder gown when all the other women wore lighter colours with pouffed sleeves. Most of that command, though, was Rosling's own indomitable acting skill.
Mrs. Erlynne is a tough character to bring across. She's a terrific mixture of motivations from all points of the moral compass, and even more than the others uses language to conceal rather than to reveal herself. Rosling captured all the diversity of this complex personality, and played her with humanity and conviction. Mrs. Erlynne must not be played as the conventional melodramatic villainess at all, and was not.
Stage pictures (they have to be called "stage pictures" because of the framing blacks) were clearly composed, and the numerous movements of the complex ballroom scene well handled. Peter Hinton's direction clearly supported the character relationships throughout, and all scenes were effectively lit. Visually, this could have been a stunning production but for those annoying frames.
If I had to give ratings for this show (maybe I should start doing that), I'd give it a 3.5 out of 5 stars -- that would be a 4 for the performances and a 3 for the designs.
No comments:
Post a Comment