The hardest things to figure out after seeing a performance of Bernard Shaw's 1931 fantasia Too True to Be Good, which the author called "a political extravaganza," are the exact intentions of GBS in writing and staging this unique and unclassifiable play.
This sizable and oft heavy-handed script seems to undertake the attempt to solve all the problems of the world, rather like a later postwar and depression-era rerun of Man and Superman. Unlike its predecessor of the early 1900s, though, Too True to Be Good presents us with a group of people living in a morass of failure and dysfunction. The play arrives at no clear solution, no neat apotheosis, but instead ends with a lengthy sermon from the play's Shavian alter ego, a sermon which closes the play on a decidedly depressing note. To me, the final act comes across less like a theatre piece and more like a political pamphlet. It's a common problem with Shaw, but this play presents the problem in an acute form.
As so often in Shaw, the basic
authorial technique is to set up conventional expectations with each
character for the fun of destroying them, usually by presenting instead
their comic polar opposite. The stage dynamics, though, get fatally subverted when the entire last act becomes a reversal of the complete preceding action. As well, there are decidedly absurdist elements in the play which call to mind such other (and equally rare) Shavian oddities as Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction and also anticipate the later absurdist and existential angst of Waiting For Godot, among others.
Given these strange aspects of the show, it's not hard to see why Too True remains a relatively rare bird in live performance. That being said, it does pose intriguing problems for the cast, designers, and director in trying to somehow make this decidedly untheatrical creature "go" in the theatre. The artists must relish the challenge because this is the fifth time the Shaw Festival has taken a swipe at Too True.
Start with the cast. This play calls for a company of nine actors, one of whom plays two entirely separate roles in the first and last acts. The three central characters of the story are each a single person, but their characters shift in and out of a broad array of different self-presentations during the show.
Absurdism is very much to the fore when the first character to speak is The Microbe, played with notable élan and engaging presence by Travis Seetoo. Equally absurd is the notion that it is the Microbe which has been made sick by the moaning and groaning young lady under the bed covers (Donna Soares), and not vice versa. Then her mother appears, and we are certainly on familiar territory here with the anxious woman who only makes her daughter sicker with all the tonics and potions and prescriptions she demands from the doctor. However, when the sickroom gets invaded by two burglars and the young lady flies passionately out of bed to protect her treasured pearl necklace, beating the snot out of the burglars in the process, we realize that even this vignette is not all it seems -- and that is only the first of the astonishing reversals in this farrago of conflicting self-portraits.
The Elderly Lady, a/k/a/ Mrs. Mopply, was played with an overplus of querulous anxiety and frenetic but futile energy by Jenny L. Wright. It was the one really overdone characterization of the show, but that's as it should be since the entire energy of the scene depends on her portrayal being wildly overdone.
As The Patient, a/k/a Miss Mopply and later simply Mops, Donna Soares brought admirable energy to her dramatic reversal of character, and to all her later appearances -- including the scenes where she appears as a non-English-speaking inhabitant of a tropical country. In the end, in spite of the rough start from her mother, she becomes one of the few characters to actually find a way out of the morass of self-doubt.
Martin Happer presented an apt note of weltschmerz as the Doctor who must somehow placate Mrs. Mopply while trying to keep her from making her daughter's condition worse.
This brings us to the two burglars who, as it happens, form together with Mops the triad of characters whose interactions drive the play. Marla McLean gave a memorably edgy performance as The Nurse, a/k/a Susan Simpkins, a/k/a Sweetie, a/k/a The Countess Valbrioni (I did mention that this play had a strong absurdist pedigree, did I not?). The best balancing act of the show comes as she gradually, ever so slightly, allows the uncertainty and fear behind all her bravado to leak out into public view.
Graeme Somerville gave a strong, play-centring performance as The Burglar, a/k/a Popsy, a/k/a The Honourable Aubrey Bagot. His character becomes the strongest mouthpiece for Shavian ideas through much of the show, somewhat echoing John Tanner in Man and Superman, but in the last act he endures the biggest slump into darkness with the lengthy final sermon of despair in which he tells us that, one by one, all his favourite ideals have deserted him. Somerville gave a valiant shot at making that bizarre ending both tolerable and somehow workable as theatre -- not that it can really be done, mind you, at least in my humble opinion.
The final two acts feature a trio of British military characters who form part of an expedition sent to rescue an English lady who has been kidnapped by brigands. The commander, Colonel Tallboys (Neil Barclay), gives a textbook caricature of the British soldier who lives in impenetrable ignorance that anyone or anything outside of Britain even matters. The moment where he strikes Mrs. Mopply with his umbrella, and the dialogue of the succeeding apology scene, were memorable comic highlights.
Sergeant Fielding (again, Martin Happer) shows us the man of ideas trapped in a uniform. Jonathan Tan gives a notably disciplined training-manual demonstration of military etiquette, all the while proving to his superiors (and the audience) that he is the one truly competent soldier on the expedition. His full name, Private Napoleon Alexander Trotsky Meek, becomes entirely self-explanatory in context.
Director Sanjay Talwar has led the company in a well-planned presentation making use of all four sides of the Studio Theatre's arena configuration.
Joyce Padua's costumes, for the most part conventional, were effective. The one unconventional choice of course is the whole question of how one ought to costume a Microbe. Padua outfitted Travis Seetoo in a full-length showpiece of floppy, flowery, stuck-on bits, with red and purple the dominant colours and -- sure enough -- one or two of the stuck-on bits gave more than a nod to microscope photographs of the Covid-19 coronavirus.
Sue Lepage's sets created effective environments for each scene of the play without blocking the views of the action from any side, which sounds easier than it actually is. Her collection of rocks in the second and third acts were among the more effective fake rocks I've seen created for a stage, a point driven home when one of the characters (Mops?) casually picks up a rock and moves it to a new position while others comment on the action.
Nick Andison's lighting design created effective pools of light and shade in the sickroom of Act I, and then gave a much sunnier effect to the tropical second and third acts before finding a deep, cold colour palette for the lengthy final sermon.
I did enjoy Too True to Be Good, and the quality of this performance was high. I'll leave it as an open question whether I would go to see another production in future. On the whole, I think not. I would prefer to chalk this up as one of George Bernard Shaw's misfires. And yes, all great creative artists have them.
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