National Post (National Edition)
‘The art of theatre is the art of acting’
CANADIAN THEATRE QUALITY GIVES THIS COUNTRY SOMETHING TO SHOUT ABOUT
Ihave been the National Post’s sole theatre critic since the paper began in 1998, and over those 19 years I have been consistently impressed and delighted by the quality of the work I have covered. Canada’s theatrical best can stand up to anybody’s, and I have sometimes wondered if the country knows what a great resource it possesses. Maybe we need to shout about it more.
We should certainly be shouting out loud about our actors. “The art of theatre is the art of acting: first, last and all the time”. Those were the incontrovertible words of the great British theatre man Harley Granville Barker who — as actor, producer, director, playwright, scholar and critic — had an unrivalled perspective on the entire territory. He was also one of the first promoters and interpreters of the plays of Bernard Shaw, and a current production of a Shaw play at the Shaw Festival is proving his point all over again.
The play is Androcles and the Lion, one of its author’s best but not seen at his festival since 1984. It takes the Greek fable of Androcles, the runaway slave who made a lion his lifelong and life-saving friend by removing a thorn from its paw, and grafts it onto some Roman history. Androcles here becomes an early Christian, apparently marked for martyrdom. He’s a meek fellow, a tailor by trade, whose best friends have always been animals and whom we and the lion first meet when he’s fleeing through the forest, resentfully accompanied by his complaining, non-Christian wife. When he next appears he’s a prisoner, bound for the arena in the company of a representative handful of co-religionists, each of whom seems to have a different interpretation of the faith that supposedly binds them together. When Androcles himself is sent into the lion’s den...well, you probably know what happens; and if you don’t, I’m sure you can guess. The Roman spectators are terribly impressed, especially the Emperor.
It’s a playful play, liable to switch in an instant from verbal and physical knockabout to impassioned debate; and Tim Carroll, the Shaw’s new artistic director, has given it a playful production, involving a substantial ration of audience participation. Reports of this had alarmed me; I feared it would just get in the way of the play. In fact most of Carroll’s ideas enliven the experience, and some of them actually enrich it.
Not all of them do. The opening dialogue between Androcles and his nagging spouse may be written in music-hall terms, but it’s hobbled rather than enhanced by having the two of them make interpolated appeals for sympathy to the people sitting out front. Other interventions are more sophisticated. Audience volunteers are given differently coloured balls to throw onto the stage whenever the fancy takes them.
One colour means that an actor will pause mid-action, possibly even mid-speech, to share a personal anecdote, related to the concerns of the play; these stories, at the performance I saw, proved surprisingly touching. Another colour will cue the recital of passages from the play’s preface and postscript, helpfully underlining the drama’s principal themes; that devotion is more important than doctrine, and that rebels with many different causes will gather under the same banner, while the established order will always have a vested interest in stamping them all out. The additions also help make a full-length show out of what has been described as the most expensive short play ever written; it has sixteen named characters and, left to its own devices, lasts less than two hours.
The director does miss one possible trick: Shaw’s preface, far longer than his play, actually contains its own one-act play, a dialogue between Jesus and Pilate; it might have been nice to shoe-horn this in somewhere. On the other hand, the production picks up on a textual hint by letting us hear the condemned captives joyfully singing Onward Christian Soldiers with the words changed to Throw Them to the Lions, someone having furnished some neat new lyrics. These Christians, we are told, are inveterate hymnsingers and we repeatedly get to hear them at it. It doesn’t hurt that most of the cast have been recruited from the company’s musical-theatre wing. That’s another thing to ponder: the great number of actors who can now be confidently cast in both plays and musicals. There’s a master or mistress of ceremonies, rotated among the cast, to guide us through the whole thing.
The interruptions and additions don’t harm the performances; they may even help keep them fresh. It’s certainly a kick to see the actors pick up, after such an intrusion, exactly where they left off, thoughts and feelings intact. I was moved, at one point to tears, by the exchanges between Lavinia, the most cleareyed and idealistic of the prisoners, and the handsome Roman captain who falls for her and tries to convert her. Kyle Blair’s Captain moves adroitly from amused and aloof to passionate and involved; Julia Course’s Lavinia, both mischievous and committed and with a patrician ability to meet her persecutors on or above their own ground, is her best performance to date. She was also. on my visit, a charming MC Michael Therriault manages a fine vocal and physical cringe as Spintho, who takes martyrdom as a licence for bad behaviour, and Jeff Irving is very funny as Ferrovius, the original muscular Christian, only occasionally making him seem too intelligent and calculating for his own good. Among the Romans, Shawn Wright is a square-jawed NCO of a Centurion, while Neil Barclay’s genial Emperor has the firmest grip of all on Shavian paradox, Shavian phrasing, and Shavian wit.
As for the two title characters: The Lion is played three ways. In the prologue he’s recruited from the audience; this, when I saw it, was delightful. In the arena, he’s a shadow puppet: for the play’s climactic encounter, this is disappointingly reductive. At his last appearance, he’s an actor on all fours with a head and little else; this too is disappointing, especially for anyone who may have beheld the polar bear in Stratford’s The Breathing Hole. But Patrick Galligan, an actor who in recent years has grown exponentially in force and versatility, is a delightful Androcles, meekly confident in his own unconventional principles.
Productions like this, performances like these, inspire me to continue writing about and celebrating Canadian theatre and theatre in general. However, my next column will be the last theatre review I shall write for the National Post. If you’d like to keep reading, and I hope that you will, you can stay in touch at robertmcushman@gmail.com.