Shaw & Co.

By T.E.K

An ambitious festival

Ontario's Niagara-on-the-Lake Shaw Festival is opening with an international flourish, offering not only Shaw but also Chekhov and French Farceur Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear. Herewith, an account of the first two:

THE CHERRY ORCHARD by Anton Chekhov

This revival is marked by calculated risk that failed. All events in the play are shadowed by the auctioning off of Mme. Ranevsky's ancestral estate and its purchase by the businessman, Lopakhin. The old aristocracy is being toppled by the rising mercantile class.

The first and gravest risk is to make little more than a sofa, a bookcase and a child's rocking horse serve as a house and have no hint of the cherry orchard. Like his disciple Andrei Serban, Rumanian Director Radu Penciulescu has placed his characters in a lunar landscape that no one could either cherish or grieve to lose.

Both as a directorial conception and as a casting decision, having Terence Kelly play Lopakhin is a mistake. Urbane, almost unctuous, he seems like an insurance man offering Mme. Ranevsky a real estate policy of cutting down the trees for a housing development. There should be a hush surrounding the regal presence of Mme. Ranevsky when she sweeps into a room. Carole Shelley resembles a '40s movie starlet posturing to capture a producer's eye. All this merely taps the defects in this production. Chekhov preached that the salvation of Russia lay in work. The Shaw Festival might take that to heart.

MISALLIANCE by Bernard Shaw

In the plays of G.B.S., talk is the moral equivalent of war. Shaw's weapons are lancing wit and blazing rhetoric. He wages a holy war against middle-class hypocrisy, capitalistic exploitation, the ser vile status of women and humbug in all forms. In Misalliance Shaw argues that the time (1909) has come to blow up the family. In his view it is a web of contractual coercion masquerading as love and care.

The country home of the Tarleton clan seems demolition-proof. John Tarleton (Sandy Webster), self-made head of Tarleton's Underwear, is a man of irrepressible elan vital to whom skeptic thought is the champagne of the mind.

Tarleton's daughter Hypatia (Deborah Kipp) is so restless under the inane constraints imposed on a gentlewoman that she has become engaged to a man who is a shrill teakettle of immaturity. When a handsome aviator (Geraint-Wyn Davies) and his Polish acrobat passenger (Carole Shelley) enter the Tarleton drawing room after their plane crashes into the greenhouse, verbal gunfire begins to crackle all along Shaw's battlefront.

This is an uneven production. The high spot is Webster's Tarleton, a figure of dynamic animal magnetism and a dauntless fox hunter of ideas. Drawn to the aviator, Kipp's Hypatia is more coquette than carnivore in her pursuit.While the clever flow of the Shavian line defies damming. Director Christopher Newton permits intellectual comedy to be diverted into farce. No matter how funny Shaw may be, his truest punch line is moral passion. -- T.E.K

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