Androcles is interactive Shaw
Of all the challenges facing the Shaw Festival’s new artistic director Tim Carroll this season, I imagine Shaw himself is the biggest.
The company’s namesake can be a burden. His plays are rarely the main event here any more, and they’re often a cumbersome drag. It’s a dilemma previous artistic director Jackie Maxwell addressed with some success in her later seasons, allowing experimentation and reworking of his later, overwrought works.
Carroll takes it a step further with Androcles and the Lion, to the point Shaw’s play isn’t even the most interesting thing happening on stage. It’s the icing on an offbeat night of theatre in which the cast throws any pretence of a fourth wall out of sight. They’re here to chat up the audience, and even invite them to participate in the show.
If you’re not a fan of interactive theatre and like your plays cut and dry, give this one a pass. It’s like a group of friends work shopping Shaw in your living room.
On the other hand, if you can’t bear the thought of another straight-forward, long-winded George Bernard Shaw play, you are in for a treat.
Minutes before the show begins, the cast — in casual clothes — is mingling with the audience. As themselves, not their characters (if you want to tell Michael Therriault how much you liked him in Me and My Girl, this is your chance). Meanwhile, the stage is exposed to the point I legitimately wondered if they simply hadn’t set it up yet.
All part of the experience, alas. The show begins but the play doesn’t: The cast promises an
open dialogue with the audience all night, and even invites someone in the crowd to come play the Lion. In keeping with the promise no two performances are the same, a different cast member acts as MC each night. Saturday’s opening had the amiable Shawn Wright — so good in recent seasons — putting on “Dollarama” glasses to read from the script while setting the scene. He then explained how four different coloured balls were handed out earlier, which audience members could throw on stage at any time during the performance. Depending on the colour, it would prompt the cast member that picks it up to share a memory, reveal what they’re thinking, sing a song, etc.
A play in which you’re allowed to throw stuff on stage? The mind reels.
“It’s just the way we roll at Shaw Festival, 2017,” said Wright.
How much of this is scripted and how much is genuinely improvised is tough to gauge, but the cast is skilled enough to blur the line.
Shaw’s play, a variation on the story of Androcles (the guy who pulled a thorn out of a lion’s paw), finds a group of Christians waiting to get eaten alive at the Roman Colosseum. It’s almost an afterthought, but — when the cast isn’t interrupted by thrown balls — it does offer some thoughtful debate on Christianity and propaganda.
But it’s mostly a celebration of the Shaw Festival itself — the people, the talent, and the little miracles they put on stage most every night. It’s an unconventional show which sheds new light on the process of theatre here, and those who make it happen.