Marriage and Men tests vows and patience
The laughs come early on before petering out in the usual Shaw way
OF MARRIAGE AND MEN, by Bernard Shaw. Starring Martin Happer, Fiona Byrne and Krystal Kiran. Directed by Philip Akin. At the Royal George Theatre until Sept. 2. **1/2 (out of five)
Every so often, the Shaw Festival offers a glowing example of the dilemma they face with their namesake.
“Of Marriage and Men” is comprised of two one-act comedies which were first paired together in New York in 1904. The first, “How He Lied to Her Husband,’ is a quick 30-minute romp in which Shaw makes his point quick and quick-witted. The second, “The Man of Destiny,” is only about an hour long but feels much longer … as Shaw’s most tedious plays tend to do.
Everything that makes Shaw the playwright so exhilarating and exhausting is contained within. His clever reversal of expectations, followed by long-winded rants that bring everything to a standstill. Engaging characters followed by unbearable bores. It’s Bernard Shaw – the great and grating – instilled into a two-hour double-feature.
Viewed side by side, as offered by director Philip Akin, the two plays are linked by married men making rash decisions in response to the women manipulating them.
In the matter of “How He Lied to Her Husband,” Shawn Ahmed is a young man smitten with the beautiful wife (Krystal Kiran) of a gruff, older man (David Adams). When a bunch of love letters he wrote to her go missing, they assume the husband’s sister is the culprit.
He prepares for the worst, concocting a wildly far-fetched story to explain the letters, even though he just wants to drop a truth bomb and run away with her. But the husband throws him a strange curve –— if he didn’t write the letters about his wife, does that mean he finds her unattractive? That’s an even worse insult.
Cue some clever laughs, a tidy ending, and curtain before it gets too silly.
The night’s funniest moment occurs after intermission when the same cast repeats the first show’s ending, and is then pushed off the stage by the cast of the second show. It’s a clever segue and raises hopes “The Man of Destiny” will continue the festivities.
Shaw has other ideas.
Kelly Wong stars as Napoleon Bonaparte, chilling at an inn shortly after the Battle of Lodi. His good mood is ruined when a lieutenant (Andrew Lawrie) arrives to tell him he was tricked into giving away the dispatches he was carrying. That’s when a mysterious woman at the inn (Fiona Byrne) informs them the messages were stolen by her brother. Who looks, and sounds, a lot like her.
Napoleon isn’t fooled and demands she hands the goods over. But a battle of wits ensues when she informs him one of the dispatches is a letter revealing Napoleon’s wife is having an affair.
It gets more convoluted from there, and certainly more tiresome as Shaw crams in his usual sermonizing on the English, on women, on warfare, and whatever else fits on the soapbox. It’ll wear you down long before it’s over, and the fact the show gets gradually darker to convey nightfall won’t help with the drooping eyelids.
The other misstep is a Napoleon played like a bratty slacker by Wong, who used the same approach as Pierre Trudeau in last season’s political comedy 1979 to better laughs. Here, he’s like a military leader whose closest experience with war is a Call of Duty game.
The laughs come early in “Of Marriage and Men” before petering out in the usual Bernard Shaw way. It’s unfortunate the funny half is the much shorter of the two.