We saw The Sea at Shaw’s one flaw, but do see Shaw’s The Sea.
A masterful take on The Sea and a mirthful production of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur at Niagara-on-the-Lake
Edward Bond’s The Sea is a great play up until its final scene. First staged in London in 1973, and more frequently revived than any of its author’s other works, it’s set in a British coastal village a few years before the First World War. It starts with a storm and a drowning; a young man, sailing home to get married, perishes, while his surviving friend and companion pleads in vain for help from the coast guard on duty, a man named Hatch who has his mind on other things.
More precisely, he has his own take on the situation. He’s convinced that the world is being taken over by hostile forces from outer space (he seems, as fantasists go, to be ahead of his time) and that the drowned man is one of them in disguise. His paranoia, which reaches impressively hysterical heights, may partly be a reaction to the humiliations he suffers in his day job as a draper.
His principal oppressor is a Mrs. Rafi, the richest woman in town, a town she rules with an iron fist that she barely bothers to conceal in a velvet glove. Her habit of returning goods that fail to meet her standards has already driven Hatch to the twin verges of desperation and bankruptcy; she pushes him right over by refusing to accept an especially grand set of blue velvet curtains. His response is to pick up a pair of shears and start maniacally cutting them up into the ordered lengths. Even his own friends and employees — young men who have bought into his extraterrestrial theories — are appalled.
Mrs. Rafi represents privilege, and Hatch shows what privilege can do to those who don’t have it. That’s one way of looking at it, and one that Bond the ideologue would probably endorse. Bond the playwright might see it differently, or at least more sympathetically. For him they could be two dynamic people, trapped in a constricting society.
They are certainly both major creations, and in the Shaw Festival’s production they get major performances. Patrick Galligan, having taken a huge leap forward in this season’s When We Are Married, takes a further one as Hatch, eaten up with passion misdirected and misshapen, defiant even when cringing. Not being required to play the gentleman has released something in him; he’s revealed as an active actor too often cast in passive roles.
For Fiona Reid, Mrs. Rafi is less of a stretch; she may actually overdo the imperiousness of this particular society dragon. But she’s unbeatable when it comes to the high comedy of the role, especially when putting the more subservient ladies of her circle through a rehearsal of their annual dramatic pageant, in aid of (naturally) the lifeboat fund. Her particular butt is her paid companion (Patty Jamieson, timidly resentful and, in one extended sequence, hilariously musical) whom she deathlessly instructs to “stop trying to sound like a woman with an interesting past.” Even better, one of the great speeches in modern drama flawlessly realized, her vision of her future self as an old woman in
Tragedy or comedy or something between, this is a play that operates on a near-Shakespearean level
a wheelchair on whom her previous victims will be able to take what she admits to be a justified revenge.
The chatelaine, the draper and the play all reach their peaks in a brilliantly grotesque funeral scene (Neil Barclay a very funny vicar) in which the drowned man’s ashes end up scattered in unexpected places. This is the play’s climax, but not its finale. That is given over to a moralistic discussion between three characters of whom we know very little.
One of them, given a pleasingly positive performance by Wade Bogert-O’Brien, is an outsider, the dead man’s friend and entitled to be mysterious. Another, the bereaved fiancée, is a shadowy figure whom Julia Course cannot bring to life. The third is a beachcombing recluse who speaks for the author in deploring the state of the world of which this community is a microcosm; Peter Millard gives him lucidity but not the prophetic fervour that he needs. He, like Mrs. Rafi earlier, advises the two high-born young people to go off together, which they do: a surprisingly traditional comedy ending, though perhaps appropriate in a play whose verdict on society’s view of tragedy that “they’ll make a law against it.” Tragedy or comedy or something between, this is a play that operates, in scope and language, on a near-Shakespearean level. Eda Holmes’ production, with its impressionistic evocations of sea and storm, certainly makes the case.
Tennessee Williams’ late one-act A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, is wonderful: the Shaw’s best lunch time show since The President. It has the same director, Blair Williams, who again mines every moment for its full potential, while never slackening pace or losing balance.
In The President the mode was satirical farce; here it’s tragi-farce. Dorothea, a fading southern belle, now a teacher, waits one Sunday morning for a phone call from the principal with whom she’s had a fling and on whom she counts to take her away from all this. Meantime she does her exercises, and spars with her roommate Bodey, who wants Dorothea to marry her beer-swilling brother (Bodey`s family is of Germanic descent) and has planned a seaside outing to that end.
Dorothea is Blanche DuBois, transferred from New Orleans to the playwright’s own St. Louis, with a mere third of Blanche’s playing-time, which may well be preferable. Blanche too was a teacher, and this play has much talk of streetcars, which this time also fulfil a vital plot-function.
As Dorothea, Deborah Hay is miraculous, combining boldness of gesture (her ladylike keep-fit routine is a hoot) with delicacy of feeling; Kate Hennig brings the same qualities, in a gruffer key, to Bodey, both protective and scheming. Kaylee Harwood is effective, if too emphatically unpleasant, as a genteel visitor who arrives to burst everybod’s bubble, to and of whom Bodey tartly remarks “you can’t catch heartbreak if you don`t have a heart to break.” Heartbreak is what Creve Coeur means; it’s also the beach resort at which Bodey hopes questions will be popped. The play’s living embodiment of heartbreak is the lady upstairs, a non-English speaker who has lost her mother, and over whom Julain Molnar makes us both laugh and cry ourselves. At the end Dorothea, acknowledging their kinship, tells her, “Tears are a release — but they enflame your eyes.” You have to agree, though for the audience many of the tears are of delight.