An iconoclastic take on Shaw
Even the playwright might applaud Odyssey Theatre’s version of Arms and the Man
Did George Bernard Shaw ever envision Arms and the Man staged like this? Seizing on the themes of duplicity, self-deception, and confusion of fantasy and reality that underpin Shaw’s biting comedy about love, war and class, director Andy Massingham has given the show a telling Commedia dell’arte twist.
Actors appear in mask or with faces richly painted, many of their costumes big and bright. Characters — at least the worst dissemblers or the most deceived among them — move with exaggerated physicality. And those characters break down into servants, masters and lovers, which is how Shaw wrote the play but is also the classic structure of Commedia.
What Shaw may have envisioned is, in the end, idle speculation. What’s not speculation is that this production — funny, fast and furiously satiric — works.
Massingham and his well-oiled cast give us a coherent, credible staging of a play about a bunch of fractured, hyper-real people. It’s rounded out by strong design including Almut Ellinghaus’ masks and Snezana Pesic’s set that blends straight lines and curved as the play and production blend the skewering of foolishness, humanity, and unexpected juxtapositions.
First performed in 1894 and still among Shaw’s most produced works, Arms and the Man is set in the brief Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885.
It’s not so much an antiwar play as one that pillories the idealization of war along with the romanticizing of love and the British class system.
In this production, Philippa Leslie, an actor blessed with superb comic timing, playfully depicts the young, upper-class and strikingly feisty Raina Petkoff.
Flitting about the stage like an attention-challenged moth, Raina strikes poses — back of the hand to the forehead like the ingenue she’s not — as readily as she breathes, foretelling the bitter words of another character spoken later in the play about “This impostor of a world.”
She imagines love and war to be romantic, thanks in no small part to the chauvinistic braggadocio of her soldier fiancé Sergius (Dylan George, who uses his height to offset his character’s diminutive morality) and her father Paul Petkoff (David Warburton), a bombastic but limpwilled major in the Bulgarian army.
Says her father of Raina at one point: “She’s dreaming, as usual.” She is, of course, but his words remind us of how adept these folks are, at least initially, at spotting others’ weaknesses without admitting to their own.
The applecart of idealized war and marriage is overturned when Captain Bluntschli appears on the scene. Played in unpretentious fashion by Attila Clemann, who had some trouble with his lines on opening night, Bluntschli is a Swiss mercenary who fought against the Bulgarians but whose apparent model for bravery is the Wizard of Oz’s Cowardly Lion.
He and Raina are an inevitable match, especially after Sergius puts the moves on Louka, the Petkoffs’ knowing and ambitious servant played by Claire Armstrong.
Also in the mix, Raina’s anxiously status-conscious mother Catherine (Doreen Taylor-Claxton) and the family’s male servant Nicola (Pierre Brault, maximizing the comic potential of the minor role without ever intruding on the main actors).
Strong in concept and overall execution, the production includes small, memorable moments. Clemann briefly channels Charlie Chaplin when his character Bluntschli, exhausted by the rigours of war, does his best not to fall asleep. There’s also a terrific bit of action involving Raina, Sergius and a tree next to the stage in Strathcona Park.
There are some moments that don’t work including the badly executed military drumming that introduces the show.
One suspects that Massingham was correct when he said, in a preshow interview, that were Shaw to see the show, “he might be doing cartwheels in his grave … he was just enough of an iconoclast to think it’s good.”
Worth noting about this production: an extra $25 per person buys you a pre-performance picnic dinner for two from Le Cordon Bleu on Laurier Avenue across from the park.
My guest and I ate our picnic — marinated chicken, grilled vegetables, baguette and more — in the park. The light summer fare was delicious. Two tips: pick up your picnic between 6:30 and 7 so you have enough time afterward for a stroll through the park which borders the Rideau River. And bring a napkin: the ones provided are too small.
Also this year: to beat the heat, matinee performances are in the University of Ottawa’s air-conditioned Academic Hall. Arms and the Man continues until Aug. 25. Tickets/information: 613232-8407, odysseytheatre.ca.