Dearly beloved, Getting Married is a drag
It’s a given that George Bernard Shaw’s best plays will resonate forever. It’s stuff like “Getting Married” that’s the problem.
Because the Niagara-on-the-Lake theatre that bears his name can’t do “Pygmalion” or “The Philanderer” every season, it has to give undeserving attention to his lesser works.
And everything about “Getting Married” is lesser Shaw, from its unrelatable characters to its flimsy story that only serves to let him vent.
Actually, ‘story’ is pushing it. There is none. It’s just a gathering of blowhards who loudly announce their stance on marriage, then spend two-and-a-half exhausting hours debating each other.
These aren’t characters, they’re exclamation points. As one flustered lady at intermission summed it up outside the Royal George Theatre last Thursday night, it’s all a bunch of “gobbledy-gook.”
Sound like fun? These second-tier Shaw shows rarely are, to the point where I wonder how a modern audience is supposed to react to them. They can be dressed up, tinkered with and finessed to a certain point, but there’s still that endless, droning dialogue to deal with.
If you think it isn’t a problem for this festival, consider that it used to do at least three Bernard Shaw plays per season. It’s now down to two, and the only one in the main Festival Theatre — “Man and Superman, with Don Juan in Hell” — will only have 17 performances late in the season.
Directed by Tanja Jacob, this year’s crack at “Getting Married” wastes little time in getting very tiresome.
On the day of her wedding, a bishop’s daughter (Katherine Gauthier) panics while reading a pamphlet called ‘Do You Know What You Are Going To Do? By a Woman Who Has Done It.’ Her future hubby (Cameron Grant) is also doing some reading, and is having doubts as to whether holy matrimony is all that.
Cue the floodgates for family members to go on — and on — about the need for marriage, and the bigger need for divorce (still taboo when the play premièred in 1908).
There’s the socialite (Monice Peter) who believes it’s her right to have two husbands. There’s the general (Martin Happer) depressed at being 50 with no wife. (“Somebody must marry the plain, honest, stupid fellows.”) He’s continually proposing to the chilly Lesbia (Claire Jullien), who believes for every child she has, the man must leave for two years. Also: “I must have my own separate house.”
The bishop (Graeme Somerville) believes you don’t have to understand marriage for it to make your life better, but to appease everyone he orders his chaplain (Andrew Lawrie) to draft up a radical new marriage contract. No one can agree on what it should be.
By the time the town mayoress (Marla McLean) strolls in and appears to have a God-like vision on the ‘meaning of it all,’ you’ll want to divorce yourself from this play.
There is one great concept to come out of all this yakking, however — that marriage should have term limits. If everything’s great, you just renew.
It’s such a sensible concept, you’ll wish it wasn’t buried in such a taxing play.
Adding to the fatigue, weak links in the cast disrupt the rhythm. When everyone is locked in, a social Shaw comedy like this feels like a symphony — but this one is just disjointed and draining.
Theatregoers may want a pre-nup.