A riotous comedy about uncoupling
When We Are Married
(out of 4) By J.B. Priestley. Directed by Joseph Ziegler. Until Oct. 26 at the Royal George Theatre. 1-800-511-SHAW
RICHARD OUZOUNIAN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONT.— When We Are Married, which opened at the Shaw Festival on Friday night, is one of those British comedies which make you roar with laughter and chuckle with recognition even though you know part of your brain is telling you it’s a bit on the coarse side and certainly politically incorrect in places by today’s standards.
But thanks to a beautiful-looking production (set: Ken MacDonald; costumes: Sue LePage; lighting: Louise Guinand), staged with warmth and wit by Joseph Ziegler (with a nice assist from Marek Norman’s original score) and acted by a perfect cast, you really just sit back and smile, maybe closing your eyes at some of the rougher spots.
We’re in Yorkshire, with that amusing accent which sounds like everyone has steak and kidney pie in their mouths while they’re talking.
Three pillars of the community and their wives are meeting for dinner to celebrate the night 25 years ago when they all got married at the same time.
In one of the marriages, the man is a bully and the woman subservient. In the second, the woman rules the roost and the man is almost invisible. In the third, it’s a Mexican (or maybe, in this case, a Midlands) standoff.
Each of these scenarios has fuelled British comedy for years, but putting them all onstage at the same time is just one of the strokes of genius of author J.B. Priestley.
He gives us just enough time to pick out heroes and villains before he drops his bomb.
Through a series of revelations (OK, things get a bit creaky here), we discover that the clergyman who supposedly married our trio 25 years ago was new at his job and didn’t register everything properly, so they’re not really married. Please don’t tell me that needed a spoiler alert, because that’s where the fun begins as we watch everyone scrambling, regrouping and wondering how to live their lives now that they’ve been given a second chance. It’s wonderful to see who rises up and who falls in the mud. Patrick Galligan is superb as the beleaguered spouse who finally stands up to his battle-axe of a wife, Kate Hennig. And while Hennig is classily brilliant, as always, I was still made a bit uncomfortable by the scene in which she smacks Galligan in the face and he smacks her right back. It’s supposed to be funny, but is it, really? We’re on much safer ground where bumptious Thom Marriott suddenly discovers his seemingly docile wife, Claire Jullien, has a tiger in her tank and is ready to turn the guns on her assailant. And then there’s the bittersweet one, with Patrick McManus, as hatefully Uriah Heepish as you could imagine, being taken down a peg or three by the quietly emerging dignity of wife Catherine McGregor. Peter Krantz and Mary Haney provide the broad, low comic humour that was too broad and too low for my taste, but I adored a young actress named Jennifer Dzialoszynski who made a quirky 15-year-old scullery maid fresh and funny. There are lots of other minor characters, too many in fact, like in Kaufman and Hart’s days: a relic from a time when salaries where cheap. But Kate Besworth stands out as a decorative ingenue and Charlie Gallant scores as the cheeky choirmaster who sets the whole thing rolling. You will laugh a great deal at When We Are Married, since it’s a lot of fun. But I couldn’t help feeling we would have laughed even more if director Ziegler had encouraged some of his cast members to do a little less.