Arms and the Man : Massingham’s exciting and disconcerting production is a mixture of performance styles that shows something is changing in Strathcona Park!

Photo, courtesy of Odyssey Theatre.

George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man (first staged in 1894) is a parody of war, with certain character “types” you might find in the Commedia, while the title is taken from  the opening sentence of Virgil’s Aeneid, glorifying the heroic feats of war: I sing of arms and the man”. This decidedly mischievous Shavian spin on the Balkan Wars could justify director Andy Massingham’s attempt to locate this play in a tradition of masked popular theatre.

However, the challenge for a director is daunting because the situations are complex and the characters do not necessarily correspond to the types that one would expect from masked Commedia performance . Still, it turns out rather well, because Andy has the company thrusting ahead with a lot of energy and they get to the essence of this comedy by moving from silly histrionics, comic mime, to deep-seated and biting satire, spewing out what appears to be a contemporary take on current politics, on human foibles and war heroics that no longer have any place in our society.

The play is set off by the simple-minded Raina Petkoff’s chance encounter with Brunschli, (Attila Clemann) a professional Swiss soldier fighting on the side of the enemy Serbians, who enters into her fantasy world of military heroes by climbing in through the window . He pleads with her not to denounce him to her Bulgarian countrymen who are looking for him. He is the last surviving Serbian enemy swine who must be captured as the war comes to an end in favour of the Bulgarians.

Raina (Philippa Leslie) , pining for her fiancé Major Sergius (Dylan George), floats about in a balletic trance acting like something out of the Tales of Hoffmann, feeds this upstart intruder chocolate creams and hides him in her boudoir so he won’t be captured. Quickly, their discussion sets the stage for a play that shows how in fact the barbarians appear on both sides of the battle, and no matter who appears to win, they all look ridiculous, pompous, overinflated and incompetent. In fact, Brunschli destroys Raina’s dreams by revealing that her fiancé, Major Sergius is a coward, and certainly not the Great War hero she believed he was .

Nothing is simple here – even the apparently simple Raina switches moods at one point showing us that her silliness is a conscious act. This wonderful moment that explodes appearances, foregrounds the parody and shows us how this play works at so many levels.

Although it got off to a rather slow start in the first act, it tightened up, it gained energy and by the second part of the evening, the group choreography was working full throttle. It was clear that Massingham and his team of actors were enjoying themselves immensely and the joy was contagious.

However, it was also clear that in spite of the great talent of most of these actors, it is a performance that hinges essentially on the work of the director. The play poses many obstacles to the physical theatre that Massingham wanted to emphasize and the result brought to the foreground the experimental nature of what the director was trying to do. This show is clearly not a “finished” work. You can see he is trying out various solutions to different acting problems created by a script that is long and wordy and does not always lend itself to corporeal theatre. Its Shaw’s fault, not the fault of the production company ,and I kept wondering why they even chose this play. However, it became interesting to see how Massingham dealt with these challenges while trying to maintain his goal of corporeal and masked performance.

Odyssey, at the outset, the site of Commedia dell’arte in Ottawa , shows us that with Arms and the Man times have changed. What Massingham’s work brings us into is a period of transition and it is clear that Commedia is on the way out. Nor is this the kind of performance you would expect of a Shaw play. It is Massingham’s reading of the play through his own experiences with various forms of corporeal , and masked theatre which includes dance, mime as well as heightened realism all mixed together to create something that Massingham has not yet defined.

There is a constant sense of rupture , of lack of continuity among the acting styles which gives one the feeling that each stage type, each character and each actor (because the differences are also emphasized) belongs in a different play. That is the best way to describe what we see.

Pierre Brault did a most perfect sample of the Commedia type as the servant Nicola with his twitching eyes, he face coming to life under that mask, his fancy foot work, his beautiful body language and voice work. He was the only one in the show who gave us moments of true commedia, and he was a pleasure to watch. There was also Doreen Taylor-Claxton as Catherine the mother , who allowed herself to be inhabited by a mask and who did not try anything remotely Commedia but she assumed masked poses that showed she was acting with her mask, not against it. She appeared to be dominated by a living mask that manipulated her movements.

Attila Clemann as the charmingly mischievous, unmasked Chocolate Soldier and crack professional Swiss fighter in the Serbian army, was a marvellous actor who mimed the beautiful moment as he tries not to fall asleep in the boudoir . However, his performance was essentially realistic because with a face that was barely made up, he focussed his acting on facial expressions, and psychological inner twists , thus contradicting the meaning of masked performance. This is an exciting actor who clearly creates his own personal ambiance on stage, but since his character demanded that , it worked very well, even though it seemed to contradict the corporeal work that the director was hoping to achieve with the group.

This character was one of the traps in the play that Massingham had to deal with but he slid around it the best way he could, especially when he transformed Brunschli’s long spoken monologue about not going to sleep, into Clemann’s long tortured mime where he tries not to collapse with fatigue into Raina’s bed. The actor stumbles around the stage trying to keep his eyes open showing us he is dying to drop and he does it without speaking a single word. The compromise body/text worked perfectly.

A lot more mixing was obvious. Louka the sexy servant played by Claire Armstrong high- lighted the performance of a perfect tart from something akin to the heightened realism of a French Farce. She has the undivided attention of the libidinous Major Sergius, supposedly the faithful fiancé of Raina. Louka on the other hand, flirts and taunts her lover but Louka also leads on Nicola who thinks she is his fiancée. Louka sets up a whole chain of deceit that gives the face-painted masks of certain actors a new meaning, more closely linked with hidden identities, false lives and complex relationships based on wrong assumptions that are the food of psychological comedies and not corporeal acting. Wonderful fun but difficult challenges for a staging that tries to foreground the body and not the spoken word. It became obvious that the show needed this stylistic mix to perform these intriguingly hybrid creatures set up by the author of Arms and the Man. Shaw was therefore both the culprit and the inspiration that propelled Massingham into a new stage relationship with his mixed group of actors whose work is just as exciting as it is disconcerting .

We are in fact watching a theatrical process in the making, a directing project propelled by elements that don’t usually fit together and it is very stimulating, fun and lighthearted, as long as you are open to the premise of the evening that this is neither Commedia nor Shaw..It’s all about Massingham trying to find a gutsy new stage language that challenges two of the pillars of Western theatre.

Sznezana Pesic’s nearly abstract but beautifully functional set in light airy colours, creates abstract space that transforms itself with a little help from the cast, into any space one could imagine. Alex Amini’s costumes tell us much about the characters and the masks suggest commedia characters without being too explicit. It all hinges on fluctuating stylistic clues that take us anywhere we wanted to go. No doubt that we will certainly want to see what this director comes up with next time. In the meantime, go, enjoy and bring anti mosquito spray! I’m sure that in spite of the naughty stuff, spoken in Shaw’s bubbly language by the way, even children 10 and up would have fun with this one.

Arms and the Man plays in Strathcona Park until August 25

By George Bernard Shaw, adapted by Andy Massingham

Set design by Snezana Pesic.

Mask design by Almut Ellinghaus

Costumes by Alex Amini

Lighting by Ron Ward.

Cast:

Raina Philippa Leslie

Catherine Petkoff Doreen Taylor-Claxton

Bluntshli, (the chocolate soldier) Attila Clemann

Nicola Pierre Brault

Major Paul Petkoff David Warburton

Major Sergius Dylan George

Call the Odyssey box office or write to them to find out hours of performance.

Note that they are also featuring matinees and presentations of the Rag and Bone Puppet theatre’s production zoom at Sea for younger children, also in the park.

boxoffice@odysseytheatre.ca or call 613-232-8407