Reviews in from Stratford. Stratford’s Ideal Husband sustained by solid performances

Perhaps it was novelist Henry James’ own frustrated playwriting ambitions that were jealously at play when he attended a peformance of Oscar Wilde’s  An Ideal Husband more that 120 year ago and delivered an appalled verdict. The ever-fastidious James considered Wilde’s new stage piece “so helpless, so crude, so bad, so clumsy, so feeble, so vulgar” that he couldn’t imagine any audience enjoying it.

To be sure, An Ideal Husband can be problematic because of its tonal challenges. And it’s no match for The Importance of Being Earnest, a work as close to comic perfection as one can get. But it keeps showing up on stage — indeed the Stratford Festival’s new production comes only days after a high-gloss revival in London’s West End opened to rave reviews. And it has long had its champions — perhaps the earliest being George Bernard Shaw who was more partial to it than to the later Earnest and who, unlike James, was never one to confine himself in an aesthetic straitjacket.

There are sound reasons why An Ideal Husband continues to seize an audience’s attention.  One prize asset in Stratford’s new production is the seductive display of villainy provided by actress Bahareh Yaraghi in the role of a resourceful blackmailer named Mrs. Cheveley. A second major virtue of this revival is Brad Hodder’s portrayal of Lord Goring, the cheerfully narcissistic young dandy who orchestrates her downfall. They end up participating in a witty but suspenseful cat and mouse game that leaves you worrying about who is really the mouse.

It’s a long play — almost three hours — and at Stratford the best stuff comes after intermission when the narrative builds up steam and director Lezlie Wade starts reminding us that the text’s volatile mixture of comedy and melodrama is supported by naturalistic underpinnings and moral considerations far removed from frivolity.

Earlier, things have begun rather badly — an upper-class party in which dancing couples seem like stylized (and ultimately bloodless) fixtures in time. Coupled with designer Douglas Paraschuk’s opulently realized vision of a Grosvenor Square mansion, they throw off the musty aura of bad museum theatre.

Then, when Wilde’s dialogue is allowed to begin, we discover that too many people on the Avon Theatre’s crowded stage believe that a Wilde epigram must emerge in calcified form — as a triple-underlined pronouncement whose primary purpose is to draw attention to itself and need have little reference to character.

There’s an ever-present danger in Wilde productions of wrongly equating manner with mannerism, and for a while it seems that this production is succumbing to it. But then some key characters start engaging our interest. There’s rising politician Sir Robert Chilton, played by Tim Campbell as a sturdy wall of a man who begins crumbling thanks to a dark secret from his past. There’s Lady Chilton, a spouse who, in Sophia Walker’s performance, is driven by what threatens to be an irreconcilable combination of love, loyalty, trust and moral probity.

And then there’s Mrs. Cheveley. Take note: she’s the only key character without a title, but the upper classes hold no fear for her — rather they are prey ripe for the plucking.

There’s a brazen self-confidence in Bahareh Yaraghi”s performance, also an insinuating sexuality. When she casually lowers the shoulder straps on one of the outfits supplied her by costume designer Patrick Clark, is she showing her disregard for convention or her contempt for the upper classes whose ranks she penetrates with a sleek, shark-like assurance? Take your pick.

It’s she who shatters the complacency of Sir Robert’s world with an uncompromising demand. Either he use his political influence to involve the government in a questionable financial venture or she will expose him to the world as a corrupt opportunist who once advanced his personal and political fortunes by selling state secrets.

In brief, the lady is a blackmailer — and a thief, a liar, and the most cunning of manipulators. Yaraghi fully understands her entertainment value: there’s a deftly staged moment when Lord Goring, wrongly thinking that he has gained the better of her, discovers too late that she has turned the tables on him and made off with an incriminating letter. But Wilde has also given her some observant lines and witticisms, remarks that deliver some unsettling truths about society. Yaraghi handles these lines with ease and fluidity; she also makes the maddening Mrs. Cheveley a real person. Raw human emotions are clearly at work when it comes to the fierce dislike that she and Lady Chilton have for each other — a dislike rooted in their school days.

Nevertheless, the production doesn’t always keep us oblivious to the play’s length, particularly in the first half when people are striking postures rather than giving performances. Indeed, and it may be sacrilege to say this, An Ideal Husband might benefit from might benefit from even more judicious trimming than it has already received.  For example, there’s an interminable monologue from the garrulous Lady Markby about politics and the social order, and although Marion Adler, a good actress with a fine sense of character, puts everything she has into the sequence, you’re still praying for it to end.

But gradually, because of the strength of specific characterizations, the production finds its footing. And amidst the many moments of high comedy, and melodramatic skullduggery, high moral issues are at stake as well.

The performances of Tim Campbell and Sophia Walker as Lord and Lady Chilton show a once-secure marriage in damage-control mode because of deceit and criminality. Even if Mrs. Cheveley is thwarted, can it be saved? And if stability returns to the marriage, can Lord Chilton’s career be saved? Is compromise possible given the morally uncompromising nature of Lady Chilton judgment on his past behavior?  The conflicts defined so beautifully in Sophia Walker’s characterization also point to the irony in the play’s title.

There’s also irony that it’s young Lord Goring, the dandified fop who does more than just save the day. Brad Hodder may delight us with the ease with which he tosses off some of Wilde’s choicest epigrams, always ensuring that they are a natural product of character, or with his preening and posturing. But Hodder ensures that this young aristo, so ludicrously anxious about his appearance as he examines himself in the mirror, is also the play’s unexpected moral centre as he awakens out of his indolence to come to the aid of a friend. He is, beneath the foppery and frippery, a good and decent man, a repository of common sense, and a believer in the grace of forgiveness.

Hodder brings all this out with memorable deftness and lightness of touch. The role can in some productions become something of a solo turn — but not here. The way his Lord Goring engages with other characters is a delight in itself — no more so than in those scenes with his much-put-upon father, played here with crusty exasperation by a terrific Joseph Ziegler.

 

(An Ideal Husband Continues until Oct. 28. Further information at STRATFORD FESTIVAL.CA or 1 800 567 1600)