Shaw Festival with Jamie Portman: Lady Windermere’s Fan offers Shaw Festival’s most visually stunning production

By Jamie Portman | June 20, 2013

Postmedia News June 13, 2013

The late-Victorian world of Oscar Wilde gets a dazzling rebirth. An award-winning Calgary playwright brings Hitler and Mussolini to the bar of justice. And the dust is blown off two forgotten playlets by major American dramatists.

In brief, the Shaw Festival’s fondness for the eclectic is in full bloom in its latest round of openings.

Most gloriously, director Peter Hinton, until recently head of English Theatre at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, has come up with an exquisitely realized production of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan.

On the surface, Wilde’s 1892 success might seem no more than his own characteristically witty take on the eternal triangle.

But as the young, beautiful and strait-laced Lady Windermere be-comes convinced that her husband is having an affair with the mysterious Mrs. Erlynne, it becomes clear that Hinton is seeking something more substantial.

Hinton senses irony in Wilde’s subtitle to this piece, A Play about a Good Woman. But who, truly, is the "good" one here? Is it Lady Windermere who is so offended by her husband’s relationship with an older woman that she contemplates leaving him? Or is it the enigmatic Mrs. Erlynne?

Beyond the witty exchanges and the barbed aphorisms, we have Wilde’s abiding fascination with secrets and lies, with the hypocrisies that keep this society afloat. But under Hinton, the play also becomes a seductive tone poem, with its central mystery assuming something of a noirish aspect.

This may well be the most visually beautiful production ever mounted at the Shaw. Those moments when the blackness of the Festival Theatre stage opens to reveal small windows of late-Victorian London society are breathtaking.

Then comes the full awesome impact of Teresa Przbylski’s set designs – for example the monochromatic austerity of Lord Windermere’s study and later the impressionistic splashes of colour that dominate a brilliantly staged ballroom scene.

Complimenting the production’s period homages to such artists of the day as Sargent, Whistler and Degas, we have William Schmuck’s superb costumes and Louise Guinand’s subtle, evocative lighting.

The title role of Lady Windermere is a tricky one, given that it’s the other characters that mainly get the scene-stealing opportunities. But Marla McLean brings sympathy and vulnerability to her performance.

Martin Happer is persuasive as her embattled husband, and Tara Rosling brings defiant but lustrous presence to the role of Mrs. Erlynne.

Over at the Court House Theatre, a further, albeit more modest, display of attractive visuals has been supplied by designer Camellia Koo as backdrop to the shenanigans that erupt in the world premiere of Calgary playwright John Murrell’s political romp, Peace in our Time.

This is Murrell’s zestful reworking of one of Bernard Shaw’s most troublesome plays, the 1938 Geneva, which climaxed with three notorious dictators – clearly based on Italy’s Mussolini, Germany’s Hitler and Spain’s Franco – appearing before a League of Nations tribunal.

Shaw kept updating and revising Geneva until he was in his 90s, thanks to changing world conditions. It could be argued that Murrell has merely maintained the precedent, but in the process this award-winning playwright also reminds us how good he can be with comedy.

Yet, Murrell remains faithful to Shaw’s concerns over failure of world government – in this instance, the loftily named International Committee for Intellectual Co-operation of The League of Nations – to maintain the peace.

Indeed, given the growing impotence of today’s UN, both Geneva and its successor seem remarkably prescient works – also sobering ones despite the comic buffoonery that enlivens Blair Williams’ production.

The barrel-shaped Il Duce of Neil Barclay is a brawling egotist who invites caricature. The scowling bundle of neuroses that constitutes Ric Reid’s portrayal of Der Fuhrer is equally the stuff of comedy but also, we learn, of nightmare.

The scene in which Hitler and a persecuted Jew, played with droll but sad persuasiveness by Charlie Gallant, confront each other is a compelling high point, thanks to Murrell’s thoughtful reworking of a sequence once considered anti-Semitic in some quarters, and to the accomplished work of two fine actors……..

Lady Windermere’s Fan continues to Oct. 19, and Peace In Our Time and Trifles to Oct. 12. Information at 1-800-511-SHAW or shawfest.com.