The Shaw Festival struggles to come to terms with a vintage anti-war play.

 

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. —  Peter Hinton is a director who has long thrived on risk-taking. Indeed, he would probably tell you that the right to take risks is a necessary component of meaningful artistic activity.

Along with that component comes another necessity — the freedom to fail. There are times when Hinton, the former head of English theatre at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, has failed spectacularly, but there have also been visionary achievements — a startling Way Of The World at NAC, a visually sumptuous Lady Windermere’s Fan and a controversial but rewarding Cabaret at the Shaw.

Hinton is also prepared to take on projects that can be fraught with pitfalls. At Stratford, he was willing to tackle the challenge of transferring the poetry of Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s Odyssey  to the stage. That challenge proved formidable, perhaps unresolvable, but Hinton’s restless, inquiring mind nonetheless brought off some fine moments.

This year, at the Shaw Festival, he has accepted another ambush-laden project. Oh What A Lovely War had an explosive impact when it landed in London in 1963. It was panoramic in scope yet it adopted the jaunty framework of the music hall to deliver a scalding indictment of the follies that led to the tragedy of the First World War. The show was brilliant polemic, an assault on a ruling class that had blithely dispatched millions to the fields of slaughter —  and its theatrical weaponry was drawn from the actual words, popular music and events that characterized those terrible four years.

So we get the misuse of patriotism and the preposterous braying of the generals  who considered that because God was an Englishman, victory against the enemy was a divinely ordained certainty. But of course victory didn’t come that easily, and if the impact of Oh What A Lovely War is tragi-comic, that’s how things really were a century ago on the battlefields of Europe. Surely this conflict was some sort of ghastly cosmic joke.

It’s now more than 50 years since Oh What A Lovely War premiered, and it may not be that easy to understand the initial effect of this sprawling, angry and often lethally funny show on a public still prepared to cocoon itself in the mythology of patriotism and sacrifice and still reluctant to accept the very real distinction between 1939-1945, a genuinely just war, and the insanity of 1914-1918.

But can even as resourceful director as Peter Hinton and an excellent cast succeed in evoking that impact today? Well they do try — not always successfully — but the end result is sufficient  to make this production a worthwhile entry in the Shaw’s 2018 season.

It was clear the other afternoon than many audience members had been left moved and shaken by what they had seen. One aging veteran sitting near me struggled painfully to his feet at the end to give the performance the standing ovation he felt it deserved — and he had lots of company. Audiences arriving at the Shaw Festival’s Royal George Theatre start getting the message immediately. As was the case in London 55 years ago, the statistics of death are reeled out for our edification, climbing well into the millions by the time the performance ends.

However, the impact of this production is at best fragmentary. The show’s full potential is not realized at Niagara,  But we can still applaud those sterlingly executed individual moments that keep reminding us of that potential. Among them:

— Those sexually insinuating female recruiters with their double-entendre musical message offering uplift for the boys headed for the battlefields: “On Saturday I’m willing, if you’ll only take the shilling, to make a man of any one of you.”

— The hilarious contribution of  Jeff Irving as a snarling and totally incomprehensible parade-ground sergeant putting his hapless charges through their paces — and later in his lethal incarnation of Field Marshal Douglas Haig who is mercilessly lampooned in this show and emerges as its primary villain.

— The humour and warmth that cast members bring to that legendary Christmas truce when both British and German soldiers leave their trenches and exchange simple gifts in a snowy No Man’s Land.

— The ingratiating yet ironic presence of Allan Louis as a top-hatted M.C. He’s there to chat to the audience and draw us into the world of this show. But beware: his rendition of There’s A Long Long Trail A’winding does not allow us an easy retreat into nostalgia — not when it’s juxtaposed with the stark back projections that are a constant presence during the performance.

— The use of familiar songs from the era as conduits into horror: the sweet sentimentality of Roses Of Picardy and Keep The Home Fires Burning can offer only passing release in an “entertainment” that also includes numbers like I Don’t Want To Be A Soldier, The Bells of Hell and Gassed Last Night.

The ensemble skills of the festival acting company are put to the test here, and the production benefits from the reassuring presence of such trusted reliables as Jeff Irving, James Daly, Alan Louis, Ryan Cunningham and Jenny L Wright. Musical director Paul Sportelli and his band provide exemplary support, and designer Teresa Przybylski achieves astonishing results with a brigade of upright pianos with the flexibility to conjure up the Cavalry in our imagination at one point and the trenches at another.

Yet the production is more successful in providing certain, vividly-realized moments than in delivering a cohesive, rhythmically confident whole. The sum is lesser than the parts. Why doesn’t it hang together?

Festival artistic director Tim Carroll wanted his current season to mark the centenary of the end of the First World War. He also wanted to find a Canadian component for both Oh What A Lovely War and a production of Shakespeare’s Henry V set in the trenches.

As director of Oh What A Lovely War, Hinton had a mandate to bring Canada into the frame. So we’re reminded at the beginning that we’re seated in the venerable Royal George Theatre, a playhouse where more than a century ago the seats might well have been occupied by Canadian troops training in the region.

From the vantage point of 2018, we’re also reminded of the colonialist sensibility that a century ago demanded that Canadians sign up to fight for king and country In addition, we’re subjected to uncomfortable reflections about the contributions of black and indigenous Canadians to the war effort, contributions that became largely unacknowledged. We even hear The Maple Leaf Forever being sung.

However, in the process, the original material has been pulled apart. Even some of the core content has been unwisely tinkered with. The centre does not hold because there no longer seems to be a centre. The material’s creative impulse has gone missing

Oh What A Lovely War is a product of London’s left-wing Theatre Workshop and its leader, Joan Littlewood, a diminutive dynamo who revolutionized the British stage in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Operating out of the shabby Theatre Royal, situated in London’s distinctly  unfashionable Stratford East neighbourhood, Littlewood and her troupe tore down the pillars of the theatrical establishment and made successful assaults on the venerable West End with radically-driven productions of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, Lionel Bart’s Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be, Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey — and Oh What A Lovely War.

Collectivism was very much a part of the Theatre Workshop sensibility and this particularly applied to the creation of Oh What A Lovely War with Littlewood there to serve as the catalyst to make it all come together with her uncanny gift for achieving both spontaneity and fluidity and for making warring elements come together. It’s doubtful whether Brendan Behan’s ramshackle script for The Hostage or Shelagh Delaney’s novice effort with A Taste Of Honey would ever have achieved international success without Joan Littlewood. She made the impossible possible.

Yet, she was the most collaborative of artists. Back in 1963, critic Charles Marowitz pinpointed the particular glory of Oh What A  Lovely War: “ . . . the production is a medley of disparate styles which the genius of Littlewood and the invention of the ensemble have welded into one.”

The problem for another director is to capture this sensibility, to  keep the welding from coming apart, particularly given the personal and creative stake that the original Theatre  Workshop company had in the material. “Never has there been such an umbilical connection between players and material,” Marowitz wrote, and these are words that anyone else taking this show on would do well to consider.

Joan Littlewood — who at one point shows up as a tiresome and unnecessary presence in the current Shaw revival — died in 2002. It is difficult now to convey to those who never knew her work the essence of her unique, freewheeling directorial style — one with the assurance to invoke Brechtian devices, commedia dell’arte, English music-hall tradition, not to mention a daunting juxtaposition of  outrageous humour and outright horror, and get away with it. Perhaps this remarkable woman’s own philosophy explains it best:   “I do not believe in the supremacy of the director, designer. actor or even the writer. It is through collaboration that the knockabout art of theatre survives and kicks . . . . No one mind or imagination can foresee what a play will become until all the physical and intellectual stimuli which are crystallized in the poetry of the author, have been understood by a company, and then tried out in terms of mime, discussion, and the precise music of grammar: words and music allied and integrated.”

So if everything is so tightly interwoven that the texture of the dramatic material seems indivisible from the texture of that first 1963 production, the inevitable question arises: Would Hinton have brought off a more satisfactory revival had he essentially stuck to the show as originally conceived? The answer, regrettably, would seem to be yes.

 

(Oh What A Lovely War continues to Oct. 13. Ticket information at 1 800 511 SHAW or shawfest.com)