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I sincerely hope that nothing I say will encourage the Berkshire Theatre Festival to lower the standards for their season openers. The wonderful Unicorn production of Pinter’s The Caretaker raised my expectations so high that I find it impossible to rationalize the shortcomings of the season’s mainstage production of Shaw’s Candida, which was consistently awful, often painfully so. The production brought back an age when it was not quite proper for summer theater to be any better than third rate and even worse for anyone to be dissatisfied with it. One would have thought that this age had never passed over the distinguished Berkshire Theatre Festival, now celebrating its eightieth anniversary with this revival of a play that was part of its first season. Fortunately, Shaw built his play, first performed in 1897, like one of the Majestic battleships of the time, and his wit and human understanding are stronger than rivets and steel. If the BTF production proved that, it is at least something.
In fact Candida is a play in which we should find a mirror, with all the forced purposefulness of our own times and its attendant trust in “values.”
The production also recalled the age when American actors couldn’t quite get British pronunciation in any of its various manifestations, much less the characteristic inflections which form the basic life-signs of human speech. If you know the play, you’ll remember that Candida doesn’t get to say much until well into the second act. Once we get to hear her, even Jayne Atkinson, who is from Bournemouth, sounds a little off. Those effortful, misunderstood British accents of all except Jeremiah Wiggins as Morell’s curate, prove discombobulating. (And the Caretaker cast brought that off so well!) I wish I could say that such details were unimportant, but in fact they are, because they are part and parcel of the nations and social groups to which we all belong. David Schramm, who in fact gave the one spirited and interesting performance of the evening, was one of the worst in this respect. One couldn’t really discern whether his Mr. Burgess came from Birmingham or Hackney.
However, that is only a part of what was wrong with the BTF production, directed by Anders Cato. In passing I should mention what I thought was good about it. The director showed a fine sense of pacing in an emphatic sort of way, although perhaps a bit too rushed on the whole, against vigorous rallentandi. The seemingly inevitable use of amplification—unnecessary, I should hope, for able-bodied actors in a house as small as the BTF mainstage, took all the air out of the space in which the characters were intended to exchange their words and encouraged the actors to speak in the same flat conversational tone they would use in Law and Order or in an insurance commercial. In this way, when the dialogue warmed up, they rattled out their words in a monotone, without bothering to articulate them with true intention. (Stage electronics could well prove the final demise of real acting on the stage after generations of film and television.) Even worse—and more significant—were the constant nervous mannerisms and tics of each and every player. This uniformity can only mean that the director is at least partly to blame for their relentless and intensely irritating overacting.
The sad thing was that there was no appreciation of the subtleties of Shaw’s writing. Shaw customarily suspends his characters in the ambivalent, soapy waters of moral equivalency until one of them asserts ordinary commonsensical decency. We have no real reason to believe or even sympathize with the Reverend Morell’s Candaulean praise of his wife until the last act. Like Caesar, Shaw's grandest character, she is no more than an enlightened pragmatist, just as her father is a benighted one. The admirable Candida herself is no more than a buoy in one particular channel. At least Candida, apparently a favorite of Shaw’s, shows that he, with all his tendencies to be an arrogant prig, could make fun of himself and his causes. The ambivalent moral situation makes for a wealth of ambiguity in his characters’ exchanges. None of the actors were equal to this basic Shavian task, least of all Michel (or Michael?) Gill, who ground away at Morell’s vanity and fatuousness throughout the evening. He showed vulnerability, perhaps too much, but there wasn’t enough there to make his character more than mildly despicable. (Surely the point of the play is more than to give people an opportunity to laugh at Christian clergymen.) If Morell is weak, Candida is strong, and Shaw intended that, although perhaps not quite to the belabored extent of this production. It was exaggerated by the fact that Jayne Atkinson, in the close quarters of the mainstage, looked decidedly too old for her part. As Shaw emphasized, Candida is thirty-nine and the Reverend forty. There was decidedly too much motherliness in her portrayal. Thirty-nine, even in the 1890’s was still on the cusp of middle age. There is meant to be something amibiguous and subtle about it, no? Like the other players, Atkinson crammed her interpretation with fussy, pointless mannerisms, which, if I remember from Hollywood movies of a time when the BTF was still young, were the stock-in-trade of character actors playing notably senior parts. She repeated these shrugs and knowing inclinations of the head ad nauseam, without any compelling sense behind them, and this most certainly not make her character any more lovable, as intended. Since not only Atkinson and Gill, but the entire cast exhibited this figitiness, I assume the director is at least partly to blame for this. This is an object lesson in the old view that a really good actor can be most expressive by doing nothing.
If Candida looked too old and her husband too young, Marchbanks was entirely out of place. Far from a confused young aristocrat, Finn Wittrock, a recent Juilliard graduate, looked more like a sophomore in a Bible-belt communications school. He had no grasp of the appropriate manner of speech or of manners altogether. As if to show that one actor could at least work below the neck, he contorted his way over the Morell’s furniture, if not walking all over them in his seedy brogues. Even an addled youth like Marchbanks would show some understanding of this aspect of etiquette, especially in the presence of his adored middle-class vicaress. In the break, I noticed a photograph of the 1928 BTF production, in which Marchbanks has an entirely more conventional understanding of where his shoes belong and where his arse, to use the language Shaw eschewed on stage.
While I thought this Candida was lacking on most levels, I would not warn you to avoid it. Shaw’s play is so good, that we enjoyed a good part of it, except possibly the third act, which, possibly because of insufficient preparation, was flaccid in rhythm and unfocussed. Furthermore, Atkinson’s Candida, in her moment of motherly triumph, is irritating, if not insufferable. You can’t kill Shaw any more easily than you can kill Shakespeare, but bad is still bad.
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