by Noel Coward
Directed by Christopher Newton
At the Royal George Theatre
June 9-October 31, 2009

   Christopher Newton is back and the Shaw Festival’s got him! A music-hall joke stretched over a bad vaudeville act and backstage conflicts (Red Peppers), an unpleasant domestic comedy (Fumed Oak), and an experimental musical fantasy about a Mayfair marriage crisis (Shadow Play): these are the three short pieces by Coward from 1936 that Christopher Newton links together by the idea of a dream image. He is certainly helped by Musical Director Paul Sportelli’s deployment of the affective power of Coward’s music, but it is Newton’s artistic taste and his designers’ and casts’ skills that make this particular trio a substantial entertainment—especially for fans of Coward.

   Newton believes all three can be grouped under the title “Scenes from Married Life,” and that all three are about ruined dreams or dreams that almost come to ruin. Red Peppers, for instance, takes us to an inept music-hall act by the husband-and-wife team of George and Lily Pepper whose feeble jokes, lame puns, and fumbled dancing are emblems of their frayed marriage as much as they are of a decaying, dying theatrical genre. However, their backstage skirmishes and acid verbal duels are pushed aside when they combine to do verbal battle against their hostile conductor and the alcoholic producer. Jay Turvey’s George is a little strained in Cockney detail but he plays nicely enough opposite Patty Jamieson’s Lily. Kawa Ada does service as Alf, the errand boy, Wendy Thatcher makes an appearance as huffy, snobbish Mabel Grace, and Kyle Blair delivers as Bert, the conductor with a baton that itches to race through the Peppers’ numbers. The funniest and most vivid characterization is Steven Sutcliffe’s as Mr. Edwards, the alcohol-sodden producer, with his woozy dignity under as much assault as his unsteady body and stiff legs.

   Newton decorates the piece with two fetching Presenters (Saccha Dennis and Jacqueline Thair), and then uses a song to prepare the scene for Fumed Oak, an unpleasant comedy that Shaw could have written were he not given to his usual verbosity. In this short play, a husband, who has suffered a sniffling, spoiled daughter, a plaintive, meddling mother-in-law, and a nagging, authoritarian wife, finally rebels in a brutally abrupt and violent manner, putting everyone in her place and slamming the front door shut with the finality of a male Nora Helmer walking out of an impossible marriage. The story is a predictable one, however, so the only shock is the extent of Henry Gow’s rhetorical and physical violence. Steven Sutcliffe plays him with a nicely judged uncomfortable reticence as he is forced to listen to his lump of a daughter (Robin Evan Willis) who massacres her piano pieces (really played by Newton on tape), his mother-in-law (Wendy Thatcher) complaining of a noisy bathroom cistern, and his wife (Patty Jamieson) who had tricked him into marriage in the first place. Henry Gow is given a significant build-up in terms of his motivation. He has been punished for 15 years with sour marital discord, and he has been patiently saving for a voyage to a secret destination. Books have fed his dreams of escape, with stories by Kipling and Conrad firing his imagination. He knows (with them) that there is more to life than “refinement and fumed oak and lace curtains” and aging “with nothing to show for it.” When Sutcliffe does erupt in the final scene, it elicits gasps from women in the audience who probably see him as an abusive, battering male in a play by a writer who celebrates politically incorrect behaviour. Fortunately, Coward is not around to contend with their moral censure. He was wittily incorrect—at least in terms of male-female interaction—and this makes for dramatic and comic sparks.

    As competently performed as these two pieces are, the best, most colourful, and most interesting piece is Shadow Play that is given a brilliant production full of music and enchantment. Louise Guinand’s lighting and Cameron Porteous’s costumes and set are magical. What is really an experimental fragment becomes a solid hit. Shadow Play catches a Mayfair couple just as the magic has evaporated from their relationship and they are forced to face the unknown. Distraught and shattered, Victoria Gayforth is heavily medicated and the result is a dream whose unedited surrealism counters her husband’s tendency to leave things out of his version of the truth. Embellished by three songs (one of which is “Play, Orchestra, Play”), Shadow Play carries a moribund love back to its past stirrings and, in so doing, revives it. Of course, the play is slight, but it is gossamer, nonetheless, that Newton and his cast make iridescent. It is probably unfair to single out any member in the cast, but I will add that Robin Evan Willis is as gorgeous as she was lumpy in Fumed Oak, and Steven Sutcliffe proves himself to be a most versatile actor, adding Simon Gayforth to his earlier gallery of Mr. Edwards and Henry Gow.

-photos 1 & 2 (David Cooper), pic 3 (Emily Cooper)

pic 1: Patty Jamieson and Jay Turvey as Lily and George Pepper

pic 2 (L-R): PattyJamieson (Doris Gow), Robin Evan Willis (Elsie Gow), Steven Sutcliffe (Henry Gow)

pic 3 (L-R): Steven Sutcliffe (Simon Gayforth), Julie Martell (Victoria Gayforth), Robin Evan Wills (Sibyl Heston), Kyle Blair (Michael Doyle)



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