Over the Falls in a Golden Barrel:

Someone looking superficially at Leonard Conolly's color-photo-filled account of the Shaw Festival's first half-century would judge it to be a fine coffee-table companion for theater pilgrims to the annual Niagara-on-the-Lake repertory presentation of plays by Shaw and by his contemporaries and successors. That someone, however, would have seriously underestimated the book, for though it is indeed replete with handsome color and black-and-white photos—selected and displayed beautifully by the book's designer, Scott McKowen—that showcase the rich and compellingly staged play-productions at the Canadian Festival, the volume is much more than a trophy book. It is a thoroughly researched, detailed, and well-written survey of the company's founding, the successes, failures, fights, and triumphs of its successive artistic directors from 1963 to 2011: Andrew Allan, Barry Morse, Paxton Whitehead, Tony van Bridge, Richard Kirschner, Leslie Yeo, Christopher Newton, and Jackie Maxwell. It is a story told with a sense of drama and with an amusing feel for the personalities involved. The author justifies his book by claiming that its subject is “one of the great theatre companies of the English speaking world.” In that he is quite right.For too long the Shaw Festival has gone unheralded for what it is: a place where theatergoers may see in three excellent theaters (the Courthouse, the Royal George, and the resplendent Festival Theatre) productions of British, American, and Canadian plays written between 1850 and the present, as well as the formidable plays of Bernard Shaw, the only playwright of the period to have produced a large enough number of major plays to sustain two or three audience-attracting productions every single year of those fifty years the Festival has existed. The productions are mounted interestingly and arrestingly by—for the most part—talented directors and designers, and performed by a first-rate ensemble of highly effective actors, some of them like Ben Carlson (alas, now decamped) and Ben Campbell (still encamped, hurrah) rising to the highest level of acting in New York or London. To attend Shaw's plays at the Shaw Festival is to see audiences having a whale of a time, to see them engaged with the plays every minute: they gasp at Shaw's outspoken characters; they follow every word and idea and emotion of the characters; above all, they laugh uproariously at Shaw's comical vision of life and humanity and his good-natured humor, even as he is transferring the arguments he has had with himself from his head to the audience's heads. I speak not from report but as a repeat witness to what I describe. It is to be hoped dearly that the most recent decision of the current artistic director, not to perform a Shaw play at the largest of the three theaters, the Festival Theatre, is a temporary mental aberration on her part, and not the setting of a pattern for the future.The cover photo of the book shows Tara Rosling as Saint Joan (in the 2007 production of the play) listening to her “voices”; it is most appropriate, not to mention highly dramatic and evocative, as the first photo the reader encounters, because Brian Doherty, whose brainchild the Shaw Festival was, had to have had something of Joan's visionary madness to have conceived of the idea. It was Doherty who proposed to his associates having Shaw as the center of a theater festival in the small but picturesque town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, in Ontario, just on the other side of the Falls, and so, near enough to the United States to draw Americans (the Festival attendees are about 40 percent American). The associates considered other playwrights as possibilities—Marlowe, Wilde, Maugham, and O'Neill—luckily they were all rejected in favor of Shaw. Good choice, for can you imagine a theater festival in which the five or six plays by Marlowe or Wilde were repeated in two- to three-year cycles in perpetuity? How many productions of Tamburlaine the Great would one want to see in a decade? And as for Maugham, apart from a handful of his best plays, the thinness of the rest would have rendered them unwatchable. Which leaves O'Neill, a substantial rival to Shaw, with a large and varied list of major but majorly depressing plays (only one comedy in the lot). The problem with that choice would have been the number of audience members committing suicide after each O'Neill play. No, Shaw was the right choice, especially to provide an alternative to the hundred Shakespeare festivals in North America.The first productions were a dramatic reading of the “Don Juan in Hell” scene and a full production of Candida. But Doherty was not satisfied with the quality of productions under the Festival's first director, Alan Andrews, and invited the British actor, Barry Morse, to take over in 1966; Morse was succeeded after only one year by another actor, Paxton Whitehead, who led the Festival for a decade. Conolly seems displeased with Whitehead over what seem to be minor crimes compared to outrages to come. Whitehead violated the Festival's mandate by producing two plays written a short time after Shaw's death. In contrast, Conolly points out that Paxton did watch out for the bottom line and grew the audiences—two rather necessary things for a theater company if it hopes to survive. During Whitehead's tenure, international stars came to Ontario to do Shaw: Jessica Tandy, Stanley Holloway, Carole Shelley, and Ian Richardson. Whitehead went out rather with a bang in 1977 by producing a five-and-a-half-hour production of Man and Superman, which received an eight-minute standing ovation—a record for the Festival. And it was during his reign that the gorgeous 850-seat Festival theater was built in 1973, but only after much sturm und drang with the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake over the building of it, which Conolly recounts, not without a sense of humor.Conolly organizes the book appropriately around the successive tenures of the artistic directors, and then within each of those discussions he discusses the various changes for the good and the bad of each director, along with a detailed account of construction costs, deficits, profits, and for almost every production, box-office results—the last piece of information usually being attached to a discussion of a production. Here Conolly performs formidably, for he manages to discuss virtually every production at the Shaw Festival over fifty years, and the way he does so is to group the plays he discusses by author but within each separate directorship. For each production he discusses succinctly, he often quotes local reviewers, but sometimes out-of-towners too, for example, Clive Barnes of the New York Times, who panned the two Shaw plays he saw on his visit. But Conolly fails to note that Barnes by his own confession disliked Shaw's plays.In that, Barnes hardly differed from the longest- and stormiest-serving (twenty-two years) artistic director of the Festival, Christopher Newton—at least in the first several years of his tenure, when he expressed an antipathy for Shaw's plays and the way they were generally performed. He seems to have come around by the second half of his term to a tempered respect and admiration for Shaw. Reading between the lines of Conolly's account of the Newton tenure, one senses that Newton saw himself rather grandly as a reformer airing out these dusty old plays of Shaw's and others, and in the process he alienated elements of his audience in the early years of his rule. A scene of nudity and various obscene actions in a production of Camille (1981), as well as a rape with a wine bottle in a Brecht production, produced the conventional denunciations and audience walkouts. Newton seems to have regarded these production enhancements as daring, avant-garde things to do, whereas now they seem old-fashioned épater le bourgeois. Even in 1981, nudity and obscenity were more than a decade old in being commonly used on stage. Conolly quotes Newton as saying he wanted to make Shaw “dangerous again.” I presume he knew what that unfortunate attitude led to in Shakespeare productions. Meanwhile, Newton added farces, musicals, and mystery melodramas as recurring features of the repertoire—not very avant-garde, not very provocative, though good for the company and good for the box office.Jackie Maxwell, who took over from Newton in 2003, has seemed to wrestle with similar issues, for she has instituted a new policy of producing plays by “Contemporary Shavians”—so-called. But her first two choices were very odd indeed. John Osborne despised Shaw all his life, and Caryl Churchill is the antithesis of Shaw in just about every way possible. She writes out of hatred of her political opponents, for example, her anti-Thatcher plays, Top Girls and Serious Money. Maxwell opines that these “Contemporary Shavians” exemplify the “provocative, spirited, cranky exploration of the status quo that is Bernard Shaw and the spirit that pervades this place.” Like Thatcher, Winston Churchill was a conservative prime minister, and therefore an opponent of Shaw's socialist ideas; he was also a friend of Shaw's, but there is no play in which Shaw attacks Churchill. What Shaw did do was to make fun of mechanical thinking wherever he found it. On other fronts, Maxwell has had to face strong criticism over trumped-up charges of “lack of diversity.” Welcome to the world of political correctness, Ms. Maxwell.Although Conolly generally delivers insightful and intelligent summary remarks on the plays whose productions he describes, he very occasionally lacks a sense of proportion, or judgment, as when he devotes much space to productions of contemporary Canadian plays that will not likely survive outside of Canada for very long. Perhaps a sense of patriotism overwhelmed him. Or, for another example, when he judges the relative box-office failure of Terence Rattigan's After the Dance as attributable to a late change of directors, but also “perhaps in part because of intrinsic weaknesses in the play itself.” There are no weaknesses in the play itself, as can be verified in the television production of the play preserved in the newly released BBC collection of Rattigan's plays on DVD. (In the interest of full disclosure, I must concede that this may not be an entirely disinterested assertion on my part, considering that I wrote the Program Note for this particular production.)All those who admire Shaw's plays, all those who have attended the Shaw Festival in search of theatrical pleasure and who found it there, all those who find themselves nourished emotionally and intellectually by twentieth-century plays, all those who savor imaginative photographs of actors acting on stages, will find in L. W. Conolly's new book a continually absorbing and frank account of what John Simon called “The best repertory theater on the entire continent.”

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