THEATRE REVIEW: CANDIDA
30 MAY/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5


NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE - Long before the folks at DC Comics dreamed up Wonder Woman and Supergirl, Bernard Shaw was toying with the notion of women and extraordinary power. Back then, he called his wonder-woman CANDIDA, and while he stopped short of gifting her with incredible strength or X-ray vision, he made her such a paragon of wisdom and virtue that men simply couldn’t help but be smitten by her. Indeed, men have been falling in love with her for more than a century, even while women have been finding her devotion to hearth, home and duty a trifle tedious.

The latest man to fall for Candida’s charms is director Tadeusz Bradecki, who brings Shaw’s unimpeachable 1897 paragon to life once again in a Shaw Festival production that opened in the Royal George Theatre Saturday afternoon. Starring Claire Jullien in the title role, the play tells the story of how the sweet and long-suffering Candida inadvertently discovers that, in the process of being a loving and dutiful helpmate to her husband, the Reverend James Mavor Morell — a rather self-satisfied and successful cleric, played by Nigel Shawn Williams — she has inadvertently caused the young poet her husband has brought home to fall in love with her as well.

But young Eugene Marchbanks, as played by Wade Bogert-O’Brien, is more than merely a poet, He’s also a lonely young aristocrat, fallen on a bit of familial hard times and fairly drunk on romance and the unfamiliar cocktail of hormones coursing through his body. He’s also a bit of a twit. Not surprisingly, in the months he has shared his life with the Reverend and his wife, Eugene’s romantic nature, combined with his search for a mother, has yielded a crush of epic proportion. And suddenly, when he returns with Candida to the Morell home after a stint in the country, things all come to a head. Young Marchbanks confronts the all-too-complacent Morell and declares his love for the cleric’s wife. Initially, Morell laughs it off, but as Marchbanks presses his cause, doubts arise and they are forced to let Candida sort it out.

Not surprisingly, Shaw, having already gifted Candida with great beauty and impressive homemaking skills, has also thrown in a heavy dollop of patience and wisdom which precludes her banging the two men’s heads together, forcing her to sort things out with impressive dispatch. Unfortunately, in this production, much of Shaw’s elaborate characterization is wasted in a first act that never really gels, thanks to Bradecki’s one-note vision of the characters.

William’s saintly Morell is simply too virtuous, his greatest sin being an inconstant English accent, Bogert-O’Brien’s dandified Marchbanks is simply too ridiculous to be taken seriously. And neither of them get a lot of help from Jullien’s swanning and superficial performance as Candida, which seems to involve only her abilities to move well and look good. Even some fine character work from the always impressive Graeme Somerville and Norman Browning, joined by an overwound Krista Colosimo, can’t save the first act from a tedium that leaves you studying the glories of designer William Schmuck’s beautifully panelled parsonage to help pass the time.

Happily Bradecki lights a fire under Williams and Bogert-O’Brien in a second act that warms the storyline, And while it fails to fully ignite the cooly detached Jullien in the title role, it still affords Shaw the opportunity to demonstrate his amazement once again that men and women can continue to put aside their obvious differences long enough to perpetuate the human race.

This is not, by any means, the finest CANDIDA this Festival has produced in its 50-year history, but it is at least a CANDIDA that doesn’t have to take a backseat to Wonder Woman and Supergirl.