THEATRE REVIEW: ON THE ROCKS
10 JUL/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3 out of 5

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE — Even with playwright Michael Healey and director Joe Ziegler on hand to channel the spirits and supply the twist, the Shaw Festival’s production of Bernard Shaw’s political polemic On The Rocks is likely to leave you briefly and periodically shaken, but rarely stirred.

Eight decades on, Shaw’s 1933 screed against the body politic, wherein he throws a grenade into the British system of democracy, is better known today for a preface that flew in the face of the great man’s long-held humanitarian principles in favour of the draconian measures favoured by Stalin and his ilk. But On The Rocks’ failure to thrive is only partially due to its outrageous preface for, in the end, it is simply not a very good play.

And while Healey and Ziegler do their best to revitalize the work in the Shaw Festival porduction that opened Friday on the Court House stage — the former with a new adaptation, the latter with his impressive and oft-demonstrated talent for adroitly guiding casts through even Shaw’s thorniest texts — the sheer weight of Shaw’s outrage and outrageousness, combined with his unruly imagination, eventually undoes them both.

For his part, Healey does some major re-arranging, opening the play — still set in the cabinet room of 10 Downing Street circa 1933 beautifully evoked by designer Christina Poddubiuk — with the action already going full tilt. The prime minister, Sir Arthur Chavender (Peter Krantz) has just delivered a socialist manifesto aimed at solving the nation’s deepening unemployment problem and his various advisors are gathering to deliver often hysterical reaction, much to the consternation of his long-suffering secretary, played with comedic relish by Mary Haney.

While the chief of police (Thom Marriott) and the head of navy (Norman Browning) eventually see the merit (and the chance for personal gain) in their boss’s new ideas, Sir Dexter Rightside (Steven Sutcliffe), the PM’s right-wing partner in a governing coalition, has already achieved something very much akin to apoplexy at the top of the show — and his condition deepens as more people show up, all supporting the prime minister’s new political direction.

The populace at large, however, is so threatened by the change, despite being both the inspiration and the beneficiary of Chavender’s vision, that a riot ensues. Before it gets fully underway, however, Healey and Ziegler take us in flashback to what Shaw intended as the beginning of the play, set two weeks in the past. Only then do we learn, in often lingering detail, how a vacuous but good hearted-man has fallen under the spell of a mystical Welsh political philosopher (Claire Jullien) who leads him into dangerous reflection.

While Healey amuses himself and his audience by playing fast and loose with gender (Sir Jafina Pandranath, for instance, is transformed into Dame Adhira Pandranath and essayed by a too-self-conciously youthful Cherissa Richards) and deftly inserting his own caustic political observations on everything from coalitions and prorogation to the 24-hour news cycle, Ziegler does some inpressive work with an extensive cast that also includes David Schurmann, Anthony Bekenn, Martin Happer, Guy Bannerman (apparently channeling Shaw himself) and a host of others. Under his aegis, here’s delicious work here from Krantz, Sutcliffe, Haney and several of the usual suspects.

Together, they manage to find a fair bit of humour in Shaw’s anti-government screed — as well as some timeless political truths, many of them subtly underlined by Healey’s subversive wit. What they don’t find in the end is much of a play, because sadly, Shaw didn’t write one. Instead, with a heavy-handedness surprising even for him, all he created was a personal manfiesto for several voices, worked into an often impenetrable monologue capable of withstanding all but the most heroic interventions.

Simply stated, if On The Rocks is going to work here or anywhere else, what it needs is a whole lot more Healey and Ziegler and a whole lot less Shaw.