THEATRE REVIEW: MISALLIANCE

JOHN COULBOURN,
Special to TorSun
28 MAY 2012
R: 2.5/5


Pictured: Thom Marriott, Tara Rosling

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE — In a little town currently marking the bicentennial of a little dust-up known as the War of 1812, one would think a sense of time and place would be considered pretty important But one would be wrong, for in a Shaw Festival production of Bernard Shaw’s MISALLIANCE that opened on the stage of the Royal George Theatre Friday, director Eda Holmes jettisons all such concerns, blithely transplanting the Shavian comedy from the Edwardian era in which it was initially set to the year 1962 — coincidentally, the year the Shaw Festival was born.

For the uninitiated, MISALLIANCE is essentially a commemoration of sorts of the ongoing war between the sexes, with a few of Shaw’s other favourite hobby horses thrown in and ridden into the ground for good measure — universal suffrage, socialism, snobbery, prudery and Britain’s ongoing class struggle, the latter of which gives this play its title, concerned as it is with a potential marriage between an aristocrat and a daughter of the wealthy middle class.

That middle class is represented by the affable John Tarleton (Thom Marriott, wearing a hairpiece more appropriate to The Lion King), a self-made underwear magnate whose adventuresome but spoiled daughter, Hypatia (Krista Colosimo), is being wooed by Bentley Summerhays (Ben Sanders), the overbred son of the vice-regal Lord Summerhays (Peter Krantz). Their burgeoning romance — to which neither of them seem overly committed — comes to a sudden end however, when a plane flown by the swashbuckling Joey Percival (Wade Bogart-O’Brien) crashes into the Tarleton family home, dislodging not only its handsome pilot but a mysterious Polish passenger (Tara Rosling), determined to turn everything into a three-ring circus for the sake of family honour.

Done in period it can be a romp, of course, but finally Shaw’s play sits in the ’60s like a Visigoth at a delicate Edwardian tea party. Even while one applauds Holmes for her sense of adventure, one is forced to note that, while many of the issues Shaw examined in his enduring and admittedly talky comedy might have had an equal resonance in the Kennedy era - feminism, politics and the class struggle were all discussed in a far different vocabulary 54 years on.

While the entire cast, which also includes Jeff Meadows, Catherine McGregor and Craig Pike, are victims of director Holmes’ and designer Judith Bowden’s unfortunate misadventures in time travel, it is in the end, perhaps Colosimo’s Hypatia that suffers most from it. In 1908, Hypatia’s interest in all things sexual signalled a much-needed loosening of the steely bonds of Victorian prudery, but in 1962, it reads far, far differently, especially as Bowden has tarted Hypatia up in a costume that is not only inappropriate but hugely unflattering as well.

For the rest, miscasting abounds. While Krantz, Marriott and McGregor are all far too young for the roles they play, Meadows is more than a trifle too old, and Sanders appears to have been cast solely for his whippet-like build in the misguided belief that skinny means the same thing as tiny. As for Rosling, it is no easier to believe that she could ever be mistaken for a man now than it was when she played St. Joan. But the big problem here finally is the era. In 1908, it was simply the plane that wouldn’t fly in Shaw’s comedy. In 1962, it proves to be the entire play. A misplaced MISALLIANCE finally proves to be a miserable mistake.