The Shaw Festival Review: Part Three: George Bernard Shaw’s Candida

By Ross

This should-have-been charming play about pastors, poets, and the principles of love unveils itself as structurally gorgeously as one might expect from The Shaw Festival. It’s the prettiest opening for the 1894 George Bernard Shaw comedy, Candida, and we delightfully join into the thoughtful foray spread out before us, thanks to the fine work of set designer Michelle Tracey (Tarragon’s Behind the Moon), costume designer Ming Wong (Crow’s The Master Plan), and lighting designer Louise Guinand (Stratford’s Casey and Diana). It just couldn’t be more pretty, but unfortunately, even with some well-meaning performances, it doesn’t hold us in its outstretched arms.

Visually, it’s exactly as we would want from Shaw’s Victorian-age comedy, but director Severn Thompson (Shaw’s Just to Get Married), after dutifully transplanting the romantic subversive tale into a 1950s suburban London neighborhood, layers its politics and its passion without much clarity on a time period when women’s roles mirrored the same ideals that Shaw set out to explore. It’s a playful yet problematic intersection, flailing some in its many concepts. It starts off grand but doesn’t exactly find its footing as it attempts to unpack the ramifications that occur when a stuffy Reverend James Morell, played dutifully by Sanjay Talwar (Shaw’s A Christmas Carol), finds himself in a competition with a youthful poet, Eugene Marchbanks, portrayed playfully by Johnathan Sousa (Tarragon’s Withrow Park), for the devoted affections of his seemingly ‘perfect’ wife, Candida, played flippantly by Sochi Fried (Driftwood’s Rosalynde (or As You Like It)).

The play is littered with several side characters fleshing out complicated ideas around socialism, capitalism, gender roles, and marriage – like the wonderfully present Miss Proserpine Garnett, played perfectly by Claire Jullien (Shaw’s On The Razzle), and her battle with Candida’s old-fashioned and formidable father, Mr. Burgess, played forcibly by Ric Reid (Shaw’s Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Human Heart)). Their combative nature finds numerous dynamic flavors to engage with in that rectory setting across from Victoria Park in northeast London. Yet the main focal point of the whole piece concerns itself with the notions around love and marriage, and the unpacking of the concept of what a woman really wants and desires from her male partner.

Longing for love and rescue, the romantic shy poet, Marchbanks proclaims to her husband that he is in love with his wife, Candida, and also that she loves him back, wanting more than just complacency and decency from her husband. Marchbanks believes she deserves something far more than just words spoken in sermon-like progression from a man more devoted to his speeches than his and her passions. The handsome young poet feels that Candida is utterly divine, and is his ‘eternal love’, and that Morell has nothing to offer her beyond care, protection, and the chores of keeping house. And that, he believes is not enough.

The priest and the poet must spar and outfox the other in Candida’s absence, holding tight to their steadfast belief systems around what a woman wants from the man in her life. The one waxes on and on poetically about what Candida needs to soar into the stars, while the other talks about what she truly desires to feel safe and held. Neither bothers to ask Candida, until late in the day, but before that ‘love must be asked for” moment happens (and spoiler alert ahead, just so ya know), we discover that we have lost the longing. I think we were supposed to be so taken by the young romantic poet and his passionate stance of love that our sensibilities would be transverse, but the unfortunate thing with this particular production of Candida is that we have not fallen for the poet, so we aren’t as thrown by her ultimate choice.

Had this framing actually worked and we were indeed enraptured by the young handsome poet, her alternate choice would have been as if we were woken up from a romantic idealistic dream, shaken to consciousness by her preference for the “weaker of the two“. But, unfortunately for this production and its audience, we knew it all along, from the moment Fried’s Candida entered the space. There was no competition at play, and the surprise and whiplash we were supposed to feel never materialized in the slightest manner.

Fried as the title character Candida has to deliver a performance that never lets us into where her heart truly lies, but as directed here at The Shaw Festival, it’s clear that she sees the poet as adorable, which he is, like a puppy dog, and that her attached heart lies with her more solid respectable husband. She’s all over him physically, but treats the poet like a little boy. And in the role of Rev. James Morell, Talwar presents something more dynamic than what is being suggested of him. Sousa’s Marchbanks never catches our heart, nor our fire, failing to make the man feel like a formidable contestant for the heart of Candida. He fidgets as Fried’s Candida plays flippant, fretting about the room while never really uncovering the true romantic idealistic hero that I believe Shaw wanted us to fall for.

The most enlivening characterizations of the play stay clearly in the clever hands of Jullien’s Miss Garnett, a wonderfully vibrant and efficient firecracker of a woman who holds a secret brilliantly close in her heart, and Reid’s Mr. Burgess, Candida’s captain of industry father, who gets flummoxed and insulted by Miss Garnett’s sarcasm, and in his trying to regain his power, he falters quite famously. Damien Atkins (Factory’s Here Lies Henry) does a fine job with the forgettable small role of Rev. Lexy Mill, but the part never finds its foolish clergy-privileged stance here at The Shaw Festival, leaving the real electric fighting to Miss Garnett and the foolish Morell against the scoundrel, Mr. Burgess.

Back in the day, Shaw attempted but failed to give this play a London production, but there were two small provincial productions that found their way onto the stage. In late 1903, the play did find its power in New York, and it was so successful that Shaw would write about “an outbreak of Candidamania” in the city. I don’t think the same will be happening in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario at The Shaw Festival. This tame Candida plays well enough with some thought-provoking and entertaining ideas, along with some sweet comedic playfulness, but the real heart and battle are over before the bell is even rung, leaving us all to just sit back and delight in the feisty fight that lives inside the secondary roles. And nod along knowingly with the rest.