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by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Severn Thompson

Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

August 16-October 11, 2024

Candida: “Oh! I am to choose, am I? I suppose it is quite settled that I must belong to one or the other”

This year the Shaw Festival is presenting only one play by its namesake playwright (and, no, My Fair Lady doesn’t count). This is Candida from 1894, one of Shaw’s warmest and gentlest comedies, that has not been seen at the Shaw since 2011 in an excellent production directed by Tadeusz Bradecki. I’ve also seen the Shaw’s productions in 1993 and 2002 and am glad to say that the present production directed by Severn Thompson is worthy to stand with Bradecki’s as the finest I have seen of this play. The great advantage of Thompson’s production is that the actors share such rapport with each other that they feel like a real community on stage that we as audience have the privilege of visiting for one eventful day.

Th play is set in the drawing room-cum-office of the Reverend James Mavor Morell, a Christian Socialist clergyman of the Church of England. Michelle Tracey has relocated the action from 1894 to 1954, when conformism was still considered a virtue, and has designed a cozy set one would be happy to live in. Morrell so popular his calendar is filled with speaking engagements. Morrell has apparently a soft spot for young men who seem spiritually lost and Eugene Marchbanks, an 18-year-old poet whom Morrell found sleeping on the Embankment, is one of his “discoveries” as Morrell’s wife Canada puts it.

Marchbanks feels quite uneasy in the Morrells’ home because, as he confesses early on to Morrell, he is in love with Canada. He so idolizes Candida that he feels the middle-class setting she lives in with Morrell and the grind of her everyday life with him do not suit a figure who should constantly be worshipped and indulged. One sign of how lofty Candida is in Marchbanks’s eyes is that he gave the Morrells a copy of Titian’s painting Assumption of the Virgin, depicting Mary’s bodily ascent into heaven after her death. To Marchbanks, Candid is no more of this earth than Mary.

To the idealistic young Marchbanks, he, not the prosaic, moralizing Morrell, is the more suitable partner for Candida. As the action develops and Morrell notices how much Candida seems to favour Marchbanks, Morell begins to have doubts. Finally, the situation reaches the point where Morrell and Marchbanks believe that only Canadia herself can solve the question of who is right. They ask Candida outright to choose between them. Candida’s reply is one of the great expositions of male foolishness and self-importance in Shaw.

Unlike Bradecki’s production, Thompson does not create a sense of danger as the play moves to Candida’s choice. Rather, Thompson views the play as a general satire of humankind’s tendency to idealize the world around it. This approach emphasizes the satirical view that Shaw takes toward all six of the characters, not just Morrell and Marchbanks.

Thompson draws uniformly excellent performances from a cast that works as a close ensemble. Sochi Fried is superb as a woman who is so comfortable in knowing she is superior to the men around her, whom she calls “boys”, that she has no need to flaunt that knowledge unless extreme circumstances demand it. Fried speaks with such a beautifully modulated tone and moves so gracefully about the set that she naturally sets herself apart from everyone else. Yet, Fried makes clear that Candida is happily part of the world around her. The ordinary and everyday is not beneath her as Marchbanks thinks, but rather she is satisfied with her life and her milieu and Fried’s onstage presence radiates this feeling of satisfaction.

Sanjay Talwar is very funny as Morrell in the subtlest of ways. Talwar well illustrates Morrell’s affected speech, that Shaw notes in his stage directions, but Talwar distinguishes how Morrell speaks in everyday situations from his from his grand intonation and declamatory manner when Morrell begins to speak about ethics as he would from the pulpit or to win an argument. Talwar brilliantly shows how Morrell moves from simply laughing off Marchbanks’s declaration of love for Candida to his beginning to doubt his own belief in her, as if he were the comic version of a modern, suburban Othello. At the same time, Talwar ably portrays the mixture of authority and innocence in a man whom one can easily see is adored by all his female parishioners.

Johnathan Sousa is probably the closest to the Marchbanks that Shaw minutely describes in his notes than any of the other three I’ve seen. The comedy of his character is the mixture of social awkwardness with an unshakeable view of the rightness of his own convictions. Sousa conveys Marchbanks’s youthfulness and weakness along with his embarrassment that he is so young and weak and his foolish notion that his intellectual and spiritual superiority are more important. What Thompson emphasizes with Sousa’s Marchbanks is that is that he belongs to the aristocracy. Marchbanks is unworldly because he has had little contact with the real world. His looking down on Candida’s surroundings are part of his class prejudice of which he is completely unaware.

The three main characters live in a community of idolaters. Morrell’s frowzy secretary, Proserpine, is well played by Claire Jullien, a former Candida herself. As we discover in a great comic scene, she is secretly in love with Morrell. Morrell’s awkward curate, Lexy, is wonderfully played by Damien Atkins. He makes the young man into an amiable nerd who so idolizes Morrell that he imitates his gestures and manner of speech. Candida’s father, the crass businessman Mr. Burgess, is played to perfection by Ric Reid. Reid’s Burgess is the surly capitalist in contrast to Morrell’s caring socialist. He takes an down-to-earth view of his world and his daughter in contrast to the unworldly Marchbanks.

Thompson’s direction is so detailed that we smile at all the links that exist among the various characters – from Morrell and Marchbanks, Marchbanks and Prosperine, Morrell and Burgess, to everyone and Candida. Thompson’s close attention to the text builds up a fully realized community on stage and with it a more generalized vision of the play than is usually seen. She shows that all except Canada dream of a world that does not exist, while Candida is the only one who is content with nurturing the world that does exist.

No theatre-lover should miss this production, not just because it is the only play by Shaw that the Shaw Festival has seen fit to offer, but because it is such a well-considered presentation of such a delightful play. It is good to see that the Festival, when it wants to, is still able to demonstrate that G.B. Shaw remains vital and entertaining today and his critiques of human nature have lost none of their sting.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Sanjay Talwar as James Morrell, Sochi Fried as Candida and Johnanthan Sousa as Eugene Marchbanks; Johnanthan Sousa as Eugene Marchbanks and Sochi Fried as Candida; Sanjay Talwar as James Morrell and Sochi Fried as Candida. © 2024 Emily Cooper.

For tickets visit: www.shawfest.com