Welcome, enriching view of playwright’s private life
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/01/2012 (5364 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
THE verbose George Bernard Shaw wrote more than 250,000 letters while cranking out plays, essays, pamphlets and articles.
Among his most famous epistles were those written over a 40-year period (1899-1939) to the beautiful, flamboyant actress whose stage name was Mrs. Patrick Campbell.
The platonically married Shaw, who first encountered Campbell while he was a drama critic, fell madly in love with her and eventually called her by her celestial middle name, Stella.
He wrote the role of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion for her, though she was actually decades older than the flower girl, and it became her triumphant signature role. They had a passionate one-year affair that ended when she married George Cornwallis-West. Shaw was wounded and, it seems, never fully forgave her.
Winnipeg’s Talia Pura, who has made a speciality of dramatizing the lives of historical women, has scripted the two-hander Queen of My Heart directly from Shaw and Campbell’s correspondence.
Pura has regal presence as the honey-voiced, gowned and bejewelled Campbell. Grey-bearded Dublin native Brian Richardson is well suited to playing the self-satisfied Shaw, though he had some hesitation with his lines.
The show, which ran about 10 minutes over its billed one-hour length, looks and feels much like a no-frills fringe production. It’s a bit dry, lacks much of a dramatic arc and peters out at the end.
But in the context of a festival that’s a total immersion in the dramatist, it offers a welcome, enriching view of Shaw’s private side. The masterful “weaver of words” often comes across as wildly egotistical, childish, possessive and even cruel. He throws around his own adjective, Shavian, and refers to his papers as Shaviana.
On the other hand, the high-maintenance Campbell has ego, vanity and childishness to match. Neither wants to care enough to let the other hurt them. “You no longer amuse me,” she snaps at one point.
Shaw’s initial flowery, witty, deeply romantic wooing by mail carries one back to an era when lovers breathlessly waited for letters to arrive and then swooned over them.
But there’s resentment and anger in the exchanges as the years go by. Shaw erupts in fury about the loss of Campbell’s son in the First World War — a conflict that to him is pointless — sputtering, “I’m sorry, I can’t be sympathetic.”
He is upset by her desire to publish their letters while his wife is still living. Campbell needs the money — a reminder of how precarious the stage life can be for a woman with fading looks.
She is stung by the mistress character of Orinthia in his play The Apple Cart, clearly based on her.
Yet through all the volatility, you get the sense that these two larger-than-life characters really cherished and admired one another. For anyone who is doing the rounds of Shawfest, Queen of My Heart sheds some fascinating light on the era and its theatrical personalities.
alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca
Theatre Review
Queen of My Heart
Theatre on Tap
To Sunday at PTE’s Colin Jackson Studio Theatre
Tickets $15 at 467-2324
Three and a half stars out of five
