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theatre review

Cherissa Richards as Lady Agatha Lasenby, Nicole Underhay as Lady Mary Lasenby, David Schurmann as The Earl of Loam and Moya O'Connell as Lady Catherine Lasenby in "The Admirable Crichton."

J.M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton asks a rather simple, perhaps even simplistic, question: If a servant and his aristocratic masters were to return to nature, would the class structure dissolve or stand up?

When I say it asks that question, I mean it quite literally. In the first act, the self-satisfied pseudo-progressive Lord Loam (David Schurmann) poses it to his staff during one of the monthly teas where he and (under duress) his three spoiled daughters treat them as equals for an afternoon. He believes all would exist in egalitarian utopia in the wilderness.

His butler Crichton (Steven Sutcliffe), who like many on hand is embarrassed by the monthly charade, disagrees with his master's fantasy. "There must always be a master and servants in all civilized communities, for it is natural, and whatever is natural is right," he says.

That hypothesis having been set up and rather at length, Barrie's play then tests it by perfunctorily stranding Lord Loam and daughters Mary (Nicole Underhay), Catherine (Moya O'Connell) and Agatha (Cherissa Richards) on a desert island with Crichton and an even more servile servant named Tweeny (Marla McLean).

With its almost mathematical structure, Barrie's lightly satirical play - which he wrote around the same time as he first conceived of Peter Pan - can feel like an outline for a play rather than a fully formed piece. While it develops certain complexities in the second half, the first part is dully predictable: it's the rare upper-class character that hasn't been outwitted by his underlings, from Plautus to P.G. Wodehouse.

The Admirable Crichton needs to be fleshed out to be dramatically satisfying and Morris Panych's production - transposed from 1902 to the 1920s - is only intermittently successful at doing so.

Panych's main addition is a chorus of servant-animals, a cockney crane, crow, wolf and hedgehog. As is now the vogue with Barrie, they narrate by speaking the playwright's twee stage directions out loud. These flouncing fauna also sing Tin Pan Alley tunes between scenes, such as Ray Henderson' thematically appropriate It All Depends On You: "I know that I can be a beggar, I can be king/ I can be almost any old thing / It all depends on you."

In addition to stalling the action, the whimsy of all this becomes wearisome rather quickly. There is altogether too much dancing of the Charleston and a firm musical convention is never established. At times, the animals play instruments themselves, while at others an orchestra is awakened from its slumber under the stage to accompany.

Meanwhile, the production fails to arouse our interest in the relationships among the different characters.

In Crichton, Sutcliffe has a conflicted character to dig his teeth into - a very capable fellow trapped in a straitjacket by his own conservative views on class. But his putative romance with Underhay's energetic Mary, the most spoiled daughter, who then adapts most enthusiastically to life as a lost girl on the island, never really ignites convincingly.

There is fine detail in the performances from Martin Happer as a clergyman and Gray Powell as Mary's fiancé Lord Brocklehurst, but the rest seem to exist in only two dimensions.

Ken MacDonald's set is storybook inspired, but - as with his My Fair Lady - it too often leaves the characters awash on a sparsely furnished stage. The clean, uncluttered aesthetic is particularly out of place in his creation of an entirely unthreatening island where dangerous creatures can only poke their heads out from the wings. While MacDonald's sets are always beautiful to look at, they aren't always functional or in service of the story, the half-sunk ship with intact lifeboat visible in the background being a particularly blatant example.

There's an almost academic aloofness to Panych's production that never allows us to be carried away by the adventure. At least not until the bows when the stage suddenly explodes with song and dance that fills every corner of the stage. When a play only fully excites in its curtain call, something is amiss.

The Admirable Crichton runs at the Shaw's Festival Theatre until Oct. 29.

The Admirable Crichton

  • Written by J.M. Barrie
  • Directed by Morris Panych
  • Starring Steven Sutcliffe and Nicole Underhay
  • At the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.


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