The Shaw Festival in beautiful Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, has established such an impressive tradition of top-level theater, mixing modern classics with newly discovered or rediscovered thought-provoking plays and musicals in impeccable productions, that expectations always run high for each season. Canada's best actors join, return to, or continue in Shawfest's superb ensemble. So the accomplished new offerings of their 2008 opening week had no productions to absolutely avoid, but, unfortunately, only one that was memorably thrilling, The Stepmother.
Opening night was director Jim Mezon's polished revival of J. B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls, darkly and handsomely designed by Peter Hartwell, with rather starkly dramatic lighting by Kevin Lamotte and slightly intrusive, similarly dark-toned original music by Paul Sportelli.
For this haunting melodrama about a mysterious Government Inspector who disrupts a family's celebration to inquire about, and reveal, their shared involvements in a young woman's tragic death, both the tone and effect of Mezon's production were appropriate. And he did avoid the gimmicky intrusions of such admired recent revivals as the one isolating the whole drama into a hokey set up on stilts. Even so, I felt that the insistent punctuation of percussive music and sound effects and the actors' virtual freeze-takes created a portentous emphasis the play doesn't need.
Peter Hutt plays the dominant paterfamilias with efforts at nuance: a man of stature, irascible but not irrational, and far more annoyed at his family's challenges to his authority than at revelations of their wrongdoing. Mary Haney, as his elegant wife, is more haughty and too convinced of her absolute righteousness to be shaken by evidence of her guilt.
Moya O'Connell could be more sympathetic as the daughter who is all-too willing to accept suggestions of everyone's wrongdoings, including her own. Her Sheila has to keep warning everyone the inspector will unearth terrible things about them if they keep protesting their innocence; but O'Connell is so shrill doing so that she mostly elicits laughter at the situation's irony, rather than sympathy for the family's increasing dangers.
Andrew Bunker makes their alcoholic son likable and somewhat pitiable, though the character is not entirely clearly drawn anyway.
And Graeme Somerville is appealing as Sheila's suitor who honestly admits that he wronged the young dead girl.
Benedict Campbell plays the titular Inspector with a kind of grim, controlled menace that is affecting but also limiting. I wish he'd been directed to give the Inspector some wry humor or wit to suggest that he is a reminder of our universal culpability and responsibility toward one another and not merely an avenging angel.
Shaw Festival's An Inspector Calls is a skilled, reasonably effective revival of a timeless modern play. However, I still await a production that simply lets Priestley's story play out to its inevitably disturbing ending without fanfares and underlinings.
