Archives for August 21, 2009

I’m still on the road in New England, where I reviewed the Peterborough Players’ Heartbreak House in New Hampshire and the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Ghosts in Stockbridge. Both productions are excellent, but only one of these two classic plays of Vicwardian manners remains viable today. Here’s an excerpt.
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You can tell any truth, however hurtful, so long as you say it with a smile. That was the secret of George Bernard Shaw’s success, and “Heartbreak House” shows his method at its most theatrically effective. Rarely have England’s chattering classes been sketched so savagely, but Shaw tells his brutal truths with such impish charm that you scarcely feel the knife slipping in until the blood starts to flow. Therein lies the strength of the Peterborough Players’ production of “Heartbreak House,” which Gus Kaikkonen has staged with the lightest possible touch. It plays like a Noël Coward-style comedy of bad manners–until the climactic moment when the ground opens up beneath the feet of the characters.
Written between 1913 and 1919 and set in the first days of World War I, “Heartbreak House” takes place in the country home of Captain Shotover (George Morfogen), a retired sailor of great age who has the alarming habit of popping into a room, saying whatever happens to be on his mind, then popping out again. The captain and his family seem at first glance to be charming to a fault, a veritable fountain of epigrammatic cleverness. One of their guests describes them as “unprejudiced, frank, humane, unconventional, democratic, free-thinking, and everything that is delightful to thoughtful people.” Yet mere minutes after these words are spoken, the Shotovers find themselves in the midst of a German aerial bombardment, and they rejoice in the devastation that threatens to consume them and the rest of their delightful kind….
Every member of Mr. Kaikkonen’s ensemble cast gives a sharply and memorably drawn performance, starting with Mr. Morfogen, whose Captain Shotover is a fey, shambling sprite…
As a critic, Shaw championed the plays of Henrik Ibsen, and as a playwright he learned from Ibsen’s willingness to skewer the hypocrisies of the 19th-century middle class about which he wrote. Yet Shaw was the better artist, and I don’t doubt that he knew it. In “The Quintessence of Ibsenism,” his 1891 tribute to the man who cleared the way for his own plays of ideas, Shaw described Ibsen’s “Ghosts” as “such an uncompromising and outspoken attack on marriage as a useless sacrifice to an ideal, that his meaning was obscured by its very obviousness.” I thought of those backhanded words of praise as I watched the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s imaginative revival of “Ghosts.” In 1881 “Ghosts” swept across the stage like a tornado of frankness, but today it comes across as a preachy piece of bourgeois-baiting…
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Read the whole thing here.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The coming of television killed off network radio in a way that’s startlingly reminiscent of the effect that the digital revolution is currently having on network TV, the print media, and the music business.
Are there any useful lessons to be learned from what happened to old-time network radio in the quarter-century that preceded its final demise in 1962? I think so, and I’ve tried to sum them up in my latest “Sightings” column for tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt:

Americans of all ages embraced TV unhesitatingly. They felt no loyalty to network radio, the medium that had entertained and informed them for a quarter-century. When something came along that they deemed superior, they switched off their radios without a second thought. That’s the biggest lesson taught by the new-media crisis of 1949. Nostalgia, like guilt, is a rope that wears thin….

Can the old media shore up their questionable future by looking to the not-quite-so-distant past? To find out, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.”
W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale