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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

Restoring a masterpiece

August 1, 2014 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I file the second of two consecutive reports from Ontario’s Shaw Festival, this one about a pair of important revivals, Edward Bond’s The Sea and Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Prolific and controversial in equal measure, Britain’s Edward Bond is esteemed in France but rarely performed in his native land, much less on this side of the Atlantic. Hence Canada’s Shaw Festival, which is best known for producing plays by George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries, has done the English-speaking theater a signal service by reviving “The Sea,” Mr. Bond’s 1973 “comedy” (that’s what he calls it, anyway) about a seaside village run by a rich, imperious old gorgon (Fiona Reid) whose high-handed behavior has turned one of the locals (Patrick Galligan) into a conspiracy theorist of the wilder-eyed variety—an Edwardian John Bircher, if you will, who hides his lunacy behind a village shopkeeper’s cringing obsequiousness.

The_Sea_0654_DCcolour-300x199Mr. Bond, in the manner of most modern British playwrights, is a man of the left, and “The Sea,” which dates from the dawning of the Age of Thatcher, can be read as a portrait of class warfare among the provincials. But like Shaw and Bertolt Brecht, his masters, Mr. Bond is too much the artist to content himself with coarse ideological parallels. Instead he turns his imagination loose, and the result is a midnight-black comedy that whipsaws the viewer between uproarious small-town satire and a stoicism so bleak and astringent (“The years go very quickly and you seem to be spared the minutes”) that it makes your skin tingle.

Eda Holmes’ staging is nothing short of remarkable, a small-scale presentation so tightly unified and subtly poetic as to recall David Cromer’s landmark revival of “Our Town.” As for Mr. Galligan, his acting is at once comically demented and utterly terrifying, a mixture that’s guaranteed to chill you…

Philip Barry’s sky-high comedies of white-shoe manners used to be box-office magic. But his reputation took a nosedive after his death in 1949, and not only have none of his plays received a major production in this country since 1995, but only two of them, “Holiday” and “The Philadelphia Story,” have ever been revived on Broadway. I had to travel to Canada to finally see a Barry play: The Shaw Festival is giving “The Philadelphia Story” the deluxe treatment, with Moya O’Connell in the Katharine Hepburn-created part of Tracy Lord, the heiress-divorcée from Philadelphia’s Main Line who finds herself torn between three suitors, one of them her ex-husband (Gray Powell), on the eve of her second marriage.

Does “The Philadelphia Story” work onstage? Absolutely, enough so that I came away even more eager to see Barry’s other plays. What’s more, Dennis Garnhum’s staging is clear and confident, while William Schmuck’s triple-turntable set is positively spectacular. The problem is that George Cukor’s 1940 film version, in which Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart were all in flawless form, is one of a handful of successful Hollywood adaptations of important American stage plays that closely track the scripts on which they’re based. Yes, it’s fascinating to see how well “The Philadelphia Story” plays in its original form, but you won’t learn much about it that you didn’t already know from having seen the movie….

* * *

To read my review of The Sea, go here.

To read my review of The Philadelphia Story, go here.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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