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[Written in collaboration with BlogUT blogger Jasmine]

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have probably noticed the ads for the Shaw Festival’s 2009 centerpiece, Garson Kanin’s “Born Yesterday”. It’s pretty hard not to, considering they’ve been plastered over every available surface for a few months now. We found out why this was necessary when the curtain rose on the play’s amazingly  elaborate set, complete with staircase and crystal chandelier. This set was by far the most - maybe the only - impressive thing about this production. The rest was, to put it lightly, awful.

That the message could have been more subtle would be a polite way to put it. The “message,” as it were, was more like a sledgehammer to the face. TRUTH! JUSTICE! FREEDOM! OF THE PEOPLE BY THE PEOPLE FOR THE PEOPLE! …All well and good, but honestly (and we shall be honest; it is, after all, a virtue greatly espoused by the play), it would also have been nice for the script not to assume that its audience  was stupid enough to warrant the oft-placed spiels about democratic values and the power of the people (oh, and by the way, equating the audience with the “ditz” of the play in its several kindergarten explanations of the origins of democracy is just rude).  The characters were stereotyped and completely one-dimensional, and what little humour there was was forced and, more often than not, came across as a cheap, last-minute afterthought.  Overall, it felt more like being forced to sit through a sermon detailing the playwright’s personal political manifesto, than the highly-touted play that was, according to the buzz, a “brilliant comedy”.

That being said, perhaps the experience could have been salvaged - or dragged by the hair just high enough to breathe - by good acting, but this, too, was sadly lacking. Deborah Hay (Billy) was bad (more on that later). Thom Marriott (Brock) was decent but not worth writing home about. The only relatively good performance was Patrick Galligan as Devery - who was also the only relatively well-rounded character.

The direction was no better. Whether a choice of the actor or the director, Deborah Hay’s act as the overly-caricatured “dumb blonde” started to get tiring long before the intermission; it didn’t get much better from there.  Understandable though it may be for her character to be emphasized for comedic effect, there was no need for it to be so overly exaggerated as though anything less would fail to impress upon the audience just how dumb and how hopeless she really was.   Like most of the play’s other flaws, subtlety seemed to be the key term that neither the director, nor the actors, nor the playwright ever bothered to understand.

We had hoped that the next day’s matinee performance “Brief Encounters” would redeem the festival, but all we got was more bad acting, poor directorial choices, and cheap attempts at laughs. Although the scripts (written by Noel Coward after all) were probably quite good, they were completely obscured by the inanity of the productions. Sad as it may be, the only thing these productions taught us was to value other theatres that much more.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 18th, 2009 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Review, arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.