THEATER.

Saints and Sinners

LINDA BRIDGES

AFEW weeks ago NR mused editorially on the spate of plays and films about Oscar Wilde. The editorial compared Wilde and his whole fin-de-sicle generation unfavorably to the great Victorians who had preceded them and the great modernists who would follow them, on the grounds of moral seriousness, citing "Wilde's one masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest," as Exhibit No. 1.

But is Earnest "Wilde's one masterpiece"? It is certainly a delicious and perfectly crafted play. And, no, it does not abound in moral seriousness. But the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, has been reopening Wilde's oeuvre in recent years. An Ideal Husband (reviewed in these pages August 28, 1995) and this season's Lady Windermere's Fan both prove to put the famous Wilde wit to the service of a deep exploration of the human heart.

Wilde's depth has been obscured for recent generations by the way he uses the conventions of melodrama in these plays. He uses them in Earnest, too: but there it is for comic effect, in a way that feels much like the irony of our own fin de sicle. In Lady Windermere, as in Ideal Husband, the wrongs and perceived wrongs, and the resulting griefs, are serious. The theme is appearance and reality, as the characters struggle with the false idealism of the lesser Victorians, in which to be worthy of love and respect the woman must never have had an impure thought, the man an ignoble one. In the final scene, Lord Windermere says, "Child, you and she belong to different worlds. Into your world evil has never entered." And his wife replies:

Don't say that, Arthur. There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand. To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice. . . . Let us go to Selby. In the rose garden at Selby the roses are white and red.

If those are startling words coming from the pen of the great aesthete, recall that Wilde once said, long before his deathbed conversion, "Catholicism is for saints and sinners. For respectable people the Anglican church will do."

We owe the recovery of this side of Wilde to the Shaw's artistic director, Christopher Newton, and his fine team of actors. In Lady Windermere Colombe Demers and Ben Carlson are perfect as the elegant young couple who come so close to the precipice. Fiona Reid as Mrs. Erlynne starts out too edgy-too much like her own Amanda in Private Lives-but deepens wonderfully. Among the galaxy of smaller parts, I would single out Barry MacGregor's endearingly feckless Lord Augustus Lorton.

At southern Ontario's other great repertory company, the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, appearance and reality are likewise the theme in Much Ado about Nothing, where trust turns out to be a worthier guide than ocular proof. Brian Bedford returns to the role of Benedick, which he has played many times in his twenty-year association with the company, this time opposite thirty-year veteran Martha Henry. "Are you sure?" asked a fellow theatergoer when told of the casting. For while it is clear from the text that Beatrice and Benedick are significantly older than Hero and Claudio, they are not usually enough older to be their parents. But such are the qualities Mr. Bedford and Miss Henry bring to the roles that the casting works. Indeed the wariness of this pair, the reluctance of each to believe that the other loves, is the more believable, and the more poignant.

Richard Monette, Stratford's artistic director, still has too much of a tendency to look for new way of doing the warhorses, such as Much Ado and The Miser (both of which will be coming to New York City later this fall, giving American audiences a rare opportunity to see the dean of Canadian actors, William Hutt, without going through Customs). In these productions, Mr. Monette has added stylized touches borrowed from the Commedia dell'Arte, and he allows the physical comedy to get out of hand. However, there was an unexpected benefit, for those of us caught up in Anglican liturgical disputes, in his setting Much Ado in the twentieth century: the words (in a song borrowed from Cymbeline) "Thou thy worldly task hast done, / Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages" fit the music of a 1930s torch song with no sense of anachronism. Perhaps the fact that our greatest body of plays was written in the same linguistic period as the first Book of Common Prayer and the Authorized Version of the Bible, whose phrases permeate our literature, has given these works a mutually reinforcing effect in keeping the Tudor/Stuart idiom available to us.

The early part of that period is the setting for one of Stratford's other offerings, A Man for All Seasons, starring Douglas Rain as the eponymous St. Thomas More. The left-wing bias of the playwright, Robert Bolt, shows, not only in the narratorial Common Man (pungently acted by Brad Rudy), but also, I think, in the play's focusing on More's relation to the law and to his own self more than on his relation to God. And Rain's More is diffident in manner, reminiscent less of Paul Scofield's portrayal in the film thirty years ago (or William Hutt's here a dozen years ago) than of Waugh's Mr. Scott-King. But it is a portrayal that grows into life; the final meeting between Sir Thomas and his wife, Lady Alice (Diane D'Aquila), and Sir Thomas's statement before his execution are moving in proportion to their lack of sentimentality.

There is much else in the cornucopias set forth at both houses. But can one speak of the Shaw without mentioning the old fox himself? This year's main Shavian offering is Major Barbara, one of the plays that justify the classic Hirschfeld cartoon of GBS as puppeteer. Shaw found his characters' humanity less interesting than ideas. So here it's no fault of Jim Mezon, Sharry Flett, Kelli Fox, and the rest that an air of unreality pervades the last act. You would not catch one of these characters talking about red roses and white.