Berkshires arts reviews

October 3, 2007 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Jerome Kilty’s Dear Liar is one of two Irish plays being offered in repertory at the Chester Theatre Company in its annual Founders Director’s Production. Directed by Vincent Dowling, who in 1990 founded the company as The Miniature Theatre of Chester, it is a glorious romp into the lives and relationship of George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Pat Campbell.

The play is based on the letters that flew back and forth between Shaw and Mrs. Pat Campbell in early decades of the 20th century when she was the most famous actress in London and Shaw its most famous playwright. They begin with Shaw trying to woo her to play the lead in “Pygmalion,” a play he wrote for her, seeing her as the only possible Eliza Doolittle.

The setting for the two character play is a stage in which stage right belongs to Mrs. Pat who has an elegant writing desk and also a hatbox of luxurious furs, and stage right, the domain of Shaw, comfortable enough but dominated by a lectern-type desk that reminds us he was a man of many words—on the soap-box as well as on paper.

Although to a certain extent, the two are confined to their areas, Dowling’s admirable direction keeps the action lively and there are moments of shared space that are telling ones and keep the plot dynamic and extremely lively. This is very definitely not just a play about letters. Both letter writers personalities explode in the letters.

Shaw is played by the talented and charismatic David Birney as a many sided man who over the course of the play and his pursuit of Mrs. Pat goes through joys and agonies. Beginning with his admiration for her as an actress, he soon finds himself unwittingly drawn into the agony of wooing her as a person as well.

The letters begin when Shaw, in his fifties and a bit older than the famous Mrs. Pat, has recently married his wife Charlotte (in a strange a-sexual marriage arrangement). The letters end many years later.

For Shaw the association with Mrs. Pat is wrenching. He begs her, scolds her, calls her “dear liar”. And he confides in her his own personal agonies. In one of the most wrenching scenes in the first Act he shares with her his horrified presence at the cremation of his mother, an occasion in which his friend Granville Barker accompanied him. As he relives it in his letter, Birney’s presentation is wrenching and so real that Barker seems on the stage with him.

At other times he can be gay and charming and persuasive. In one of the few scenes in the play that the two actors can really share, a trial reading of scenes from “Pygmaion” in which he is still desperately trying to convince her to play the head, he is hilarious and dynamic. And in old age, self-angry at having grown old, still feisty. Still the GBS he has created for the world. A fine performance.

Bairbre Dowling gives us a Mrs. Pat who may not be as verbal as Shaw and who thus writes shorter letters, but a woman who is more than his equal in insisting on being her own self. She is a commanding presence, tall, stately elegant, and extremely beautiful. She is a fine actress and she knows it. But she also is a strong woman. She is no longer young, has born two children in her first marriage and loses her husband in the Boer War about the time Shaw’s pursuit of her begins.

She knows who she is but does not queen it; indeed she has a calm, almost stoic ability to be herself, know herself. For years she argues she is too old to play Eliza, a 19 year old flower girl. But after years of persuasion, at age 49 she plays the role to critical acclaim in America as well as in London. Dowling succeeds brilliantly in evoking this stunning woman, so sure of herself, even when physically injured in a taxi smash, even in hr skillful handling of Shaw her persistent wooer with a calm strength. She is stunning in her physical presence, playing the role with the authority Mrs. Pat knows she has.

Birney and Dowling make for perfect casting in this duo.

Bairbre Dowling is also cast in the second Irish play—also a two character one in which she plays opposite her talented father Vincent. With her playing leads in both plays and he directing one and playing a lead in the second, life must be pretty full of theatre for the talented pair during the two weeks of the run.

A review of the second play “The Gravity of Honey by Bruce E Rodgers will appear in this space in time for you to make either or both of these Irish celebratory plays. The theatre is only a 35 minute drive from Lenox, and about the same from Pittsfield. The matinee I saw was sold out and the applause sincere and prolonged. And it’s a charming little theatre.

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