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Love, Marriage and Middle-Class Morality Go On Trial In Lively, Production of Shaw's "Candida" at McCarter

Donald Gilpin

Controversy over the institution of marriage may take different forms over the years, but it never seems to disappear from the forefront of our cultural consciousness. "There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage," opined the great Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), and, with marriage rates declining, divorce rates soaring and same-sex partners seeking civil and theological sanctions, who knows what he might have to say about the current status of marriage in our society.

Shaw's comedy Candida, written in 1894 and currently playing in a lucid, spirited production at McCarter's Matthews Theatre, has plenty to say about the flimsiness of many of our most cherished notions concerning that troubled institution.

Prolific author of a diverse body of work, including more than 30 major plays, Shaw loved nothing better than puncturing the balloons of his bourgeois contemporaries and attacking conventional ideas on gender roles, marriage, fidelity and religion – all of which provide juicy targets in Candida, an early masterpiece.

Set in the sitting room of a northeast London parsonage, the story revolves around three main characters: James Morrell (Michael Siberry), an idealistic, progressive Socialist minister of the Church of England; his charming wife Candida (Kate Forbes); and the impassioned young poet Eugene Marchbanks (Jeffrey Carlson), who enters the home, announces to Morrell, "I love your wife," and proceeds to demolish many of Morrell's previously unquestioned beliefs about his marriage and himself.

The proceedings, stretching over three acts from morning to the night of a single day, culminate in Candida's announcement that she must choose between the two men and that she will conduct an "auction," in which the two men must present their cases. The climactic scene, rich in drama and comedy with frequent surprises, is a triumph of Shaw's playwriting, of Lisa Peterson's direction, and of sophisticated, skillful character work by all three actors.

Candida could certainly be classified as one of Shaw's "discussion plays," and the dialogue is full of Shaw's customary wit, politics, and intellectual ideas. Amidst all the discussion, however (and the need for more attentive listening than the average contemporary audience is accustomed to exert), Ms. Peterson keeps the pace moving swiftly. The dialogue bristles, the comedy resonates richly, and the characters – including three finely drawn supporting roles – come to life with vivid and memorable expression. At just over two hours, the evening passes swiftly and enjoyably.

Mr. Carlson's animated Marchbanks (He played Romeo in Emily Mann's 2001 production of Romeo and Juliet at McCarter, and was recently on Broadway in Edward Albee's The Goat and in Boy George's musical Taboo) is a whirlwind of sighing, languishing and expostulating in the throes of tormented, anarchic, angelic, unrequited love. With his long bedraggled hair, worn jacket, tattered fingerless gloves and brown canvas shoes, this displaced son of aristocracy seems an alien presence by the hearth in the family sitting room. His poetic soul would be more at home on the heath or in the nighttime city streets.

Marchbanks is unquestionably an alien presence to the patrician Morrell. In the hands of these two superb actors, the two foils clash dynamically. The presence of Mr. Siberry's burly liberal, middle-aged minister and the boyish, impetuous poet on stage together provides continuously high tension, crackling conflict, and surprising comic twists and turns. Marchbanks does not hesitate to go on the attack in quest for the love of Candida: "A woman with a great soul, craving for reality, truth, freedom and being fed on metaphors, sermons, stale perorations, mere rhetoric? Do you think a woman's soul can live on your talent for preaching?"

Marchbanks is the truth-teller, a dangerous presence in any family setting, as Candida explains, "Eugene's always right. He understands you; he understands me ... and you, James – you understand nothing."

Ms. Forbes' Candida, the object of both men's affections, provides a strong focal point for the production. She asserts an appropriately maternal control of herself and the two male protagonists. The critic Eric Bentley has compared Candida to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, but here the woman is clearly in charge, and it is the husband who has become the pampered doll, highly successful in his career perhaps, but so deluded and helpless in the sphere of his own home or in the business of real life.

Polly Lee as the efficient, nervous and infatuated secretary, Michael Milligan as the comically mannered and finicky curate, and Robert Langdon Lloyd as Candida's businessman father all assist in developing the character of Morrell and creating their own strikingly interesting and entertaining figures of the world of late Victorian London.

The unit set, designed by Neil Patel with lighting by David Weiner, depicts the Morrell's sitting room and study with three enormous windows on the upstage wall, the minister's disorderly work table (no less than fifteen feet long) at center stage, and a fireplace, the family hearth, downstage center. The dramatic green leafy wallpaper design appropriately evokes the pre-Raphaelite inspiration of William Morris' Arts and Crafts Movement, with which Shaw allied himself. The setting is impressive, but overwhelming in its proportions and a bit perplexing as the residence of a socialist minister.

Playgoers with a psychoanalytical bent, wanting to explore further Shaw's creation of Candida, might well see alter egos of the playwright – and at the same time the brilliance of this play – in all three of his central characters. Certainly he identified with Morrell, a socialist, a moralist, an idealist and man, like himself, "full of spiritual enthusiasm and sympathetic emotion." But at the same time he perceived Morrell as "a great baby, pardonably vain of his powers and unconsciously pleased with himself."

Shaw also must have possessed great affinity for Marchbanks, the amorous young poet, the truth teller, shattering the smug assumptions of the minister and his world. Ultimately, however, in creating this play, Shaw perhaps plays the role of Candida, the maternal figure, presiding over the proceedings and helping, with firmness and love, her two "boys" to better understand themselves and to find or rechart their paths in life.

The issues are infinitely complex, infinitely controversial. As Shaw later wrote in his Man and Superman, "Those who talk about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners were left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You can't have the argument both ways."

George Bernard Shaw's Candida will run through April 11 at McCarter's Matthews Theatre. For tickets and further information call (609) 258-2787 or visit www.mccarter.org.