The Shaw Festival Theatre Review: Jerome Kilty’s Dear Liar
By Ross
It seemed like the most fitting formulation for the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario to present Dear Liar, a play, written with care by Jerome Kilty (Look Away), that centers on the witty, sharp, caustic, loving, and adoring correspondence between the world renown Bernard Shaw, who this festival was named after and pays yearly homage to, and the legendary Mrs. Patrick Campbell, an English stage actress, best known for appearing in numerous plays by Shaw, Shakespeare, and Barrie, but known to Shaw as his lovely and greatly loved “Stella“. This subtle and sweetly performed two-hander, delivered with careful contextual compassion in the beautifully Belguin Spiegeltent out back in a field behind the Shaw Festival‘s main stage (in the tent’s third and last rental season at the festival), is as fascinating for its literary and theatrical history as it is for its tender underbelly, about two people who, even in moments of harsh sarcasm and silence, loved each other with an unrequented intensity that few of us have ever felt before.
Or maybe not. Maybe the beauty of Dear Liar, created and performed most empathetically by its two captivating stars; Marla McLean (Shaw’s Witness for the Prosecution) as the legendary English stage actress, Beatrice Rose Stella Tanner (9 February 1865 – 9 April 1940), better known by her stage name Mrs Patrick Campbell; and Graeme Somerville (Shaw’s One Man, Two Guvnors) as the famous Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist, George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known, at his insistence, as Bernard Shaw; is that we all have known such a thing, at one point or another in our lives. And we have loved that someone deeply and with all our heart, only to never find the opportunity or the capacity to truly inhabit it fully. They certainly knew how to express themselves to one another, as these letters and this play’s fantastical formulation clearly show, but life and its societal considerations and constructs never allowed them to fully live in their love openly and honestly. And in that structured stance, the true heartache of their love hangs in the air softly and sadly.
Following their decades-long written relationship, through their written words, letters, and some of the scenes that Shaw wrote specifically for “his Stella,” Dear Liar plays on the “two-star system“, letting this pair of actors have free range inside the circular curated space, thanks to design coordinator Aurora Judge (Shaw’s Tons of Money) and the solid work of lighting designer Jeff Pybus (Coal Mine’s People, Places and Things). It’s dynamic and engaging, tender and fierce, this fencing match of love and desire, as we watch the two talented actors negotiate their deep love and affection for each other, while also living very separate lives with husbands, wives, and children that have nothing to do with the other.
Theatre is where the two could honestly and passionately come together and stand side by side without the world crushing the electric energy they had for one another. Shaw, within his letters to “his Stella“, confessed to having crafted many of his characters after his Mrs Patrick Campbell as his muse and model. Although this was not the first character that Shaw wrote with her in mind, the part of Eliza Doolittle in his Pygmalion was expressly written for her to play, and in 1912, they began negotiations for its production on the London stage. It was there, within those meetings, when the infatuation took on a power that almost overwhelmed them. And through numerous tragic accidents and complications, at the age of forty-nine years old, Mrs. Patrick Campbell finally originated the role. It was a triumph that led her to take the play to New York and on tour in 1915, as well as playing Eliza once again, to great acclaim, in the 1920 revival in London.
“Someone should have said Hush just once,” but their passionate, yet unconsummated love for one another stays solidly as the central theme in this deliciously crafted dance for decades. It circles and circulates around the space like carnivore and prey, with each one taking the lead at some point through witty romanticisms and sarcastic jabs at each other’s talent and creativity. Through world wars and conflict, both internal and external, and many periods of silence and the withholding of love, the two remained locked in this cycle of tenderness, care, and jealousy, etched in quiet acts of betrayal and abandonment, but forever returning to their deep love for one another time and time again. “When I am solitary, you are with me,” Shaw wrote to his Stella, speaking the words that transform ideas and situations poetically and emotionally into something deeper and more profound.
They both were weavers of words, even as one held firm to his “Superman” aesthetic and the other always painted herself as less than, in regards to grammar and writing skills. “Then you still love me“, is the ideal, even as you call me your “squashed cabbage leaf,” suggesting that he made Eliza a Cockney just to torture her nightly. But eventually, it was Campbell who broke off the relationship (somewhat) as Pygmalion became the worldwide celebrated theatrical sensation that it still is. And despite their marriages and squabbles, which the letters so clearly contain, they attempted to forge a friendship, taunt and tight with adoration and love. Still, Shaw never again wanted his Stella to originate any of the future roles he had written in her image, like Hesione Hushabye in Heartbreak House. That stance, sadly, seemed to be born out of his deep feelings of abandonment and hurt, with the compulsion of love just underneath and out of reach.
They fought and argued in ways that would make any other run, but it’s clear, through their correspondence, that they never could quite let each other go. “Do you mind, darling?” she asks, about letting a resentment fade into the background so they could regain their footing with one another. That’s one thing they seemed to be able to do for one another, even as they battled about the publishing or selling of any of their letters when the impoverished Campbell needed it the most. Most of the letters were not published until 1952, over a decade after Campbell died in France, aged 75, of pneumonia (what would Eliza have to say about that?) and two years after Shaw’s death. Her death, clearly a meaningful, sad moment for the man, was one of the few deaths of a personal nature that he ever noted in his personal diaries.
The history of these two celebrated theatrical souls lives large in this meticulously well-crafted staging, with both etching out figures, dressed to perfection, illuminating both the time and place, as well as the heart of their complicated connection. It’s more tender than heartbreaking, in a way, while also overflowing with fascinating formulations and sharp wit. If only the art of penmanship still lived on as cleverly as it did back when we put ink to paper and created art in letter writing. McLean’s Campbell clearly captured my heart with the way the actor playing the actress captures her complicated emotional terrain and slyly delivers it. One of Campbell’s best-known remarks, uttered upon hearing about a male homosexual relationship (but not said in this play), was “My dear, I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.” It’s a stance that solidified my love for this woman and delivered me strongly into the arms of Dear Liar. It’s a Shaw Festival dance of love that will last forever, and even though it won’t shake the foundations of this atmospheric tent, it will touch both your emotional heart and your theatrical curiosity of two well-known fighters that live and breathe in theatrical history and in their letters of love to one another.
