The Twelve-Pound Look at the Shaw Festival delights

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The Twelve-Pound Look, a 1910 one-act by Peter Pan playwright J.M. Barrie, may be short and simplistic – but it is entirely in the Shaw Festival's sweet spot and proves a delight as this year's appetite-whetting lunchtime show.

The rich and well-connected Harry Sims (Patrick Galligan) is happily preparing for an impending knighthood – practicing for the ceremony with his much younger, second wife (Kate Besworth), who he alternately bullies and patronizes.

Alas, in arrives Kate (Moya O'Connell), a woman who has been hired to type up responses to messages of congratulations from Harry's chums and colleagues, to ruin his party preparations.

Kate is Harry's first wife – who left suddenly in the middle of the night several years earlier, leaving a note alluding to a mysterious man. They haven't seen each other since.

After he gets over his initial surprise, Harry effects a triumphant attitude – imagining that Kate must regret having left him, given that she is now working as a typist and he is on the verge of being knighted.

But Kate is entirely without remorse and lets Harry in on the story of why she left and how she left. Twelve pounds helped her buy a typewriter – and obtain financial emancipation from a husband obsessed with superficial success.

You can see where this is going, of course, but the didacticism of Barrie's comedy is leavened by its cheeky, class-skewering humour and general congeniality. Thanks to O'Connell's gleeful performance, the play – a favourite of the Actresses' Franchise League, a pre-WWI agitprop troupe dedicated to women's suffrage – never outlives its welcome; the pleasure she takes from hearing how Harry discovered her Dear John note is infectious.

Galligan does a fine job blustering about – and, briefly, showing a little humanity, too – while Besworth glitters as his unnamed second wife who may soon develop "the twelve-pound look" herself.

Director Lezlie Wade begins her production with a pair of servants singing If Eve Had Left the Apple on the Bough – a battle-of-sexes tune from an old Victor Herbert operetta – while wielding a newspaper with the banner headline "VOTES FOR WOMEN."

It's unnecessary and drearily unfunny in its over-the-top presentation – but after that she doesn't set a foot wrong. It's a nice amuse-bouche before a more serious play about work and feminism(s) like Caryl Churchill's Top Girls.

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