THE WAY OF THE WORLD
Written by William Congreve
Directed by Peter Hinton
Starring Caroline Cave, Mike Shara and Tanja Jacobs
At the Young Centre in Toronto
**½
The convoluted plot of William Congreve's The Way of the World is tricky to follow under the best of circumstances. In his stylish new production of the classic Restoration comedy, director Peter Hinton extracts a number of exceptional performances from his ensemble, but has little success in untangling the play's confusing web of blackmail plots, disputed inheritances and prenuptial agreements for the audience.
Soulpepper's programs prefer contextualizing essays to synopses, so here's the main thrust: Mirabell (Mike Shara) wants to marry Millamant (Caroline Cave), but her aunt Lady Wishfort (Tanja Jacobs) hates him "more than a Quaker hates a parrot" and vows to withhold her niece's dowry if the two wed.
In order to get at the cash, Mirabell has his servant Waitwell (Michael Simpson), who is married to Wishfort's servant Foible (Maria Vacratsis), impersonate his rich uncle to woo Lady Wishfort. He then plans to blackmail her into giving him permission to marry Millamant.
And that's only the half of it. Characters are often not only married, but carrying on more than one affair. It's a comedy of manners, but since most of the manners are alien to our time, the plotting can seem particularly preposterous.
To make the audience more comfortable, director Hinton has moved the play to somewhere in the late 1950s or early 1960s, a decision that affects Carolyn Smith's costumes and set more than anything.
Ultimately, it has an "every time" feel to it despite the appearance of a Playboy club and the hilarious use of a vibrating belt exercise machine (you know, the ones that "shake your fat away").
With heightened performances and physical comedy, Hinton's approach is very entertaining, but does little for clarity. At intermission, the chatter was largely about trying to figure out what was going on. Even having read the play before, I found myself frequently lost. Better to just ride with it.
The Way of the World is a co-production between Ottawa's National Arts Centre, where Hinton is the adventurous artistic director, and Soulpepper, whose soulmate playwright remains Chekhov. You can feel a (mostly healthy) clash of styles here, notably in the performances of two of the leading ladies: Tanja Jacobs and Nancy Palk.
From her first appearance as Lady Wishfort, Jacobs is delightfully and daringly over the top, a cross between Dame Edna and Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous. She spends much of the play in a monstrous dress that looks like a mushroom cloud of orange sorbet and candy floss; she contorts her face and body into terrible shapes and lives up to Waitwell's description of her as "the antidote to desire." The strange, hoity-toity voice and accent she has adopted, however, makes quite a bit of what she says unintelligible. On the opposite side of the spectrum you have Palk, who takes a more traditional Soulpepper approach to the play. She speaks precisely and is very clear in action and intention, imbuing her machinating Mrs. Marwood with great humanity. But you get the sense that she hasn't quite stretched herself to where the director was going. In between, striking perhaps the ideal balance between Jacobs's style and Palk's substance is the wonderful actress Caroline Cave. Her Millamant is aloof and mannered, but she always maintains a connection to recognizable emotion even in her biggest moments. Her performance is matched in quality by Mike Shara as her Machiavellian suitor Mirabell. In their famous "proviso" scene, in which they devise a sort of philosophical prenuptial agreement for their marriage, this production of The Way of the World achieves its one perfect (and sexy) moment.
The Way of the World runs until Aug. 2 (416-866-8666).
J. Kelly Nestruck