CANDIDA
  Theatre Royal, Bath
Opened 10 July, 2013
***

It’s a familiar character type: the animated, engaging woman who brings out the true potential in a man by inspiring him yet not overshadowing him. Yes, in many ways Bernard Shaw’s Candida is the great-aunt, a century avant la lettre, of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of so much recent cinema. Yet there are also crucial differences. Candida does not just twinkle entrancingly, but configures both the household and his professional arrangements so that her husband, Christian Socialist preacher the Reverend James Morrell, does not even notice all the problems there aren’t. And, most crucially, the play is actually about her, not him.
    
Nevertheless, this 1894 work is almost candy-floss by Shavian standards, one of his “Plays Pleasant” and so slight it even runs at less than two hours including an interval, which is almost unthinkable for a GBS play. Simon Godwin’s Bath revival is perhaps a shade too keen to enjoy the comedy; it does not gee matters up implausibly, but the central trio of performances do not jell. Jamie Parker’s Rev James is all muscular Christianity both physically and intellectually, and talks with the slight gabble of a P.E. master. Charity Wakefield’s Candida, in contrast, plays the diction so assiduously that sometimes her crisp period enunciation trips her up. And Frank Dillane gets all the swooning and rhapsodising of Eugene Marchbanks, the teenage poet infatuated with Candida and determined to provoke a choice between him and James, but the son of a Victorian earl would probably not use so many glottal stops. The supporting players each get a decent bite of the cherry, foremost among them Christopher Godwin, unobtrusively excellent as ever (replacing the indisposed David Troughton) as Candida’s jocular but unashamedly acquisitive businessman father.
    
It has been suggested that when he wrote this triangular relationship Shaw had in mind his own predilection for non-sexual affairs, and that this was in turn his way of redeeming (or sanitising) his own mother’s relationship with musician George Vandeleur Lee. Whatever the motivation, there is something about the set-up which is at once too artificial to be persuasive and not artificial enough to be Shaw in top debating gear. You get carried away by the Manic Pixie aspect, but you never really forget that it’s just a Dream.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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