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.