Shaw Festival: recovering the past

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE,  Ontario; Thursday morning --

"Dah-da-da-dah-da-da-Dah, Maa-aame! "Dah-da-da . . . . "

I can't get the damn tune out of my head, inserted there at Tuesday's CLO opening and playing on auto-rewind ever since, with no mute button in sight. Usually a familiar musical will deposit three or four tunes in that space between my ears, ordering them up on auto-scramble, especially when I'm trying to clear my mind to focus on something important, like finding just the right word to describe a reaction I can't understand until I find the word it matches . . . or a REALLY important moment, like a par putt at the climax of a $1 nassau. 

Niagara-on-the-Lake (Lake Ontario, to be precise), or NOTL as it's abbreviated, though I've never been sure just how to say that, is in the heart of Candian fruit and wine country, and our very comfortable hotel, the Pillar & Post, is in part made up of a Victorian-era canning factory. It's a little outside town -- about a 15-minute walk with my bad knee -- and I'd prefer to be right in town at the Prince of Wales, which we do use on some trips, but the P&P has its attractions, including a very prettily embowered outdoor pool which this morning (sunny, after yesterday's drizzle) is bedecked with good looking women.

But my mind is on last night's play, Terrence Rattigan's "After the Dance," which I expected to be one of those soppy moral melodramas, just the kind of play that the angry young men of the "Look Back in Anger" generation and their successors swept off the English boards.

It is that, of course, but it turns out to be much more -- in a way, a sort of rediscovery, exactly what you hope for from a big, experienced repertory company with 40-plus years of mining the (mainly) English theater of the late 19th and early 20th century -- what they call their "mandate," the period of G.B. Shaw's long and productive life (1857-1950).

"After the Dance" turns out to be nothing less than a state of the nation play, the kind of thing we expect now from David Hare, but in a subtle way. It's set in 1938, on the eve of the catastrophe of World War II, focusing on a generation just young enough not to have died in the futile trenches of WW I but casualties of that war nonetheless, their optimism and capability sapped by the pervading nihilism. No one ever refers to politics, either national or international, but we feel the anaologies between their lives and those of the nation and the world in almost every line. I'm going to enjoy exploring this in more depth for a proper review.

Recovering the past, you could call it -- recovering a play that was never a great hit when it first appeared, running for just 60 performances when it debuted in 1939, when it probably seemed already old news as the war came rushing on. It's had only a couple of revivals since. It's also recovering what the play tells us obliquely about the individual caught in the rush of history. And coming to the Shaw, as I have a couple of times a year since 1981, is also a recurring recovery of the past, since the company has such consistency of personnel, year after year, and each play vibrates with echoes of previous Shaw Fest plays in the same places. When you see something else, you see many of the same actors, wisps of the previous play still clinging to them, and you're caught in a web of remembrance, motifs and themes layered on each other, the stage reflecting back layers of your own life over that same drift of years.

I think T.S. Eliot said something vaguely related to all this in "Tradition and the Individual Talent."

Just kidding. NOTL is no place for heavy thoughts. It's a beautiful day today and the world beckons. Right now I have to get going, to help my group through the morning and make it to today's matinee of "Wonderful Town." And THAT should finally clear that "Maa-aame" out of my head.