From the left: Sanjay Talwar as Rev. James Mavor Morell, Sochi Fried as Candida Morell, Ric Reid as Mr. Burgess and Johnathan Sousa as Eugene Marchbanks in Candida at the Shaw Festival.Emily Cooper/Shaw Festival
- Title: Candida
- Written by: Bernard Shaw
- Director: Severn Thompson
- Actors: Sochi Fried, Johnathan Sousa and Sanjay Talwar
- Company: Shaw Festival
- Venue: Royal George Theatre
- City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
- Year: Runs to Oct. 11, 2024
Polyamory, so the meme goes, is for people who have a kink for scheduling.
Had the concept been around in his time then, Rev. James Mavor Morell (Sanjay Talwar), one of three characters in a proto-throuple at the centre of Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play Candida, would certainly have been a prime candidate for trying it out.
In the opening scene of that Victorian comedy, now back on stage at the Shaw Festival, Morrell, a Christian socialist minister, and Prossie Garnett (Claire Jullien), his adoring secretary, are hard at work at their most favourite intimate activity – trying to fit in yet another speaking engagement into his busy calendar.
Between all his visits to communist-anarchist, social-democrat and Fabian societies, Morrell is so booked up preaching about social justice and Jesus that he seems to have forgotten to pencil in enough time with his wife, Candida (Sochi Fried).
Unsurprisingly, then, another man has swept in to the void. A sensitive young poet named Eugene Marchbanks (Johnathan Sousa) returns with Candida, back from a trip out of town and immediately confronts Morrell: “I love your wife.”
Sochi Fried, right, as Candida Morell, and Johnathan Sousa, as Eugene Marchbanks, appear in Candida at the Shaw Festival. Shaw's main gambit with its production of the Bernard Shaw classic is to set the action in 1954.Emily Cooper/Shaw Festival
Morrell is unperturbed; indeed, he tells Marchbanks that he likes it when other men fall for Candida. “But I say, Eugene: Do you think yours is a case to be talked about?” the minister asks. “You’re under 20: she’s over 30.”
This, what I suppose passed for “age gap” discourse back in the day, does not deter Marchbanks – who has convinced himself Morrell is not fulfilling Candida the way he should.
“A woman, with a great soul, craving for reality, truth, freedom, and being fed on metaphors, sermons, stale perorations, mere rhetoric,” he says, appalled. “Do you think a woman’s soul can live on your talent for preaching?”
Candida was a sensation when it premiered, poking at the conventions of marriage and presenting a mother as the object of a romantic tug-of-war between a reformer and an artist. Indeed, in 1904, Shaw’s play reached New York in a production that was deemed by the Sun to have sparked “Candidamania.”
Candidamania has kept on, to a certain extent, to this day in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.; director Severn Thompson’s new production is the seventh in the Shaw Festival history, which ties it for most produced show at the repertory company.
In the summer of 2024, however, with a mania having instead erupted around Miranda July’s novel All Fours, about a wife in peri-menopause having a second sexual awakening with a younger man, there’s little to cause much of a stir in Shaw’s script.
Indeed, Candida is too much on the sidelines for the play to feel particularly in touch with contemporary currents. The cliffhanger before the intermission sees Morrell heading off to speechify and leaving her alone with Marchbanks, trusting her not to stray but stay.
This would be more exciting if there were a little more chemistry among the three leads.
Fried, a well-established stage actor but still a relative newcomer to Shaw, is sensational as the seductively smart Candida, with an appealing growl to her delivery of lines.
But both Talwar and Sousa play up the comic and heady sides of their characters in their portrayals; the former is confident but pompous, the latter nervy but nervous.
Their lack of appeal seems like a conscious choice on the part of the production, with the director perhaps inspired by Candida’s famous line about deciding – this is a semi-spoiler, so watch out – to choose “the weaker of the two” men at the end.
But with neither Morrell nor Marchbanks seeming a strong match for the object of their affection, the play simply doesn’t quite pop – with some of the most fun coming from Jullien (who was an excellent Candida herself in 2011), Damien Atkins and Ric Reid’s performances as minor characters.
The Shaw Festival’s had a great run of late with Shaw’s more obscure and unwieldy plays – perhaps because they have to justify themselves through their stagings. For Candida, Thompson’s main gambit is to move the action to 1954, manifested in Ming Wong’s pleasing costume design and a little Chet Baker.
That era’s a bit done, though, truth be told – with Shaw’s lesser-known but better comedy about marriage, Getting Married, having just been transposed to the 1950s at the festival a few seasons ago. It’s ahistorical and boomer-centric to think that’s the only decade people questioned marriage. Why revive old plays if not to challenge our preconceptions about the past?
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