On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage VICTORIAN VANITIES By Stefan Kanfer The great Victorians, as G. K. Chesterton sagely observed, were "lame giants; the strongest of them walked on one leg shorter than the other."...
...On their wedding night, the presence of body hair and breasts larger than those of an idealized sylph turned out to be repellent to him, and he made no attempt to hide his abhorrence...
...For the record, there was a final chapter to the Ruskin-Millais story...
...sound like elocution lessons rather than heartfelt phrases...
...She encouraged them with her letters, now flirting, "Perhaps some day if you are very good and behave properly at rehearsal I will write you a love letter...
...Sadly, Effie was just as naïve as her husband, and immediately assumed that she was ugly and afflicted, a loathsome sight for any man...
...There are also moments when Ruskin turns into a governess, without even the excuse of sex...
...There is a moment, he points out, when Carlyle "turns suddenly from a high creative mystic to a common Calvinist...
...Ludovica Villar-Hauser has directed with an adroit and painterly hand, emphasizing the mood of the epoch as well as the psychology of the individuals...
...Yet for all his intellect and eloquence, Ruskin remained an unworldly figure in private life...
...Besides, Seldes' imitations of Dame Edith Evans, the Duchess of Windsor and Shaw himself are inimitable...
...then again, Mrs...
...His seductions, as was usually the case with Shaw and ladies, were strictly verbal...
...Patrick Campbell, England's leading actress...
...For the performances, perspicacity, and not a few laughs, it is a carnival well worth attending...
...That she did, three years later, after much wheedling, cajoling and flattery...
...Instead, he has written a discreet drama of three sensitive individuals on a collision course that may have been set by the aggrieved party...
...Instead of trying to break them up, however, he seems to encourage their liaison, leaving the couple alone on numerous occasions...
...his missives retain their value because he addressed the subjects of philosophy, art and life...
...That Shaw was smitten is evident from the first letter in 1911, when he writes the actress: "It would be meanly cowardly to pretend that you are not a very wonderful lady, or that the spell did not work most enchantingly on me for fully 12 hours...
...After a brief interval, Effie and Millais wed...
...Effie fears affection as much as gossip...
...Pat" filled a sizable volume, and enjoyed a second life as the basis of Jerome Kilty's epistolary play, Dear Liar, which first debuted on Broadway in 1958...
...As Slade Professor at his alma mater he not only lectured on esthetics, he became the grand apologist for British imperialism...
...And I am on the verge of 56...
...But this was an age when divorce was rare and scandalous...
...Gradually the painter attempts to ameliorate the situation, speaking softly to Effie and listening to her very mild and euphemistic complaints about isolation...
...Shaw could never be content with mere chitchat...
...to the last brogue-filled declaration...
...One generation later another chaste affair took place...
...The only child of a prosperous wine merchant and a fanatically religious mother, John was a precocious, Godhaunted boy who read every chapter of the Bible every year, composed verse at the age of seven, won literary prizes at Oxford, and wrote his first book, Modern Painters, at 24...
...Now they have yet another incarnation at the Irish Repertory Theater...
...Although the three share a small cottage, their vacation begins innocently...
...He was simply, like his fictive contemporary Sherlock Holmes, a brain without emotions...
...Of his generation, John Ruskin (18191900) verged closest to genius—and to hysteria...
...She was Mrs...
...The intellectual, the artist and the lady enjoyed that rarest of Victorian desiderata, a happy ending...
...Playwright Gregory Murphy could have made the triangle a study in overheated intrigue—Eyes Wide Shut in period costume...
...In 1848, aftera hasty courtship arranged by his parents, he married the beautiful Euphemia ("Effie") Chalmers Gray...
...Indeed, he is at his least persuasive when he makes literary love and gushes like a schoolboy: "If I looked into your eyes without speaking for two minutes I might see heaven...
...Whether delivering a line like "I refuse to play the horse to your Lady Godiva" or sounding off about politics, he is G.B.S...
...Despite the advice of well-wishers, Ruskin did not contest the annulment...
...Once there the painter abandons caution, confessing his feelings to all who will hear...
...An enchanted undergraduate named Cecil Rhodes was enthralled by those words, and it is no exaggeration to say that Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope to Rhodesia, still bears the scars of Ruskin's exhortation...
...It is not his business to say nice things about it, but to shout that 'the voice of thy son's blood crieth unto God from the ground.' "To hell with your chaplain and his tragic gentleness...
...As Effie, Woodward gives one of the season's subtlest, most finely calibrated performances, her placid exterior never quite masking misery and longing...
...There are moments when George Eliot turns from a prophetess into a governess...
...violently and exquisitely in love...
...England, he boomed, "must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men, seizing every fruitful piece of waste ground she can set her foot on...
...It hardly mattered that he was married and that she was recently widowed, raising two children, and courted by countless suitors...
...Accompanying them is John's acolyte, a brilliant young landscape artist named John Everett Millais (Jy Murphy...
...Their marriage was long and fruitful...
...Yet whenever he is in the company of the Ruskins he cannot help but notice that Effie is tyrannized by her husband, a cold, remote figure who will not be contradicted in anything from the choice of menu to the kind of garment appropriate for rough weather...
...Pat's only son, Hugh, is killed, Shaw rises to a new fury...
...As the leading lady, Marian Seldes plays with all of her considerable wit and style...
...Millais is gone most of the time, roaming the countryside and sketching...
...Backed by the two old pros who play his parents, he becomes in the end a convincing and even sympathetic figure...
...As the Great Man, Donai Donnelly is perfection, having played Shaw many times before, most notably in his one-man show, My Astonishing Self...
...He wanted her to play Eliza Doolittle in his new comedy, Pygmalion...
...Shaw answers, "I want to swear...
...The couple stayed together, persisting in their mariage blanc for five years, then a third party entered the picture and altered their lives...
...She is a bit too old for the role...
...Within a few years Ruskin would become the country's most influential thinker...
...Wait for a week...
...Seff, new to the role, is a bit too haughty and explosions like, "Madam, you forget yourself...
...No use going on like this...
...I do swear...
...No, don't show me the letter...
...As it turned out he was neither homosexual nor heterosexual...
...Not long afterward he confessed to a colleague: "I fell head over heels in love with her...
...It only needs a letter from the King to make me feel that the shell was a blessing in disguise...
...A chaplain, too...
...Once in a while he makes a romantic suggestion, but the slightest overture is instantly rebuffed...
...After all, they both reasoned they were not sleeping together (and never would...
...The next shell will perhaps blow him to bits, and some other chaplain will write such a nice letter to his mother...
...Dear Liar is essentially a reading, yet director Charlotte Moore never allows her players to remain in place, filling the small stage with lively movements...
...Still, he conveys a sense of that classic Victorian paradox, the innocent sophisticate...
...The passion that Effie has kept locked away now bursts forth, and she sues for an annulment of the marriage...
...The dashing Murphy, who could have made Millais the 19th century equivalent of a rock star, shrewdly underplays his role, as does Kristin Griffith as Lady Eastlake, the one woman in whom Effie can confide...
...As for Ruskin, he outlasted the chatter, writing and teaching, going from strength to strength, instructing (and often scolding) the British public on art, politics and economics...
...Even so, none are as vigorous as the exchanges themselves...
...When Mrs...
...But I should very much like to have a nice talk with that dear chaplain, that sweet sky pilot...
...Together they expand the Samuel Beckett Theater in every sense of the word...
...now flattering, "If I could write letters like you, I would write to God...
...So matters worked out well for all concerned...
...In this she is handsomely abetted by Mark Symczak's set design, Christopher Lione's sumptuous costumes and composer Dewey Dellay's effective mood music...
...The Ruskins, John (played by Richard Seff the night I saw it) and Effie (Jennifer Woodward), journey to the Scottish highlands at John's insistence to enjoy the scenery and get away from the thronged, oppressive city...
...Conversely, he is at his most poignant and ferocious writing about the Great War, a conflict he opposed from the start...
...But inside the elaborately papered walls of the Ruskin house all was not well...
...The newlyweds traveled widely, settled in London and mixed in the highest society—including, on occasion, that of the Queen...
...That ringing defense of England's most revolutionary 19thcentury artist, J. M. W. Turner, brought overnight fame...
...Ruskin is aware of the growing attraction between his wife and guest...
...Pat is right when she observes that her correspondent's letters are a Victorian "carnival of words...
...But this liaison was rewarding, if quarrelsome, and lasted for decades...
...Pat was 50 when she played Eliza the flower girl...
...His letters to "Mrs...
...Even then the romance remains platonic until the Ruskins return to London...
...The marriage had never been consummated, because the unworldly John had derived his notion of a woman's body from marble statues...
...and then I shall be very clever and broadminded again, and have forgotten all about him...
...I shall be quite as nice as the chaplain...
...He never remarried, and never caused a breath of subsequent scandal...
...Outwardly everything was serene and content: an exemplary Victorian life filled with material goods and lofty thoughts...
...There has never been anything so ridiculous, or so delightful, in the history of the world...
...Her demand shocks London, but no one is as traumatized as John's parents (Frederick Neumann and, the night I saw it, Anita Keal), who dispense the worst kind of advice, preparing to back their precious son in a prescription for disaster—a lawsuit that will "clear his name...
...she bore him eight children...
...She writes that the chaplain of Hugh's company has sent a letter "full of tragic gentleness...
...But he was also truly seduced by the lady's theatrical beauty and charm...
...At the time, Shaw had an ulterior motive for his effusion...
...He was, of course, George Bernard Shaw, master playwright, pamphleteer, egomaniac, and inexhaustible correspondent...
...It is at this point that The Countess begins...
...One of the pair lived until 1940, the other until 1950, yet their roots were thoroughly, irredeemably Victorian...
Vol. 82 • August 1999 • No. 10
