On the Road to Secular Salvation

By T.E. Kalem

Two views of power, Shaw's and Ibsen's, in Ontario

The lust for power is the unifying theme of the two plays that opened Canada's annual Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, last week--but not power for its own sake. The central figures in both works, one by George Bernard Shaw and the other by Henrik Ibsen, are secular Salvationists who dream of bettering mankind's lot. One thrives; the other is doomed.

MAJOR BARBARA by Bernard Shaw

Shaw was a born preacher who loved to toss firecrackers of paradox into the pews of respectability.

On the firing line here are two mettlesome protagonists. Barbara Undershaft (Janet Amos), a major in the Salvation Army, proudly marches under its motto of "Blood and Fire" and does the Christian God's goodly work among the poor. Andrew Undershaft (Douglas Campbell), her munitions-tycoon father, marches under the maxim of "money and gunpowder." And yet this merchant of death is an apostle of life. His argument to Barbara is that he feeds and houses his workers so that they can find their souls, while she drugs the poor with a soup-kitchen dole.

But the play is less polemical than comedic. It begins .with a family confab in Lady Britomart Undershaft's London town house. Long estranged from Andrew, the haughty lady (Betty Leighton) knows her select social turf, but that's all. Daughter Sarah (Janet Barkhouse) is enamored of a bean-brained fop (Briain Pet-chey) and Barbara is in love with Adolphus Cusins (Tom Kneebone), an impecunious teacher of Greek.

Summoned home after a 20-year absence to underwrite these marriages, Andrew is most concerned that Barbara should be squandering her high passion on the Salvation Army. He agrees to see her shelter if she and Cusins will visit his cannon works. At the shelter, we meet sycophantic derelicts, ruffians and pitiably broken men. But it is Undershaft who nonchalantly breaks Barbara's heart, and opens her eyes. He signs a check for -L-5,000, matching a sum from a notorious distiller named Bodger, so that the Salvation Army shelters may stay open. When the Army's general accepts the money, Barbara breaks down, sobbing, "Drunkenness and murder! My God: why hast thou forsaken me?"

But the cold Shavian in Undershaft would say that only illusion has deserted her. He has previously expressed his creed to Cusins: "Have you ever been in love with Poverty, like St. Francis? Have you ever been in love with Dirt, like St. Simeon? Have you ever been in love with disease and suffering, like our nurses and philanthropists? ... I have been a common man and a poor man; and it has no romance for me." At the arms plant, with disconcerting alacrity, Barbara and Cusins accept the Undershaft inheritance, saying they plan to "make war on war."

In the key roles, Douglas Campbell and Janet Amos somewhat lack the highly charged authority that their parts call for. Undershaft should be as formidable as a Caesar in mufti; Campbell is more like the amiable president of a swank country club. The way in which Amos' Barbara fishes for human souls is energetic but rather like a Girl Scout trying to land a cookie order. Kneebone makes a winningly ebullient Cusins, but it is easier to picture him running into a cannon than running the cannon works. What still runs, exuberantly after 73 years, is the play.

JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN by Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen exists here, but only as prints may be discovered in the snow without the palpable presence of a living being.

This is a wintry tale of three blasted lives ruined years before the play begins. It is a kind of autopsy performed on the emotional lives of John Gabriel Borkman (Douglas Campbell), his wife Gunhild (Frances Hyland) and her twin sister, Ella Rentheim (Kate Reid), whom John Gabriel once loved but left to further his vaulting ambitions. He "wanted to wake all the slumbering spirits of the gold." But not out of a personal mania for making money. As he says of the great steamers out on the fjord: "They make this whole round earth into one community. They spread light and warmth into human hearts in countless thousands of homes.

That's the thing I dreamed of doing."

The dream became a nightmare. The great bank Borkman heads plunges into default on overextended credits, ruining many investors. After five years in jail, he has had eight more years of self-imposed exile, pacing an upstairs room "like a caged wolf." The embittered Gunhild will not speak to him. But Ella forces a confrontation. She is dying, and she wants the Borkman son, Erhart (Hayward Morse), whom she raised as a boy, to take her name, just as Gunhild furiously wants the son to clear hers. The sisters settle old scores with each other and with Borkman. Ella accuses him of killing her ability to love, though in Reid's portrayal she is tender and valiant.

Yet another woman, Mrs. Fanny Wil ton (Diana Barrington), has won the son's heart. Fanny, seven years Erhart's senior, could be a model for the gay divorcee.

She is fun to be with and knows when to take her fun even if it might not last. As she leaves the dour house with Erhart, John Gabriel, in true Ibsenite fashion, goes out into the snow to die as the two sisters clasp hands in reconciliation. In the title role, Campbell possesses the flinty dignity of granite. But the play was quarried out decades ago.

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