ON WITH THE SHAW

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

A MODEST, HEALING PROPOSAL: since funding for the arts no longer seems a feasible practice in the U.S., why not send your arts dollars to Canada? Over the years, the Canadians have brought to the arts both a responsible and an inspired use of public funds. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp., with its urbane programming, provides a cool antidote to America's increasingly hotheaded airwaves. Toronto's ambitiously international Harbourfront reading series, which brings authors before live audiences, succeeds on a scale unknown in the U.S. And Canada's two primary drama festivals, the Stratford and the Shaw, are heartening examples of that unlikely process by which public money is transformed into classy and sometimes profound entertainment.

The Shaw, located on Lake Ontario between Toronto and Buffalo, occupies three theaters in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a pretty town that might be described as the confluence of a network of bike paths and vineyards. The festival bills itself, justifiably, as a global one-of-a-kind: the world's only theatrical company dedicated exclusively to George Bernard Shaw and to those plays by other authors written during Shaw's lifetime--plays "about the beginning of the modern world."

The modern world is--at least as Shaw memorably conceived it--a place where pieties must be uprooted, conscientiously yet wittily; we must be deadly serious in our every flippancy. This year's festival includes a pair of lively, chatty Shaw productions, You Never Can Tell and The Philanderer.

You Never Can Tell revolves around the Clandon family, whose grown children know nothing of their vanished father. It starts engagingly. A young man (Richard Binsley) poises like a vampire over an attractive young woman (Jan Alexandra Smith). The scene is not grisly but comic, as the bouncy, blue-painted sea behind them suggests. The man is a fledgling dentist who has set up practice in an English coastal town. He has a lot to learn; she--Dolly Clandon--is his "first tooth."

Dolly's pretty mouth has other things to teach him as well. The girl and her twin brother (Gordon Rand) have evolved a rapid-fire patter that tongue-ties everyone around them. Smith and Rand do a nifty job of depicting the deepest sibling affinities. They can finish each other's sentences because they are, finally, one creature: that familiar Shaw character, the Bright Young Upstart, whose iconoclasm glides and shimmers rather than pounds and thunders. Unfortunately, others in the cast (Helen Taylor as the twins' icy sister Gloria, with whom the dentist falls in love; Jack Medley as the world's most dexterous waiter) are not quite up to the mark. The Clandon family's eventual reunion, like the sea around them, is a little choppy.

The Philanderer is more satisfying. Simon Bradbury is an overburdened lover who seeks to detach himself from one woman while securing himself to another. He makes an appealing Don Juan; short and tousled, he comes across as a sort of Machiavellian teddy bear.

Shaw was a master at parrying his critics, as when, replying to accusations of prolixity, he noted, "It is quite true that my plays are all talk, just as Raphael's pictures are all paint, Michelangelo's statues are all marble, Beethoven's symphonies all noise." The Philanderer mixes its talky satirical jabs at "Victorian routine" with a visceral sensation of claustrophobia. The play evokes something of the hard-pressed maneuverings that arise when romantic passions are hopelessly tangled.

Perhaps the summit of this year's festival will turn out to be a mystery, Edward Percy and Reginald Denham's Ladies in Retirement. Murder mysteries are a staple of summer repertory, often drearily so--an excuse for the worst sort of eyebrow-lifting, tiptoeing hamminess. But this one, which documents the gathering desperation of an aging woman who must find a sanctuary for her two dotty sisters, reminds us that mysteries onstage can have a creepiness they never possess on film. We behold the potential victim--a living, breathing presence--and we sense, as the victim does not, that the end approaches. Who needs cinematic special effects? What could be more "special" than life itself--especially when it is about to be annihilated?

Jennifer Phipps is superb as the gentlewoman who baby-steps toward homicide, as are her two sisters (Sharry Flett, Evelyne Anderson) in their portrayal of an uncomprehending, petulant sense of entitlement; they make a beguiling trio of witches. Simon Bradbury turns up in this production too, this time as a ne'er-do-well who, in his bumbling criminality, can hardly restrain his admiration at the bold murder he uncovers. It's a keen pleasure to step from this neat and gruesome drama into the neat and wholesome streets of an old Ontario town.