I don’t quite understand what happened here. This was my most anticipated production of the season- a small chamber piece from and featuring two of my favourite festival artists- but I’m fairly certain the show was pitched as an original (performers Marla McLean and Graeme Somerville are credited as “co-creators”), an intimate work crafted out of non-narrative material, specifically designed to play in the unique Spiegeltent space in the 11am lunchtime slot (it does also have some performances at 1 & 7 but it’s the 11 that most interests me). The whole point, I could have sworn, was to present something fresh and intimate out of lesser-known mandate material (a lovely concept for supplementary programming). But at some point along the way, the team decided to simply stage an existing play rather than pursue this creation concept. After all, if someone has already written a play using the letters between Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell, why not just do that play instead of writing a new one based on the letters between Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell?

Couple of problems there, the first being that Jerome Kilty’s existing play based on the chosen source material is not very interesting. It’s long, dry, and incredibly stuffy. It gains nothing from being played in such a unique venue, it requires an intermission that said venue isn’t particularly well equipped to facilitate, and it literally does not fit into its timeslot. The production also desperately needs a director, which it does not have.

The lunchtime show was a lovely idea back when it first appeared in the form of a 30-45min one-act at the Royal George, the program stuffed with an insert offering a discount on lunch at a local partnering restaurant with the presentation of your ticket. It was an opportunity for patrons to fill out their day of theatre and integrate local businesses into the Shaw experience. You’d leave the one-act well before noon, have time for a leisurely lunch, then meander over to your 2pm matinee. The Shaw’s decision to move their showtimes from 2 & 8 to 1 & 7 isn’t my favourite call in general (it makes dinner pretty close to impossible) but I understand theoretically wanting day trippers to make it home not too long after midnight. But this show in the 11am timeslot is a full two hours long, and the matinee begins at 1- this math does not math and it’s rough watching patron after patron demand answers from a front of house staff trying their best to facilitate an impossible transition (I was lucky that my 1pm show was in the studio theatre just steps from the Spiegeltent and there were enough other patrons in my shoes that the matinee was planned to start a few minutes late. If I’d been due at the Royal George, I doubt I would have made it).

All this I could forgive (well, I don’t know, proper scheduling is at the heart of a rep company running smoothly, but you know what I mean) if the compromise was made in order to do a really great existing play. This is not that. It’s unimaginative, over-descriptive, and completely lacks perspective. Perhaps most criminally, the play makes less than zero use of the chemistry between its real-life-couple performers as they spend all their time literally narrating letters rather than actually playing opposite each other (a stolen glance backwards during a technically offstage moment revealed the show’s one true beat of connection). The longing and heat that underlies the source material is nearly entirely absent. The sadness, too, gets buried under propriety and not in a way that magnifies it. I’m not sure what went wrong here but the result definitely feels far from its promise.