The backbone of the Shaw Festival is and has to be the work of George Bernard Shaw. As much as success with work closer to the edges of the mandate is a boon to the company that continues to push its long stagnant boundaries, at the end of the day what this company has that no other does is specialization. The Shaw Festival acting company, theoretically and historically, are experts at performing texts that don’t get much performance in North America outside of this Niagara-on-the-Lake enclave.

This expertise is evident in this season’s production of Major Barbara as longstanding company favourites Patrick Galligan and Fiona Byrne fluidly exchange cutting barbs and verbose philosophy in perfectly trained accents, looking as comfortable in Gillian Gallow’s detailed 1906 costumes as in jeans. Trouble is, as the festival moves further and further away from the mandate texts (the just-announced 2026 season yet again features only one Shaw play), that expertise is lessening. The young company members here are noticeably weaker with the material than artists of comparable seniority the last time the company did Major Barbara. Galligan, Byrne, and Patty Jamieson aside, the accents are rough, the character work broad, the physicality awkward. Shaw is, like Shakespeare, a skillset unto itself beyond basic dramatic skills and, with only a few Shavian roles up for grabs each season, the young company doesn’t seem to be mastering the craft through experience. When they share the stage with the likes of Galligan and Byrne, that comes through all the more clearly.

Director Peter Hinton, usually a dynamic eye for a heady text, leads a production that lends itself to intellect investigation but doesn’t capture much emotion or build any momentum. Gabriella Sundar Singh’s Barbara is a wild-eyed zealot, a bold intellectual choice that gives the audience little to latch onto, while Gallow’s intriguing set design facilitates little movement but leads to classroom-style thematic speculation (the steps to the lit doors are at strange heights- a space-saving practicality or a commentary on the arduous task of climbing towards the light?). The set is a box, but nothing is made of whether the characters operate in or out of it.

There’s a distinct pressure that comes with being the one and only full Shaw play in a Shaw Festival season and I’m not sure there’s any text in the writer’s vast canon that could fully live up to that pressure, no matter how great the production. Said canon is too vast and varied to have just a single representative title at a festival bearing its name and, certainly, the technical skills to deliver said representative text need to be non-negotiable. This stark and academic Major Barbara with its uneven cast but plenty of worthy elements could happily sit alongside a similarly flawed but contrasting second Shaw text but, on its own, it doesn’t stand quite tall enough.