Neil Munro and Harley Granville Barker
Shaw Director Discusses George Bernard Shaw Contemporary.
Some plays directed by Neil Munro for the Shaw Festival from 1988 to 2002 included The Marrying of Ann Leete, Rococo, The Madras House, The Secret Life and His Majesty. Here, Neil Munro discusses Granville's Waste in a 1995 interview.
What attracted you to the work of Harley Granville Barker?
Neil Munro: “I have been a (Harley Granville) Barker freak for quite some time. That was the very first show (The Voysey Inheritance) I did here in 1988. I had not talked to (then artistic director) Christopher Newton for about 15 years and he phoned me up and said (in a British accent) ‘Neil, this is Christopher,’ and I said 'Christopher who?' And he said ‘I want you to come and direct a play for me’, and I thought well, I don’t know if I want to go to the Shaw Festival. So, he sent it to me in the mail.
"It was The Voysey Inheritance and my jaw dropped at the ability of this Edwardian writer. It was a tremendously modern powerful prose he used and I am happy to say that Chris and I fell for Barker at the same time. This (Waste) will be my third Barker, I think, and I hope to do more in the seasons to come. We are trying to quietly get through the canon.
"There are only six or seven plays. Barker did not leave a great deal. And Waste is timely – a politician publicly caught in a sexual indiscretion with disastrous results – especially coming after the Clinton thing, and coming after that supreme court judge in America, and the kinds of scandals that are continuingly popping up. It's about how much real 'waste' is involved and the kind of pettifogging about who’s screwing who while major legislation, which could change history, is drifting away and falling apart."
It’s an interesting juxtaposition too, the protagonist Henry Trebell working on the disestablishment of the church and meanwhile personally dealing with the subject of abortion.
Neil Munro: “It is quite fascinating how Barker weaves idealism into a time in England when idealism was hardly prevalent at all. Again, it is one of those things where they are just about to move into the First World War.
Why did you leave Henry Trebell (David Schurmann) in the final scene?
Neil Munro: "Well, I was thinking about that and I wanted the last image of the play to be him and not to be the young boy. The young boy was funny, but what I wanted to get was a "gravestone effect". So that in a sense, you were walking through a graveyard, and there is a stone that stands for everything you have just seen, but does not declare itself.
"I wanted audiences to see just one more time the waste, just to emphasize that because all of these characters are wasted. Every single character in the play has lost something irretrievably and they are stained by it and they are hurt by it, and these are the people that are running our lives.
It was a strong ensemble…. (Fiona Reid, David Schurmann (who has done several Barker plays) Peter Hutt, Mary Haney, and William Webster.)
Neil Munro: “Yes, it was a wonderful cast and that play is extremely difficult to work on as well because Barker is so uncompromising in his prose that you needed a very strong cast to be able to pull that off.
How closely did you work with Fiona (Reid) who plays Amy O’Connell? (Henry's marital dalliance)
Neil Munro: “She was terrific like everybody else. One thing about Barker is that he elicits a tremendous amount of affection from the actors because of the nature of the piece and the dialogue, and you don’t get to do stuff like that on stage. So they all fell in love with the play immediately and then it was just a question of clarifying this and saying 'I don’t know what this means, we will find out as we work on it'.
"It was a big challenge for everybody to find the uncomfortable side of the character, the unpleasant or the unattractive sides of these people, and see to what extent we could the bring the unattractive side out without turning everybody off.”
Playwright Harley Granville Barker
|
What do you think about this article?
More in Visual & Performing Arts
Latest Articles