Theater Review: Pearl’s ‘Candida’ played perfectly

By Joseph Hurley

CANDIDA, by Bernard Shaw. Starring Joanne Camp. The Pearl Theatre Company, 80 St. Mark’s Pl., NYC. Through Oct. 11.

If done conventionally, or carelessly, "Candida" can easily come off as one of George Bernard Shaw’s most annoying plays, with the heroine’s virtuous character edging toward intolerable smugness and infuriating self-satisfaction.

Fortunately, the Pearl Theatre Company’s sparkling new production of Shaw’s 1895 comedy gets just about everything right, above all remembering that the Dublin-born author was writing a comedy, a point overlooked or otherwise lost in far too many stagings of the brief, graceful three-act work.

Casting is everything in "Candida" and much too often the title role is assigned to a fading star decades too old for the role, determined to get by on the belief that the audience will find her as admirable and as desirable as do the play’s major male characters, the heroine’s husband, the Rev. James Mavor Morell, and Eugene Marchbanks, the reckless and self-centered young poet the couple has befriended.

Vulnerability is not normally a word that comes to mind in describing an actress’ performance as Candida, but among the many qualities that make Joanne Camp’s interpretation of the part so appealing and so revelatory, it is perhaps the fact that she seems, even when she is entertaining the potentially annoying adoration of everyone around her, always and unfailingly at least slightly vulnerable, ready to go crashing off into crippling self-doubt.

Director Clare Davidson has surrounded her star with a company on which it would seem difficult to improve.

Morell, all too often dealt with as a nearly unplayable character, is played here by the virile Martin Kildare with a combination of practical intelligence and physical agility that unite to create a fully fledged character who never for a moment becomes the insufferable bore the role seems to be in so many productions of the play.

At the other end of the romantic seesaw at the wry heart of "Candida" is the whining, self-pitying poet, Marchbanks, whose passion for the reverend’s wife is undiminished by the character’s inherent fatuousness. In a role played in past productions by actors as diverse as Marlon Brando and the late Burgess Meredith, the Pearl has had the wisdom to cast Daniel J. Shore, a gifted young actor who distinguished himself last season as Juliet in the off-Broadway hit, "Shakespeare’s R&J."

Shaw wrote "Candida" in 1895, or perhaps 1897, a detail on which there is a dispute among GBS sources, but the play was initially performed only for purposes of securing a copyright.

Although it was published in 1898 in a series of works GBS entitled "Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant," dubbing it one of the "Pleasant" ones, "Candida" never experienced genuine success until 1904, when it received the first of a series of well-received revivals, engendering a popularity which has never really dimmed.

In Shaw’s mind, "Candida was a kind of reversal of the core situation involving the sexual relations in Ibsen’s "A Doll’s House," written in 1879. Shaw wrote that "in the real typical doll’s house it is the man who is the doll."

The heroine of "Candida" has been called "the first of the Shavian madonnas who infantilize their male partners," but in the Pearl’s glowing, fast-paced staging of the play, the comedic combatants are so spectacularly well-matched that each member of the master’s witty triangle is fully able to give as good as he or she gets.

The Pearl Theatre’s "Candida" is something very close to a classic reborn, which is, after all, almost a mission statement for this admirable company.