The rarely produced John Bull’s Other Island by George Bernard Shaw is a theatre opportunity not to be missed and judging by a recent sold out Sunday night show, three months into its run here at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, it is an opportunity appreciated. The play, a comedy with serious undertones as only Shaw can lay them, is the story of partner civil engineers, one an Englishman (Benedict Campbell, above) and one returning to his homeland (Graeme Somerville). They visit Roscullen, Ireland, a town which just happens to need a new elected representative, with plans for economic development. Enter John Bull, stage right. The future Celtic Tiger stage left.

There are reasons why this play is not often offered. Some parts of John Bull, the only Shaw play that takes place on and tackles the issues of Shaw’s native country, represent the worst tendencies of Shaw’s finger-wagging preachiness: this is how you should think about politics, religion, class,  and Ireland. But it is exactly these same reasons, especially Shaw’s views on Ireland, an economically paralyzed country when he left when he was 16, why John Bull is essential to the Shaw canon.

Roscullen, Ireland listens to their new Parliamentary candidate.

Here at the Shaw Festival, the only theatre festival in the world that specializes in the works of Shaw and his contemporaries, a unique mandate of a specific historical period,  John Bull’s Other Island makes an appearance about once a decade. This time around, as in all other years at this incomparable festival, a terrifically capable cast take on some of Shaw’s longest homilies. Pictured above, from left, Ric Reid as Matthew Haffigan, Thom Marriott as Father Dempsey, Guy Bannerman as Cornelius Doyle, Patrick McManus as Barney Doran and Benedict Campbell as Tom Broadbent. All help Shaw turn Ireland’s cliches on their head. “Top o’ the morning,” “more power to your elbow,” and other phrases that Englishmen, the John Bulls of Shaw’s story, might romanticize  their other islanders to say. Shaw mocks these assumptions while still saving some vitriol for his own countrymen: “an island of dreamers who wake up in a jail.” It is a jail of their own making and the nightmare of the post-Celtic Tiger comes to mind.

The riveting character of the former priest Peter Keegan (the charismatic Jim Mezon)  is still called Father by the Roscullen townspeople. He is a mouthpiece for Shaw and what Father Keegan has to say in the play has as much relevance today as then: “I did not know what my own house was like, because I had never been outside it.” Ireland, Shaw’s own house, was in much disrepair then as it is now. John Bull’s Other Island, although written 106 years ago about an Ireland struggling for Home Rule, proves that Shaw is not just lessons and zingers.

When Keegan protests that the Catholic Church is its people and its people are the church, the argument against ecclesiastical hierarchy has more significance now than even Shaw, a Protestant with great respect for the Roman Catholic Church if not its chain of command, could imagine. These words of Keegan’s could be directed to the broken hearts of devout churchgoers who feel betrayed by the Irish Church’s handling of its criminal priests.

There’s much more of Keegan’s eerie foreshadowing: the necessity of science transcending national borders and of course the doom of development which to post-Celtic Tiger analysis is all too prescient.  However, as directed by Christopher Newton, John Bull’s Other Island, thankfully has humor too  in a broad, slapstick way, underlined by wild plaids, paired with stripes and patterns and topped off by mutton chop sideburns wide enough to block the exits. It’s fitting to accentuate the comedy , after all every Irishman “is a born humorist.” We wish. We’ll need it.

Additional cast: David Schurmann (Hodson), Jonathan Widdifield (Patsy Farrell), Severn Thompson (Nora Reilly), Mary Haney (Aunt Judy), Craig Pike and Tim Ziegler (Local Lads).

John Bull’s Other Island will run as part of the Shaw Festival until October 9, 2010.

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4. An Island of Beauty, History, And Storytellers
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