By Jean Anouilh. Translated by Christopher Fry. Directed by Joseph Ziegler. With Patricia Fagan, Jordan Pettle. Presented by Soulpepper Theatre Company. To Sep 20. Mon-Sat, 7:30pm; Wed & Sat 1:30pm. $28-$65 (regular rush $20; youth rush $5). Young Centre, Bldg. 49, Distillery Historic District, 55 Mill. 416-866-8666. www.soulpepper.ca.
What if Eliza Doolittle had stayed on at the Embassy Ball and had been found out? What if a malicious Professor Higgins had invited her not to show off his skill but to lure his twin brother away from another woman? Jean Anouilh’s play L’Invitation au château (1947), adapted by Christopher Fry as Ring Round the Moon, feels like an odd mash-up of Shaw’s Pygmalion with Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, only with much more plot and much less wit. In most of Anouilh’s comedies deliberate artifice and whimsy mask the melancholy truth that innocence exists only to be destroyed. It is a difficult mood to capture and it has quite eluded director Joseph Ziegler, who too often pushes the work’s delicate tone toward farce.
The play offers a plum role in the identical twins — the manipulative Hugo and the kind-hearted Frederic — both played by Jordan Pettle. Pettle, with his “gonna” and “wanna,” has the least crisp diction of the cast and is hardly credible as an aristocrat. Besides that, he does far too little to distinguish the twins in voice or gesture. If Pettle does not make the central role the showpiece it could be, at least the rest of the cast creates a memorable collection of portraits. Chief among these is Nancy Palk’s Madame Desmortes, the twins’ aunt and a kind of Gallic Lady Bracknell. Her constant abuse of companion Capulet (a comically dowdy Brenda Bazinet) provides a stable stratum of humour throughout. Patricia Fagan is affectingly vulnerable as Isabelle, the poor ballet dancer Hugo hires to play an aristocrat to win Frederic from the spoiled millionairess Diana (a sneering Diana Donnelly). Brenda Robins has a hilarious turn as Isabelle’s mother, uncontrollably awestruck with Madame Desmortes’ wealth. Yet for all its use of dance, as in the wonderfully intricate tango between Kevin Bundy and Kristen Thomson, the production is like a fallen soufflé, the airiness knocked out of it with too much heavy handling.