Theater: Maugham's Of Human Bondage adapted for the stage

The Soulpepper Theater in Toronto is Canada’s largest repertory house, presenting a diverse mix of musicals, straight plays, and single person performances. This summer they took the financial risk of playing a mini-season in Manhattan, bringing 20 or so players and seven shows. Their actors have diverse talents, for example offering after-theater cabaret shows in the lobby. The managing director Albert Schultz seems to foster a family-like and Canada-centric environment with his troupe, introducing himself (as director) and each player in Of Human Bondage personally after the play was done, emphasizing the Canadian roots of all the actors. Based on the evidence of the performance I saw, the troupe has excellent acting skills and creative production and directing. I am less certain of the choice of repertory as a match for Manhattan.

W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) wrote his finest novel in 1915, just before WWI broke out. The arts were then in a turbulent period of modernistic revamping (Joyce, O’Neill, Picasso, Stravinsky, Schoenberg). I remember being impressed with Of Human Bondage when I read it in high school, but the meandering plot of the young man Philip, torn between painting and medical school, who finally settles on medicine--the practical thing--now seems to me more of a product of the nineteenth century mind than of the twentieth. In wrestling with his future, Philip (played by a good but slightly too old Gregory Prest) encounters many of the ills of early twentieth century London: prostitution, poverty, illness, class tension. While the language and sexual candor are fairly explicit, it seems to me that Dickens had covered much of this ground better in his novels 50-60 years earlier. A socially-conscious Victorian sensibility pervades the atmosphere, unlike the more psychoanalytic and inward depictions of tortured characters by O’Neill or Joyce. Playwright Vern Thiessen adapted the long novel into a 2 ½ hour play, focusing the novelist’s semiautobiographical journey through Philip’s early life into the events of his medical and sexual education. In doing so, Thiessen nicely centers the drama on the most “theatrical” parts of the story: Philip and women, Philip and the abuses of medical education, Philip struggles with art vs. science. But the longer novel, with its longish explications of Philip’s inability to decide on his life course, better sets up the final resolution when he settles for the

virtues of “the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died”, quite different from the outcome of, say, Joyce’s Stephan from Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, who abandons the familiar or safe course to pursue his life passion (art).

While the plot felt a bit dated to me, the production used many modern (and trendy) stage devices that I have seen recently in other plays. Philip’s entrapment was emphasized by his staying within a square, red-floored stage space throughout the play, including at intermission when he stayed there in fetal position as the audience exited and re-entered. This was similar to the claustrophobic square that Ivo van Hove used in last year’s A View from the Bridge. Several of the characters played musical instruments or percussed/sang special effects when not acting, reminiscent of John Doyle’s Sweeney Todd, memorable for Patti LuPone playing the tuba when not being Mrs. Lovett. To emphasize Philip’s artistic talents, most scenes had female actors placed around the stage periphery holding picture frames to their faces, as living demonstrations of his past, and frustrated artwork. Schultz kept the staging moving briskly, and his actors played multiple parts without confusion. A standout in the ensemble troupe was Michelle Monteith (seen below), who played Philip's dysfunctional codependent lover Mildred, at first a gold digging society woman, later a prostitute dying of syphilis. She was virtuosic in her accent, sudden changes of temperament, and manipulative depiction.

Props and settings were minimal and effective, sparely focusing us on the characters. This was a nice job of translating the detail and complexity of a novel to the stage. Yet for me the technical panache and overall acting quality did not add up to a compelling evening at the theater. I grew impatient with Philip’s dithering (perhaps a younger actor might have done this better) and the plot felt like a creaky, sentimental ending to the Victorian era, rather than one contemporary with early Joyce and O’Neill. In the end, Maugham, who grew up in the late nineteenth century, then lived through much of the twentieth, considers but finally shies away from the rebellion that was to characterize the later century. The production, with its modernistic staging, thus felt out of place with the spirit of this novel. The appreciative audience seemed to enjoy what reminded me of the comfortable evenings of theater in middle or suburban America that I remember from my youth. The Soulpepper company, for me, has the technique but not the innovation or edge to be a good fit for Manhattan of 2017.