Word: candida
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Sarah McCluskey as Candida is a simple case of miscasting. McCluskey evokes only about half the role; she is all matron, and no sexual charmer. Part of the trouble is that she is visually wrong for the part, far too stocky and imposing; more important, she never quite manages to summon up the vitality both men are continually extolling. She's at her best in the last scene, when the script calls for a quiet, calm delivery of her lines...
...result of this miscasting and misdirection is to unbalance the play. On the one hand, Candida becomes a less than credible savior; on the other, Morell is elevated to almost tragic dimensions, while Marchbanks seems no more significant than his own self-characterization as "a little nervous disease." The hardest part of the production to stomach is Marchbanks' final epiphany; at the end, Epstein's Morell is convincingly desolated, but Emerson's poet appears no less...
POETRY MAKES nothing happen," admits Auden in the middle of a tribute to Yeats. Similarly, for George Bernard Shaw, the poet or idealist changes nothing, not even himself. In Candida, the poet Marchbanks and the preacher/politician Morell--rivals for the protagonist's love--are each immured in a prison of words. Marchbanks, an intruder into Morell's apparently idyllic Victorian home, attacks the vacuity of the parson's Christian Socialist platitudes; but his own endless flights of romanticism are no better. Both forms of verbiage are equally foolish--and equally valid. Neither is, in Auden's words...
What transformation occurs in the play is the work rather of Candida, Morell's wife, who nourishes, sustains and, when necessary, strips away her men's illusions without ever succumbing to them herself. Through the agency of this energetic woman, a remarkable but typically Shavian reversal takes place: the seemingly strong, happily married Morell comes to realize his childish dependency on his wife; at the same time Marchbanks, rejected by Candida as the less needy, internalizes her gift to Morell as his own vision, in the process exchanging childhood for artistic maturity. In Candida, the "best" man fails...
...Candida is very fine early Shaw; its dialogue is eloquent without being talky, its characters are vivid and complex and its polemics never threaten to overpower the central psychological drama. The Loeb production--spotty as it is--still manages to retain much of the play's original dramatic force. But it succeeds partially only because, with Candida, it would be very hard to fail utterly...