Word: morelle
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It is a marital situation comedy a bit like A Doll's House turned upside down. Candida (Joanne Woodward) treats her husband James Morell (Ron Parady) rather like a doll. When the poor devil is thoroughly terrified that she will leave him for the ardent young poet Marchbanks (Tait...
Morell is a pompous minister and a spellbinder in the pulpit. Marchbanks is a physical coward who baits people by ventilating their pretensions. His strength is a burning sense of vocation. Candida is an alluring marvel of self-control with wisdom flowing through every artery.
The end 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...
In contrast, the minor roles are handled with a much greater sense of what Shaw is about. Cynthia Cardon is just right as Prossy, Morell's secretary and admirer, snapping out her consonants, as Shaw once suggested she should, with a "ten pound gun hammer spring." Thomas Champion, as Burgess...
"Nothing that is worth saying is proper," Marchbanks tells Morell at one point. but Morell too has his share of Shavian aphorisms. "I like a man to be true to himself, even in wickedness," he lectures Burgess. If Morell the socialist and Marchbanks the poet are two different masks for...