The Guardsman is enjoying a very successful run at the Berkshire Theatre Festival. The play, by Ferenc Molnar, fits beautifully into the company’s 82nd season, acknowledging, as it does, the theatre’s link to the past. But a review of this season’s playbill makes it abundantly clear that BTF is equally forward-looking. The greater focus is on established plays and musicals, but attention is also paid to demanding contemporary writing and also to premiere productions. It is not for nothing that this company has a much-admired history and an equally admired here-and-now.
Molnar’s play is a modest three-act variation of love’s challenges in marriage. The Actor loves The Actress but doubts her feelings for him. He must challenge her to determine whether or not she is faithful and, to this end, he dons the costume and behaviour of The Guardsman, a Russian soldier with a bizarre (that is to say, theatrical) accent. A mutual friend, The Critic, comes and goes, observing their behaviour and dispensing his wisdom in he process. The whole is a light confection, the sort of play that is produced, when it is produced, more as a vehicle for star couples than it is for the play’s insights or intellectual challenge.
Jayne Atkinson and Michel Gill play the husband and wife couple (and are, themselves, husband and wife off the stage) and they play them and each other with quiet, easy and controlled charm. The text, in a slightly awkward translation by Grace I. Colbron and Hans Bartsch, but this doesn’t get in their way. Nor does it do anything but enhance the work of Richard Easton, as their mutual friend. Easton tosses off his every thought with grace and mischief, each serving to coat the other in a pretty delicious combination. Watching these three, in particular, makes this Guardsman a real treat – a play wholly about the theatre and its power to charm. The play, with its many references to stage emotions versus real emotions, does its share of contributing to an evening that reveals the theatre as a place for thinking, if only tangentially.
BTF achieves one more significant accomplishment – The Guardsman is a three-act play that runs with two intermissions. Where, other than the opera, are we accustomed to such a traditional approach to an evening? In a world where the 90-minute (or less) intermissionless evening is quickly becoming the standard, BTF is going against easy formulae by producing plays in many styles, plays that represent the past without losing sight (or hold) of the present.
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