Shaw Festival’s ‘The Apple Cart’ is a startling speculative fiction that makes the case for the monarchy

The Apple Cart

By George Bernard Shaw, directed by Eda Holmes. Until Oct. 7 at the Shaw Festival’s Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre, 10 Queen’s Parade. shawfest.com or 1-800-511-7429

The term “versatile actor” appears, perhaps too liberally, in the biographies of many talented performers these days. But for Tom Rooney, whose Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia entry literally begins with those two words, the descriptor is wholly deserving.

You need not look further than some of Rooney’s recent performances to understand his versatility. Last fall at Crow’s Theatre, he played the misanthropic titular protagonist in Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” A few months later, at the same theatre, the Dora-winning actor got down on all fours as a poodle in “Fifteen Dogs.” And now at the Shaw Festival, he has transformed into an idealistic British monarch confronting an institution-threatening crisis in George Bernard Shaw’s “The Apple Cart.”

No matter the play, Rooney is like an old-school detective. He sifts through the material he is handed, finding and using the smallest of details to craft performances that feel positively unexpected, singular and profoundly realized.

In director Eda Holmes’ production of “The Apple Cart,” Rooney delivers a turn of virtuosic restraint as King Magnus, an intelligent, philosophical and introspective British ruler whose prime minister, Joe Proteus (an intense Graeme Somerville), seeks to strip from him any last vestiges of power and turn the ruler into a rubber stamp.

The constitutional crisis, Proteus explains, stems from a speech Magnus delivered in which he argued in favour of his using of a royal veto, “the only remaining defence of the people against corrupt legislation.”

Shaw’s 1928 comedy, a speculative fiction set in 1967, is a rich play of ideas: largely the playwright’s ruminations on political philosophies, power, and the role of the state and private enterprise.

What little there is to a plot centres around Proteus’s attempts to coax the king into signing an ultimatum, which the monarch argues will turn him into a doormat: “Half the country expects me to wipe my perfectly polished boots on the cabinet, and the other half expects me to let the cabinet wipe its muddy boots on me,” the politically minded Magnus laments.

In Magnus’s long monologues, Shaw makes as strong a case as you can find onstage about the merits of a constitutional monarchy. That these speeches are always compelling is a testament to Rooney’s skill.

He utters these monologues with a gentle rhythmic cadence, laying out his arguments (and by extension Shaw’s, for Magnus is written in the playwright’s likeness) one by one. Rooney’s benevolent king is a monarch shackled to a cage, unable to fully contribute to the society for which he cares so deeply.

What also makes this play enthralling is how it echoes our political system today. Though written nearly a century ago, and set in an alternate reality more than five decades in the past, some of Shaw’s future predictions ring eerily true.

The Britain of “The Apple Cart” is one of “solid middle-class comfort.” The general populace is civically disengaged, relying largely on cheap offshore labour. And it’s not just the monarchy and the legislators fighting for relevance. Both are facing the rising tide of the fictional global conglomerate Breakages Ltd., which seeks to more substantially influence the political discussion.

It’s from this frame that Shaw raises important questions: if we live in a society where lawmakers only care about their power and political survival, and where large corporations have infiltrated the political arena, who will look out for the common people? And by extension, is there a place for the monarchy to help fulfil the role as the final defence against corrupt legislation?

While Shaw has his own beliefs, he doesn’t offer answers to many of these questions. Ideas are thrust into the forum, scrutinized, debated — often with searing humour — but left to the audience to form their own conclusions.

Holmes’ production balances the comedic levity with the philosophical gravity, even if some of her in-the-round staging at the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre feels somewhat static. (Depending where you’re sitting, you might be staring at Rooney’s back for extended periods.) Judith Bowden’s clinically white set, with a large pillar at centre stage, also impedes some sightlines.

Ryan deSouza’s original compositions, however, inject urgency into the political proceedings. And Bowden’s costumes — with lighter tones for Magnus and darker ones for the cabinet ministers — accentuate the ideological differences among the characters.

But while “The Apple Cart” is thought-provoking, you can’t help but notice Shaw’s self-indulgence in this work, clocking in at close to three hours. Some of his future predictions are too fantastical, particularly a hilarious scene in which a loquacious American diplomat, Vanhattan (André Morin), gleefully announces the U.S. is rejoining the British Empire. Other tangential narratives, such as Magnus’s relationship with his mistress, Orinthia (Sochi Fried, in a magnetic performance), are briefly introduced before they’re swiftly dropped, never to be mentioned again.

Still, Homes’ production is a formidable showcase for this Shaw ensemble that, in addition to Rooney and Somerville, also boasts strong supporting performances by Martin Happer and Sharry Flett. As cabinet minister Lysistrata, Flett in particular delivers a blistering cry of a monologue late in the first act, lamenting the state of affairs and the increasing influence of powerful corporations influencing the public good.

It’s in scenes like those that you come to appreciate “The Apple Cart” for what it is: a political warning about the fragility of our democratic institutions, as much for audiences today as it was for those who watched this comedy-drama close to a century ago. Don’t upset the apple cart, indeed.