Review: The Apple Cart rocks at the Shaw Festival with Tom Rooney as a magnetic King Magnus

• Title: The Apple Cart
• Written by: George Bernard Shaw
• Director: Eda Holmes
• Actors: Tom Rooney, Sochi Fried
• Company: Shaw Festival
• Venue: Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre
• City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
• Year: Runs to October 7, 2023

Critic’s Pick

At the Shaw Festival this season, it’s The Apple Cart that rocks.

The Bernard Shaw 1928 satirical play is a wordy, unwieldy one about democracy and its defects.

It zigs and zags, on and off topic, through reams of rhetoric about the unelected political power of the monarchy versus that of corporations in a capitalist country – in just under three hours with a single intermission.

But with Tom Rooney, czar of the summer stage in Ontario, giving an appropriately magnetic performance as King Magnus – supported by a rock-solid ensemble of festival veterans and newcomers alike – this vivid comedy conducted with verve by director Eda Holmes comes across as a great symphony of speeches.

Shaw’s “political extravaganza,” as the Irish playwright dubbed it in his subtitle, was originally set in a speculative future. Holmes has modified that ever-so-slightly so that the action now takes place in an alternative past.

We seem to be in a Mad Men-era episode of The Crown as the play begins among the king’s various attendants in Judith Bowden’s striking set of white with splotches of red.

All The Globe’s reviews from the 2023 Stratford Festival and Shaw Festival so far

The audience gets the general gist of what’s going on behind the British crown as Sempronius (André Morin) and Pamphilius (Kristopher Bowman) both sip and spill tea while going through the papers and royal mail on the monarch’s behalf.

Magnus has upset the elected rulers of Great Britain by using his persuasive power to influence the people – and not hesitating to speak his personal opinions, one of which is that the veto power he holds over bills is more than symbolic.

Joe Proteus (Graeme Somerville), the dyspeptic British prime minister, is up in arms about this anti-democratic discourse – though it doesn’t, apparently, take much to raise his ire. His primary way of controlling his cabinet is through fits of pique that culminate in threats to resign. (These work, because, then as now, who would actually want that job?)

Some of the Shaw Festival’s finest actors play Proteus’s eccentric ministers – from a bumptious republican and union leader who is also president of the board of trade named Boanerges (Martin Happer) to a dour monarchist and “Powermistress General” named Lysistrata (Sharry Flett). Minor ones, too, with names like Crassus, Balbus and Nicobar are portrayed both with neat nerdy individualization and as a barking chorus familiar from any parliament’s Question Period by the likes of Neil Barclay, Richard Lam and Travis Seetoo (who would make a fine Pierre Poilievre on stage or screen some day).

An empire-about-to-fall atmosphere is conjured by those ostentatiously Greco-Roman monikers. Indeed, the real power seems not to really lie with either the king or parliament but a shadowy transnational corporation called Breakages Limited that has helped put the current set of MPs in office and makes a tidy profit by cleaning up whenever things get messy at home or around the British empire.

There is foreshadowing of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and the concept of disaster capitalism in the thinking of Shaw – though a more modern satirist might have also named this fictional company Disruptors, Incorporated.

The Apple Cart’s first lengthy act sees Proteus deliver an ultimatum to the King that will either see him voluntarily shut his trap or trigger a constitutional crisis – and the fun comes from listening to the superbly slippery Magnus slide his way around and through every confrontation with elegantly formed arguments.

Rooney, who has long proven himself to be a virtuoso of Shakespearean verse at the Stratford Festival, now shows himself, too, to be a rock star of Shavian rhetoric. He’s making only his second professional appearance in a play by Shaw here – the last time being at Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon in 1992. Of course, he’s had more recent training in this department in Canadian political comedies by Michael Healey such as Courageous and Benevolence that were like Shaw with swear words.

The key exchange for audiences going in to The Apple Cart to be aware of: When Proteus says: “There is nothing more to be said,” one of his ministers replies: “That means another half hour at least.”

This is not far from the truth – and, indeed, the second act completely wanders away from its main plot as Magnus visits his mistress Orinthia – a vain divorcée played with extraordinary flair and vulpine vocals by Sochi Fried in one of the most striking Shaw Festival debuts I’ve ever seen. Later, an American ambassador shows up to declare that the United States has revoked the Declaration of Independence.

But this is even more entertaining and thought-provoking than the more structured first act. Shaw was, in many ways, at his best when he was his most self-consciously Shavian.

The Apple Cart is ultimately best enjoyed as a piece of music, flowing from movement to movement.

Holmes notably showed a flair for orchestration of oratory in her unsurpassed production of Tony Kushner’s underrated play The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures in this same studio theatre eight years ago; she does again here with a show that is much more entertaining than it has any (divine) right to be.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)