The Stillborn Lover
12 July 2003

A strange relationship has grown up between Richard Chamberlain and the Berkshire Theatre Festival. The renowned actor offers himself, a play and a director. In the case of "The Shadow Of Greatness" three years ago, it was a bad bet. This year, "The Stillborn Lover" emerges as a somewhat different proposition, flawed but complex and potent, a sometimes eloquent play of timely ideas.

Chamberlain brings a deep reserve and quiet dignity to the pivotal figure, the Canadian diplomat Harry Raymond, in Timothy Findley's study of international politics and sexual repression in the era of Watergate. In the end, as Harry's long-shrouded secrets emerge, the actor seems to break through a shell into outbursts of passion and anger, before coming to a decision of loving sacrifice.

The theater has surrounded its star with a remarkably strong supporting cast: Keir Dullea, Jessica Walter, Lois Nettleton and Jennifer Van Dyke. The direction by Martin Rabbett does not always serve them well, and some clumsy moments emerge in the shifting early scenes of exposition.

But the play, in its American premiere, shows Findley, who died last year, as a dramatist with much on his mind, and a fine sense of psychological mystery. "The Stillborn Lover" takes on probing questions about the men who practice war and those who strive for diplomatic solutions, with the shadow of Nagasaki and its mushroom cloud looming over the past and present of Harry Raymond and his family and friends.

The play unfolds in a "safe house" outside Ottawa. Under a veil of secrecy, Harry and his wife Marion, who suffers from Alzheimer's, have been spirited out of Moscow and carried, jet-lagged, to a retreat guarded by two members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Raymonds' daughter, a much-married, man-hating lawyer, Diana Marsden, is on hand to help with the adjustment. Two old friends, the government minister Michael Riordan and his brittle wife Juliet, also turn up.

"The Stillborn Lover" begins with a voiceover describing the ancient Japanese game called "Go," a variant on chess played with black and white stones whose positions are fixed after their first moves. With a checkerboard patterning a drop flung loosely over Michael Downs' Japanese-influenced setting, the game is set forth as a metaphor for life. Like stones, people become stuck in one place. Under Fabrice Kebor's crepuscular lighting, the early mood is as ominous as a morning dream.

Adding to the air of vague dread are the vagaries of Marion, played by Nettleton as a sometimes difficult, sometimes funny woman, who moves in and out of lucidity. It soon comes out that Harry is regarded as a suspect in the murder of a young Russian, and that the police are to question him. Here Chamberlain, tall, upright, silvery haired, makes the ambassador a model of delicacy and restraint. Then, as the questions accumulate, Chamberlain blurts out Harry's confession at the end of Act I, that he is a homosexual.

Structurally, the play moves between the present and the past, with interludes in Nagasaki and later in Cairo. A leftist intellectual during his years at Cambridge before the Spanish Civil War, Harry experienced great guilt after the bombing of Nagasaki, the second nuclear target after the Japanese had sought surrender. "Nothing will ever match the barbarity of that second bomb," Harry remembers angrily.

In Act II, the political liabilities of having a closeted gay man as Canada's ambassador to Moscow play a major role. Dullea's guarded, slippery Michael, a leading candidate to succeed the dying prime minister, strives to protect his future, aided by Walter's sharp, thorny, socially adept wife Juliet. Van Dyke's deliberate, acidic Diana, though shattered by her father's deceptions, strives to support him. Less vitally, she also duels with Superintendent Jackman, acted with cynical realism by Robert Emmet Lunney. The second officer, the right-wing Corporal Mahavolich, flexes his muscles and runs, as played by Kaleo Griffith, who also doubles in nude scenes behind an upstage screen as the murdered Russian. Some of these little interludes are confusing and a bit silly.

But the second act offers big moments to both Nettleton and Chamberlain. The still youthful actress, whose Broadway career goes back to the late '40s, delivers the production's most gripping passage in reaching back into Marion's memories of blazing light and haunted darkness in Cairo. Throughout, Nettleton also raises tantalizingly ambiguous questions about Marion's state of mind. Chamberlain reaches his own high points in confronting Dullea's amoral politician and in his last scene with Nettleton, after the final revelations about the murder and Marion.

Initially produced in Winnipeg in 1993, Findley's second play has waited a decade for a production in America, for reasons that are sometimes all too obvious. But it is a bold choice for the Berkshire Theatre Festival, as its alliance with Chamberlain and Rabbett produces theatre of merit to compensate for an earlier bust.

© 2003 Malcolm Johnson