The Devil Steps Out in Style

Irish Voice Entertainment

The Devil Steps Out in Style

December 13, 2007

By Cahir O’Doherty

The Devil’s Disciple Starring Darcy Pulliam, Lorenzo Pisoni
At the Irish Repertory Theatre, New York

IT’S been quite a week for the devil. Between the plays of George Bernard Shaw and Conor McPherson, Old Nick’s been getting around lately.

The devil in Shaw’s play The Devil’s Disciple, now playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, is actually a dashing young man with a fearful reputation, and not the red tailed demon come to claim another hapless soul, there’s no doubt which play is the more satisfying.

Set in New Hampshire during the War of Independence, Shaw’s perennial old melodrama (dating from 1897) introduces us to the Dudgeon family, headed up by the aging puritan matriarch Mrs. Dudgeon (Darcy Pulliam).

Her son Dick Dudgeon (Lorenzo Pisoni) is a freethinking revolutionary in thigh high black leather boots, an affront to her harsh sensibilities and a challenge to the conventions of the age.

But from Dick’s first appearance on stage there’s no question where Shaw’s sympathies lie, nor is there much doubt about who will triumph and who will eventually fail.

Directed by famed Oscar and Tony Award winning designer Tony Walton, who has directed the Irish Rep’s productions of The Importance of Being Earnest, Major Barbara and other plays, The Devil’s Disciple leaps to life in the first scene and then barrels along at breakneck speed all the way to its hilarious conclusion.

Happily, 2007 has been a year of extraordinary hits for the Irish Rep, which is now in its 20th season, and The Devil’s Disciple rounds off their successful year on an artistic high note.

Walton is the perfect director for this Tale of Two Cities-like romp, and in casting the circus-trained Pisoni he has found the perfect star for the vehicle. Pisoni’s skilled physical acting and his obvious delight in the role give the whole production its focus and energy and when he’s onstage the play comes vividly to life.

As Judith Anderson, the wife of the town’s minister Anthony Anderson, Jenny Feller does as much as she can with a generic damsel in distress role. Vexed by the sinfulness of her sudden attraction to another man, and reflexively attempting to repress every part of her own nature, she’s a study in inner conflict that only ends when she discovers that her love is unrequited.

Dick Dudgeon may be a handsome rogue, but this is a George Bernard Shaw play, and so grand passions – however unruly – are certain to take a backseat to principles.

Dick Dudgeon, we discover, is in the main a man of action, and town minister Anthony Anderson is a man of conscience and principle. But when it becomes clear that the British Army are seeking the minister and not the rogue, Dick nonetheless steps in to impersonate their quarry and is immediately arrested and sentenced to hang.

Blinded by her passion, Judith sees something more romantic in Dick’s self-sacrifice than an act of compassion. She regards it as a heroic declaration of love.

It turns out that she’s wrong about that though. “People see what they look for, not what is actually before them,” Shaw once wrote, and this play illustrates that dictum.

Although The Devil’s Disciple is the only play Shaw ever set in America, it’s really all about the public piety and private hypocrisy of Victorian England, where the play closed early, probably because it featured a significant British military defeat.

In the character of General Burgoyne (played to perfection by John Windsor-Cunningham) we met a classic Shavian realist who appears onstage to make some scathingly funny remarks about British military competence and it’s marked limitations, and it’s no wonder that the play failed to garner praise from the Victorians.

Like his fellow Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, Shaw held a bright polished mirror up to the excesses and pomposities of the British Empire, and naturally they didn’t thank him for it.

Rebecca Lustig’s costumes are a marvel, explaining each character and their trajectory. Puritan starkness contrasts with the swashbuckling fashions of the 1800s, making sense of the central themes of the play.

For Shaw all you have to do to permit other men to shoot you is dress them in the redcoats of the British Army. In The Devil’s Disciple men and women wear and discard costumes and personas like the latest fashions, but only some are willing to pay for what they cost.

(The Devil’s Disciple is playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 West 22nd Street, until January 27. Call 212-727-2737 for tickets, or visit www.irishrep.org)

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