When George Bernard Shaw first encountered actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell (born Stella Tanner) in 1899, it sparked a relationship that would span four decades and generate more than 400 letters – a remarkable cache of correspondence between “Joey” and “Stella” that survived despite Campbell’s eventual poverty and Shaw’s tendency to destroy personal papers.
The letters reveal a relationship that defied easy categorization: part professional collaboration, part intellectual sparring match, part unrequited romance. Shaw, already married to Charlotte Payne-Townshend, found in Campbell both an ideal muse and a tempting canvas. He wrote Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion specifically for her, and waited to debut the play until she could perform it — despite her advanced age. At the same time, he projected his desires and ambitions flirtatiously onto her, and so was famously hurt when she stole away to marry her husband. Meanwhile, Campbell maintained her independence and sharp wit while navigating both theatrical and personal challenges, which included financial difficulties and devastating personal loss.
Playwright Jerome Kilty’s Dear Liar, which has not been performed at Shaw since 1979, mines the archive of their correspondence to chart the complex relationship. The Festival’s new production of the play — created and performed by Shaw stalwarts Graeme Somerville and Marla McLean in the enchanting confines of the Shaw Festival’s Spiegeltent – turns Shaw and Mrs. Campbell’s decades-long epistolary relationship into an electrifying dance of wit, ego, indirection and emotion.
It must be acknowledged up front that the play’s source material – the actual letters exchanged between Shaw and Campbell – is unlikely fodder for compelling theatre. The real action of both reading and writing is internal and therefore inherently undramatic. Recognizing this fact, Somerville and McLean smartly limit the scenes where they do one or the other. Kilty’s script elides gaps of creation, transmission and reception in favour of sequential excerpts that respond directly to one another. Somerville and McLean recite and physicalize these excerpts in a thrilling pas de deux of intellectual sparring, romantic tension, and profound human connection.
Somerville declaims brilliantly: embodying Shaw’s towering eloquence and razor-sharp wit, while displaying the performative and carefully constructed nature of his persona. As the play progresses, we watch his curiously self-conscious genius memorably navigate moments of seeming vulnerability — such as his famous description of his mother’s cremation, or the events leading up to Stella’s marriage. Meanwhile, McLean’s Mrs. Campbell is a vivacious, coyly flirtatious revelation, who matches Shaw’s verbal pyrotechnics with her more smiling and less performative brand of wit – while conveying the aspirations and deep wells of emotion beneath her sophisticated exterior.
Kilty’s script masterfully distills key moments from their relationship into a coherent narrative arc. We witness their electric collaboration on Pygmalion, with Shaw cajoling and directing Campbell towards her definitive performance as Eliza Doolittle. And we witness their argument over a second play script as they become estranged. The World War I sequence emerges as the production’s emotional core: Shaw’s intellectual anti-war stance, though genuine, comes across as performative and self-important when juxtaposed against Campbell’s devastating loss of her son – McLean’s portrayal of this grief cuts through Shaw’s prolixity with heartbreaking authenticity.
And the production finds its perfect home in the Spiegeltent’s circular, stain-glassed space – which becomes a cosmic stage on which these extrahuman bodies orbit one another across the decades. The production is never static. Making innovative use of the building’s unique architecture, the actors have intimate center-stage conversations where they speak their letter excerpts to one another directly . . . then one will retreat to their respective writing desk, to declaim or listen . . . or walk, glide, or even run laps on the circuit that separates the perimeter booths from the central seating and performance area. Throughout, their words bridge the physical gaps between them, creating a physical manifestation of their correspondence’s ebb and flow. This choreography becomes particularly poignant in the second half, as periods of estrangement are marked by their distant circling of the space . . . forever connected, yet apart.
Jeff Pybus’s lighting design and Aurora Judge’s design deserve special mention for subtly guiding and focusing our attention and marking the passage of time as Shaw and Mrs. Campbell age, and their relationship evolves. What emerges is far more than a simple recitation of historical correspondence. It’s a meditation on the nature of performance itself – in art and in life. Shaw’s carefully crafted letters reveal as much in their artifice as in their content, while Campbell’s responses cut through pretense to emotional truths. Their decades-long debate over publishing the letters adds another layer of meta-theatrical complexity, which forces us to consider – with a drink in hand and ticket receipt in pocket – the line between private truth, public performance, and economic value.
This production of Dear Liar, staged during the Spiegeltent’s final summer season at Shaw Festival, serves as a particularly fitting farewell to this magical space. It reminds us that great theatre can emerge from the simplest elements: two actors, a collection of letters, a dynamic space . . . and the courage to let human connection fill the space between them.
Dear Liar is on stage in the Spiegeltent until September 27. The show schedule and tickets are available on shawfest.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
