Shaw's Summer Season

New version of The Invisible Man among this year's offerings

A few years ago, the Shaw Festival expanded its mandate to cover not only plays written during the lifetime of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), but also plays set during that period. This has opened up many interesting possibilities, including the potential to commission new work.
Consequently, this year the festival has commissioned playwright Michael O'Brien to create a stage version of The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. "For Neil [director Munro] and I, as we conceived the show, our first attraction to the story was just the impossibility of doing it and the suspense and doing impossible things on stage," he says.
"But to me there's a great story to be found in it by an adaptor," he continues. "It's part of the great family of Faustian stories: the Promethean figure who finds a great secret and wins it at great expense to himself. To me, the interesting thing was to find out why invisibility is something that's so attractive to people that they would want to risk their life to achieve it."
O'Brien found an answer in the idea that "invisibility is synonymous with freedom", he says. "I think that's the attraction, and I think that remains one of the greatest human attractions: to do anything you want and not suffer the consequences."
Wells wrote his novel about the Invisible Man in 1897, "right at the end of the century, when the question of individual freedom became a burning issue," says O'Brien. "He imagines that if he could become invisible, he would become a new kind of human being who would answer to no one but himself. Having achieved it, he realizes it's an incredible trap."
All larger considerations aside, it's a story that presents enormous challenges as a play, because of the various illusions that are required to make it convincing. "I just tested my limits and I wrote impossible things," says O'Brien. "I don't quite know exactly how everything is going to happen, but a great deal of ingenuity is going into putting it onto the stage."
Among other impossibilities are "a scene with rain on stage, and the Invisible Man is running through the rain and we see his shape. There's a scene where he runs amok and steals a bicycle. There's a scene where we see him running through fog and a scene where he climbs a roof and lays siege to a house," O'Brien says.
"I really asked for everything."
The Shaw Festival presents The Invisible Man from May 13 to October 29. Also running now are Arms and the Man and Too True to Be Good (both by George Bernard Shaw); The Heiress and the Cole Porter musical High Society. Later openings include The Crucible by Arthur Miller (opening June 3); Chekhov's Love Among the Russians (June 10); The Magic Fire (June 11); Noël Coward's Design for Living (June 15) and Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen (July 5).
Some productions run to the end of November. For tickets, call 1-800-511-SHAW (7429), or visit www.shawfest.com.

Publication Date: 2006-05-14
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=6255