By Amy Nickerson
The National Arts Centre has kicked off a season of plays which are as plagued with ethical dilemmas as the NAC is with managerial problems.
“I ended up with a season that addresses some very important issues to do with ethics, to do with morality,” says arts director Marti Maraden, “to do with individual morality in the face of public pressure.”
She opened the 1998-99 theatre season to a packed house with Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, which she directed.
The drama-comedy bears an eerie relevance to the recent Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.
The play is set in the late-Victorian era and focuses on Sir Robert Chiltern, a British MP and the apparent image of morality. The conspiring Mrs. Cheveley reveals a blemish on Chiltern’s record by exposing that the “ideal husband” sold government secrets for personal profit when he was a young man.
This secret threatens to destroy Chiltern’s perfect marriage and career, but it is left to Lord Goring, a friend of Chiltern, to put the pieces back together.
Maraden smiles impishly when she talks about the similarities of the play to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair and the subsequent impeachment inquiries.
“I was very conscious of how timely this piece was,” she says. “I let my audience draw their own parallels.”
Maraden says An Ideal Husband forces us to re-evaluate our own behaviour before throwing stones.
“Can people be ideal?” she says. “Can we forgive? What is a person’s responsibility as a politician?”
Maraden, a Stratford veteran and Centretown resident, makes no secrets of her sympathy toward Chiltern and Clinton.
She brushes a strand of hair from her eyes as she talks about the financial and managerial problems that drove John Cripton, the former director of the NAC, to resign two weeks ago.
“I want to make very clear that the problems were at the board level, and not with the staff,” she says. “He had a vision of what he wanted the NAC to be.”
Robert Welch, a Manotick native who played a dual role of two butlers in the play, says politics are the same now as they were when Wilde wrote the play in the late 1890s.
“By modern standards, it’s almost naive,” he says. “We don’t even know what gentlemen are any more.
“We have had some shake-ups,” he says, referring to management within the NAC.
Welch says the underlying issue is cost.
“To succeed one must have wealth,” he says, quoting Chiltern from the play. “At all costs, one must have wealth.”
Kelly Beaton, assistant director of communications for the NAC, agrees the problems between Cripton and the board were financial in nature.
“What Mr. Cripton was looking at, given our financial situation, was not feasible,” she said.
The NAC is already operating under a $3-million deficit and projects a loss of $2.8 million for the 1998-99 season.
The curtain hasn’t fallen on the NAC yet.
An Ideal Husband played to almost sold-out crowds on both its preview and opening nights.
The play runs until Oct. 31.