From the Shaw Festival "Victory" info page:
"Warning: Victory is deliberately offensive. The playwright brilliantly explores the use of language as a weapon. It is not for the squeamish and contains very strong language."
This contemporary play by Howard Barker, a very self-confident mid-20th century white male English poet/playwright, is about the Restoration, the time following King Charles II's return to the throne after Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans' revolution and institution of the republic. It's like crude (or cruder) Shakespeare. The man we met in line for the Shaw Festival bus goes to the Shaw every year, but when we told him we were going to see Victory, he grew quiet. C asked, did you see it. Yes, he said. Did you like it? No, he said. Well then! It had its moments, but the epitome of its attitude was the fact that there was no curtain call and C wondered if the playwright hoped that people wouldn't even applaud at the end. Many probably didn't really want to.
One oddity was that an understudy had to perform. This wasn't an oddity, per se, but the fact that he needed to carry a book or iPad with him was. A bit strange.
The Shaw Festival is very much like OSF: in a pretty small town, three theatres, ten-ish plays, many theatre-goers. Our first time. Very happy to experience it.
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