Unarmed Against Shaw and ‘The Man’

COSTA MESA — A few months short of its 100th birthday, George Bernard Shaw’s “Arms and the Man” remains a briskly entertaining anti-war farce even though its mannered style can seem as old-fashioned as a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

The play’s deflation of romantic ideals, battlefield heroes and class pretensions still has comic bite. The characters--all wonderfully far-fetched--are clever prescriptions for mockery. And the typical Shavian wit shines with a bright insouciance.

But, except for the broadest possible outlines, very little of that comes through in the rudimentary student production at Orange Coast College’s Drama Lab. The actors are simply way out of their depth. Despite their best intentions, they lack the technique and the stage experience to put over a sophisticated period satire of this sort.

The play unfolds in 1885 during a war between the Serbs and the Bulgarians. The plot centers on Raina Petkoff, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Bulgarian family, and the two soldiers vying for her love. One is Capt. Bluntschli, a Swiss mercenary for the Serbs who has climbed into her bedroom while trying to avoid capture. The other is her Bulgarian fiance, Maj. Sergius Saranoff, a swashbuckling cavalry officer.

Shaw often gets credit for the astonishing prescience of his plays, which seemed to anticipate events. “Heartbreak House” has been described, for example, as a drama that foresaw the collapse of Europe on the eve of World War I. In fact, Shaw didn’t finish writing that play until well after the war broke out.

Similarly, it was only after completing the first draft of “Arms and the Man” that Shaw was advised by a friend about the particulars of a Balkan conflict to suit his needs. Until then, far from having the Balkans (of his or any period) in mind, Shaw had thought of “nothing but a war with a machine gun in it.”

The local color Shaw subsequently researched and inserted into the play fooled everybody. It created “the impression that I have actually been to Bulgaria,” Shaw recalled, according to biographer Michael Holroyd. More important, of course, it also provided the characters with exotic backgrounds to be exploited for comic effect.

Consider the provincial Raina. She naively defends what she believes to be her upper-class cultivation by boasting that the Petkoff family has the country’s only private library--in reality a few half-empty bookshelves of probably unread books. She has been to Bucharest “every season for the opera,” she says with inordinate pride, and she also has spent “a whole month in Vienna.”

Shaw has better targets than Raina, of course. Her father, for one. He is shown to be a boorish parvenu, though it must be said that this production takes things around the bend by having him pick his toenails with a butter knife at the dinner table.

Sergius, however, comes in for the greatest lambasting. He is a ludicrous amateur soldier in love, if not with war, with an antiquated belief in heroism-on-horseback. His personal sense of honor (“I never withdraw”) is nothing less than military incompetence at best. At worst, it is criminal.

Although Sergius is brave, he is obstinately deluded. His one-way cavalry charges against superior machine-gun fire have resulted in the more or less complete decimation of his troops.

That’s no way to run an army or a war. For that matter, Sergius doesn’t seem to know how to run anything else either, especially his secret affair with Louka, Raina’s servant.

Bluntschli, a professional soldier who has no illusions about modern warfare, is Sergius’ diametrical opposite. The son of a Swiss hotel owner, Bluntschli takes a cynical as well as pragmatic view of battlefield realities. He not only runs for cover, he believes he’s better off armed with chocolates (to fend off hunger) than bullets (to fend off the enemy).

Although this production can’t help sketching in all the above, the tone and texture of the individual performances are usually wrong. The actors, shaping their roles in only the vaguest terms, often fall back on acting cliches (gruff voices, intense scowls and the like). As a result, the entire staging is strained.

* “Arms and the Man,” Drama Lab at Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. Continues Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m. Ends Dec. 18. $5 to $6. (714) 432-5880. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

Debbie South: Raina Petkoff Ellen Walcutt Brown: Catherine Petkoff Sherry Mattson: Louka Sean Cox: Capt. Bluntschli Timothy Adams: Nicola Brewster Loud: Maj. Paul Petkoff Patrick Bruno: May. Sergius Saranoff Diana M. Brooks: Anya Donavon T. McGrath: Russian Officer

An Orange Coast College Repertory presentation of the play by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Alex Golson. Co-director: Todd Kulczyk. Scenic and costume design by the ensemble. Lighting design by D.P. Vining and Robert Stayner. Stage manager: Stayner.