By George, a Worthy Rival

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TITLE: THE SHAW FESTIVAL

AUTHORS: SHAW, CARL STERNHEIM AND HARLEY GRANVILLE BARKER

WHERE: ONTARIO, CANADA

THE BOTTOM LINE: A troupe devoted to one writer dashingly demonstrates the merits of his all but forgotten collaborator.

Perhaps the unlikeliest stage event of the decade will occur next month in ye olde and quainte Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. The tourist haven's Shaw Festival, one of North America's bigger and better theaters and the world's most faithful keeper of the flame for the white-bearded windbag of Fabian socialism, is sponsoring a debate premised on the heretical idea that its patron dramatist should be outranked as a playwright by his colleague Harley Granville Barker. Although recalled chiefly as producer (The Doctor's Dilemma), director (Major Barbara) or actor (Man and Superman) of many Shavian debuts, Granville Barker is being ballyhooed by Shaw Festival artistic director Christopher Newton as "maybe the last undiscovered great playwright."

It is inconceivable that the Barkerites will "win" the debate -- one might as well expect a huzzah for the superiority of Marlowe among the merry merchants who profit from bardolatry in Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon -- but the festival is already making the case. The highlight of its nine-play season is a spellbinding production of Granville Barker's The Marrying of Ann Leete, written in 1899 when the author was 22 and promptly dismissed as "a practical joke" by the Times of London. A century later, it feels startlingly fresh and new, its language conversational rather than expository, its events surprising yet rooted in character, its sensibility feminist yet faithful to its periwigged 18th century setting. Whereas in Shaw everyone seems to be on a lecture platform, Granville Barker's characters appear to talk to themselves alone. Not one speech in Leete is more than six lines long; many are broken into half-articulated reverie. Granville Barker's topics are as relevant as Shaw's: Waste (1907) discusses abortion and was suppressed by censors until 1936. Both writers mix moralizing and pragmatism. But Granville Barker seems observant and compassionate, while Shaw is caught up in paradox and amiable humbuggery.

The Shaw Festival, founded in 1962, is unique in being devoted solely to modern classics. It performs "Shaw and his contemporaries," defined as plays written between 1856, the year of Shaw's birth, and 1950, when he died. Noel Coward has been produced 11 times, becoming a secondary focus, and Granville Barker is scheduled for the same treatment. The one-act Rococo will appear next season in a lunchtime slot on the schedule, traditionally reserved for short Shaw (such as this season's tiresome young-Napoleon foofaraw, The Man of Destiny). A full-length work, Waste or His Majesty, will appear the season after. The Shaw Festival's resurrection began with The Voysey Inheritance in 1988. It has since been mounted by Britain's Royal National Theatre and the Long Wharf Theatre, in New Haven, Connecticut. Says Newton: "It took me a few years to realize what we had in him."