It tells us something of the playwright’s time that this play’s title character is largely made a bystander within it.

One would think the wife of Rev. Morell (Craig Oliphant), played engagingly here by Cheryl Moore, would be the driving force in Shaw’s Candida. Yet what the character is reduced to, by and large, is being the passive centre of gravity the men around her orbit about; like the subject of medieval love poetry, she is elevated and idealized but ultimately not given much to do. Even by the end, when she really lets show her individual strength, mind and spirit, she’s essentially playing peacemaker between two would-be suitors.

Candida is, indeed, an anachronism populated with anachronisms; its characters are types now most certainly clichéd, such as the pompous and hidebound clergyman, the effete and idealistic poet, and of course the saintly matron.

Nonetheless, both Shaw’s and the play’s liberal foundations successfully find context in the now. What the play is really about is ideas themselves, and their power to shake up smug complacency. Like much good drama, what we’re witnessing is entropy, with established order made disordered; what Shaw illustrates is that’s also the essence of progressivism.

The play concerns the socialist Rev. Morell’s self-righteousness challenged by the well-to-do young poet Marchbanks (Eric Rae), who covets the older Candida and considers her husband unworthy of her. Whom Candida will finally choose is less the point, however, than whether Marchbanks may have a point: the Reverend, having a mirror held up to him, wonders if he’s truly the good man he took himself for.

Indeed, Oliphant’s performance seems a bit stagey sometimes, but it’s appropriate for a character who’s been somewhat pompously treating life as a stage for some time. The rest of the cast is uniformly strong, with Peter Hudson especially good as comedic support.

Delivered as it has been in the form of a domestic comedy, Candida may seem slight — even cute. Nonetheless, it has a thoughtful undercurrent that cuts to the surface, its baggage notwithstanding.