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Queen of My Heart

Mrs. Beatrice Stella Campbell was one the great stars of late Victorian and early 20th century English theatre, a woman who became the muse and, for a time, the great love obsession of playwright George Bernard Shaw. He wrote the part of flower-seller Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion expressly for her.

In Queen of My Heart, Winnipeg actor/playwright Talia Pura uses their decades-long correspondence as a window to the English cultural life of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In just an hour, she and fellow Winnipeg actor Brian Richardson – working on a spare set consisting only of a chaise longue and a writing desk – manage to turn the droll humour and great wit of the letters of Stella and GBS into a tragicomedy of manners.

The play spans 40 years and so moves quickly, from Shaw’s first letters to Stella (he first came across her in his duties as theatre critic for the Saturday Review) to his declarations of love for to his anger as she declares her intent to marry another. Even after she rebuffed him they remained friendly and he cast and directed her in the first West End production of Pygmalion. They corresponded until her death in 1940, with varying degrees of intimacy, but Shaw ultimately disappointed her by refusing to allow her to print his letters (claiming his wife would not approve).

As Shaw, Richardson brings the playwright’s vanity, egotism and emotions to the fore. Despite his admirable prose and his Fabian views, Shaw was as capable of envy, jealousy and anger as any other man and, though he stumbled with lines in places, Richardson does an admirable job of letting the writer’s humanity shine through.

Pura plays Stella as both engaging actress and practical woman. Yes, she’s coquettish and overwhelmed when Shaw declares his love but she remains pragmatic, aware that she must make her own way. That the two kept in touch speaks both to their characters and to the profound affect they had on one another.