Chris Eldon Lee reviews “Widowers’ Houses” which is at The New Vic in Newcastle-Under-Lyme until Saturday 29 June 2013.
I had no idea George Bernard Shaw’s playwriting career had got off to such a vibrantly flying start.
“Widowers’ Houses”, premiered in 1892, was the first of more than sixty scripts that mark Shaw out as Ireland’s finest. And the play’s revival at the New Vic this week devastatingly hammers home how Human Beings have changed so little in the ensuing century – especially when it comes to arrogance, ignorance and greed. The Rich will always feed off the Poor, and excuse themselves by claiming they are providing for them because no one else will.
Photos by Joel Chester Fildes
All you have to do is replace Shaw’s storyline of 19th century affluent landlords screwing rents out of disgustingly overcrowded London slums for one in which modern profit-making multi-nationals demand cheap clothing from dangerously dilapidated third world factories….and you have a modern parable in which anyone in the audience wearing a cheap shirt could be complicit.
So hats off to director Theresa Heskins for spotting this little-performed play and then doing such an outstanding job with it.
She and Shaw reel us in from innocuously gentle scenes of a polite Rhineland holiday to a vortex of secreted social disgrace in a deeply divided London. What threatens to ruin these profitable business arrangements is a budding love affair between an unaware mortgagee and the “house farmer’s” daughter.
Being an early work, there are some implausibles in Shaw’s plot. The central one is why on earth would the polite, apologetic Dr Trench (Mark Donald) fall for such a tempestuously flaring redhead. Luckily for us, Blanche is a wonderfully written part and Rebecca Brewer takes full advantage of the opportunity to scream, shout and strop her way through the play – whilst still being dangerously attractive. It’s a memorable performance that no blonde could hope to match.
William Ilkley is very threatening as her overbearing father Sartorius. He’s a self-made bully who improbably fires the one man (a very Dickensian rent collector called Lickecheese) who can bring him down, and then unconvincingly leaves him to tell devastating truths to his son-in-law-to-be.
Rather like the figures in a Punch cartoon, the names are a summary of their nature. But these are beautifully rounded and endemically flawed characters of quality.
The present day parallels make for difficult viewing at times. But Shaw applies a layer of slick, oily humour onto the very troubled society waters. There are welcome jokes of recognition and ridiculousness that cleverly tread a thin line between alleviating the angst of it all, whilst not quite distracting us from the vital message.
Shaw’s plot finally dissolves into dishonour amongst thieves and Heskins’ productionn feels appropriately unresolved because – as Sartorius says – “everyone is powerless to alter the state of society”.
It’s an uncomfortable conclusion that precipitated a debate as long as the A53.
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