Why isn’t this mischiefmaking Shaw gem not dusted off more often?
Theatre Misalliance Orange Tree, Richmond ★★★★★
Bertolt Brecht branded Bernard Shaw a “terrorist”. “The Shavian terror is an unusual one, and he employs an unusual weapon – that of humour,” he argued. Watching Paul Miller’s expertly cast, wonderfully well performed, and entirely – at times convulsively – entertaining revival of Misalliance at the Orange Tree, it’s hard not to concur with Brecht’s provocative assertion.
The Times reviewer was bamboozled by the 1910 premiere, judging the incessant – often counter-intuitive and paradox-loaded – dialogue that flows forth in an affluent Surrey household one Saturday afternoon, “the debating society of a lunatic asylum – without a motion, and without a chairman”.
To our ears, today, however it sounds – for all its period detail – resoundingly modern.
The general impression is at once musical (every word forming part of the overall composition) and mayhemic: even here, in an apparently safe bourgeois milieu, lives are at stake.
The moral, as terrifying as anything in the Old Testament but flouting received ideas, is that we must strive to wrest our true selves back from the living death to which we succumb through the suffocating bonds of family and the constraints of capitalism, class, gender and convention. That might make the evening sound like the height of earnestness, but no other playwright aside from Wilde did more to uphold the importance of being otherwise.
It begins by introducing us to the effete Bentley Summerhays, son of a lord (and erstwhile colonial bigwig), whose “high voice” is described in the text as “a little exasperating”, and is very much so in Rhys Isaac-jones’s archly fluctuating falsetto. The action continues in the same vein of unpredictable peculiarity.
Bentley, also known as Bunny, faces a prospective marriage (for which read “misalliance”, social as well as sexual), with the emotionally restless, terminally unimpressed Hypatia (Marli Siu) – the daughter of self-made underwear tradesman, John Tarleton (Pip Donahy), in whose house we are and into whose vinery comes crashing a plane bearing a pal of Bunny’s and a forthright Polish acrobat called Lina.
Though this patently absurd intrusion has been likened in some quarters to Shaw anticipating Pirandello and Ionesco, the foreign invader’s bracingly critical attitude (beautifully conveyed by Lara Rossi), which sets off a profusion of romantic proposals, is simply Shaw at his mischief-making best.
Throw in the further arrival of a ranting socialist bank clerk, suffering the rage of the emasculated and underpaid, and the only really head-scratching aspect of the play is why this is its first major London revival since 1986: it’s a treasurable, scintillating gem. Until Jan 20. Tickets: 020 8940 3633; orangetreetheatre.co.uk