Away from the West End, it’s all a bit gloomy
NO BIG West end shows opened this week, allowing one to visit fringe venues. On Monday night, I caught up with a goodish Widowers’ Houses (G. B. Shaw) at the Orange Tree in Richmond upon Thames.
Tuesday brought a jaunty The Grand Tour at West London’s Finborough, which I reviewed earlier this week. And on Wednesday, I caught a new double-header at the neat little Jermyn Street Theatre. How spruce the place is looking these days.
James Hogan’s Ivy & Joan is two short plays separated by an interval. Both feature one middle-aged man and woman. The first features Ivy and Victor, hotel workers at a seaside town near Manchester. Sour, deluded Ivy has just been sacked after 40 years of humdrum toil. The second gives us the ostensibly richer and more Southern Joan and eric, married and unhappy. Joan is losing her marbles and keeps talking about a holiday they had in Venice. eric is a miserable nitpicker.
The action does not exactly gallop. The plays, which have echoes of Alan Bennett or Harold Pinter, might work better on radio. Lynne Miller (once of TV’s The Bill) plays the women, Jack Klaff the men. They are more comfortable with the northern hotel couple, perhaps because it is slightly cliched territory.
The second half, featuring Joan and eric, is the more ambitious scenario but playwright Hogan is a little too cryptic to make it comprehensible.
We are left to ponder on similarities between two markedly different english couples, in language and attitude separated by class, yet both unhappy.
WHO are the villains of a rapacious rentals market in slum housing: the rent enforcers, the leasing companies or the freeholders? Are rich liberals ( whose pension funds depend on property dividends) being noble — or hypocritical — if they sympathise with poor tenants? G. B. Shaw’s 1892 play
Widowers’ Houses may be hailed by some as a socialist attack on racketeer landlords in Victorian London, but it is subtler and ranges wider than that. Shaw had the skill of presenting all sides of an argument.
He certainly gives us a sly and nasty capitalist property tycoon in Mr Sartorius; yet he also exposes the naive doublestandards of an earnest young buck, Trench, who fancies Sartorius’s daughter Blanche only to drop her when he learns what a shark her old man is in business. What fine sentiments, we initially think — until we ponder that Trench’s family owns the freehold on Sartorius’s acres.
Paul Miller’s up- close production at the Orange Tree — recently under new artistic direction — gives a clear, sometimes accomplished account of the Shavian debates. Patrick Drury makes for a lean, controlled Sartorius. Rebecca Collingwood does well as his daughter. I was less taken by Stefan Adegbola as Trench’s too-plummy friend Cokane but Alex Waldmann, playing Trench, reminds us of a potential which has perhaps been forced too hard in some of his recent roles.
Simon GREGOR has a grand time as rentcollector Lickcheese, whose sudden transformation mirrors that of eliza Doolittle’s dad in Pygmalion. A scene where Lickcheese betrays his desperation for money is done with a tremendous and sudden, raw throatiness by Mr Gregor. Meanwhile, Shaw — so much more balanced than a clumpingly bad essay about the rental sector in this show’s programme — skilfully floats questions about women being a form of property of Victorian englishmen. And are rich men’s daughters pursued out of love or greed? Shaw knew that greed came in all sizes.