“WIDOWERS’ HOUSES”

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25271, 25 August 1947, Page 3

“WIDOWERS’ HOUSES”

THE STAGE

REPERTORY SHAW AT RADIANT THEATRE “Widowers’ Houses” has the interest of being the very first play by Mr Shaw. His own account of its origins and the accidents of its birth on the stage (preface to "Plays Unpleasant”) does not altogether commend it as a play for amateur revival so far away as this from the original scene and so long after the event. Fifty-six years are but as yesterday in the life of “Hamlet.” But no amount of respect for the genius-elect of Mr Shaw could make “Widowers' Houses’’ appear more than it is—an imperfect reconciliation of an early Shaw social crusade with someone else’s (William Archer's) quite different idea of a play. If the Repertory Society production of the play, opened on Saturday at the Radiant Theatre, had been even less presentable and less audible than it was, the trouble taken to show us this play would deserve some acknowledgement. Almost any production can add its little bit to the experience of reading the book; and it may be considered a piece of anyone’s education to know how Shaw began. The motives for choosing “Widowers’ Houses’’ remain a puzzle. Was it the society’s fancy for late-Victorian sets and costume? Was it the relative flatness and triteness of Shaw dialogue when his zeal outran his art? Or was it not so much Shaw at all. as that “sympathetically romantic ‘well-made play’ ” which Mr Archer planned and Mr Shaw did not succeed in- wholly obliterating with his “grotesquely reaalistic exposure of slum landordism?” The play is Shaw at his most tractarian. Man’s inhumanity to man, as exhibited by Sartorius the slum landlord. has since been refined and improved upon in ways which belong to an older history and a more dispiriting perspective than .Shaw’s early Socialism permitted him. Original sin has become bigger news in art than The System. Snobbery has shifted its ground, and can laugh with the rest of us at the “tact” and “taste” of William de Burgh Cokane and the “breeding” cf Blanche Sartorius. Having made this curious choice, the Repertory Society has proceeded without much apparent regard for adventure in production or casting. Mr Brian Fisher Betts, as Sartorius, behaved like a consistent character but lacked any trace of emphasis or assertion of personality. The play belongs to Sartorius, as “Mrs Warren’s Profession" belongs to Mrs Warren. Whether by design or weakness the production has allowed it to slip into the infantile fingers of Dr. Harry Trench and Blanche, as futile and redundant a pair of lovers as ever trod stage. Miss Mary Wootton must be credited with making the cardboard Blanche stand up and respond like a woman; but to the extent to which she dominates Mr Betts as a piece of flesh and blood the play is worse-balanced and its weakness more exposed. Miss Wootton was mostly clearly heard; Mr Betts’s indistinct and hurried speaking threw away many of the more promisingly Shavian lines in the play. Indistinctness of another sort handicapped Mr Norman Barrett, who played the impossible snob Cokane with a degree qf anguished affectation that grated <Jh the nerves. What else can be done? Shaw himself wrote (in retrospect) Of “silly and irritating” qualities in this play and the “original tomfooleries” of the 1892 production. Perhaps Cokane is bearable, if acted with enterprise and “savoir faire, Harry.” Mr Earrett’s performance was not. Mr lan Findlay (as Harry Trench) was embarrassingly awkward and difficult to hear all the time; in his silent scene in the last act he was a very illbalanced passenger on the bar of Miss Wootton's bicycle. There was little sign pf either keenness or ability to get on with the play. How much better it would have come off if people had been made to move about with conviction, instead of standing about as if waiting- to be photographed, is guc.is.work. Cer-

tainly, in the mechanics of production, “Widowers’ Houses” surprised by its lack of the average tidiness which the society usually achieves. It probably demands a resourcefulness or inventiveness in production—if it is to be anything—which is not needed for the slicker custom-built success-plays jn which the society is better experienced. In the meantime it will be a pity if the society allows the experience of a badly-chosen Shaw, badly and unadventurously done, to discourage it from the production of substantial and “serious” plays. At least a part of Shaw’s Preface may be taken to heart: “Every attempt to extend the repertory proved that it is the drama that makes the theatre and not the theatre the drama. Not that thia needed fresh proof, since the whole difficulty had arisen through the drama of the day being written for the theatres instead of from its own inner necessity. Still, a thing that nobody believes cannot be proved too often.”