UK Theatre Network

Widowers’ Houses, George Bernard Shaw’s first stab at playwriting, begins almost like a boulevard comedy of Brits abroad behaving badly. 

Young Harry Trench has just passed his medical exams and is celebrating in typical student fashion by going travelling.  As he tours Europe, freed from the trammels of polite society and his dinner jacket, he scrapes an acquaintance with another pair of English tourists, the exquisite Blanche and her formidable father, Mr Sartorius.

Soon though the façade of light comedy is thrown aside, and Shaw’s trademark political, moral and philosophical purpose comes to the fore.  Mr Sartorius is a self-made man, and while Harry’s aristocratic relations have no objections to his alliance with Blanche and her vast wealth, Harry himself is appalled to learn that his future father-in-law made his fortune as a slum landlord.  Having seen the result of such living conditions in the hospital out-patients department, the newly qualified doctor wants nothing to do with Sartorius’s tainted money, but Blanche has no plans to eke out an existence on Harry’s measly £700-a-year private income, and as her fiancé is too gentlemanly to reveal the true reason for his misgivings, she breaks off their engagement.

The third act challenges Harry’s high-minded attitude and Blanche’s idolatry of her father, and Shaw satirically lets them discover that real life is about compromise and pragmatism.

The passionate love affair between the jovial Harry (Ben Addis) and the doll-like Blanche (Lucy Briggs-Owen) is the glue that holds together a not entirely convincing structure, and if director Greg Herzov hadn’t played up their almost animalistic sexual attraction the ending would have fallen flat.  Shaw devotes most of his attention to the sinister Sartorius, played in his inimitable and inscrutable manner by Roger Lloyd-Pack, and the rent-collector Lickcheese, a conniving and obsequious pauper-on-the-make portrayed by Ian Bartholomew with Dickensian relish.  

Ashley Martin-Davis is responsible for Blanche’s mouth-watering costumes – what a shame that velvets of such rich plushness and colour are nowadays only seen on soft furnishings.  And special mention for Vanessa-Faye Stanley, who upholds the Exchange’s long tradition of scene-stealing servants as Blanche’s put-upon maid.

Although this is Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses is littered with typical Shavian wit, ridiculous moral dilemmas, and a cast of vivid characters, and remains as entertaining, funny and pertinent as it was in 1892. 

Widowers’ Houses is on until Saturday 9 May 2009

Prices: £8.50-£29.00

Evenings: Mon-Fri @ 7.30pm, Sat @ 8pm

Matinees: Wed @ 2.30pm, Sat @ 4pm

Box Office: 0161 833 9833

www.royalexchange.co.uk