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by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Joseph Ziegler

Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

May 23-October 4, 2003

"Shaw's First Play is a Gem"

Written in 1892 but not performed professionally until 1907, "Widowers' Houses" was George Bernard Shaw's first play.  You would never know it.  Shaw's wit, politics and subversion of form are all here but in a much more concise, trenchant form than in some of his more garrulous later works.  Its topic of dirty money is still relevant today.  The Shaw Festival gives the play a production so detailed and impassioned it's hard to imagine the work ever being done better.

On a trip down the Rhine, young Dr. Harry Trench has fallen in love with Blanche, an attractive woman travelling with her rich, arrogant father Sartorius.  Sartorius approves of the couple's marriage with the strange proviso that Harry's aristocratic relatives with accept him socially.  Harry assumes that this is because Sartorius is a self-man made man who has risen from the lower orders, but Harry's people do agree.  When Harry discovers that Sartorius' wealth comes from being an unscrupulous slum landlord, he is placed in a moral dilemma between his love for Blanche and his abhorrence for her father.

Shaw has taken the structure of a typical comedy--young love, an old father, a happy ending--and turned it about.  Here the objection to marriage comes from the prospective groom not, as usual, from the father.  When at the end Harry gives up his scruples to marry, seeing he is as implicated in infamy as Sartorius, the "happy ending" is more a celebration of vice than triumph of virtue.

Joseph Ziegler's direction is superb.  He brings out the underlying tension between the characters' outer show and inner motivations in the otherwise straightforwardly comic first act.  In  the second act when the characters' true natures burst out, Ziegler emphasizes their ferocity.  Sartorius seems more like a demon than a man and when Blanche takes out her frustration by beating her maid her viciousness is terrifying.  Ziegler highlights Shaw's modernity by thus exposing the cruelty that exists beneath gentility.      

Ziegler draws exceptionally fine performances from the entire cast.  Dylan Trowbridge makes Harry seems a bit of a dolt at first, a fool for love, but convincing reveal his inner strength in his fierce debate with Sartorius in Act 2.  Similarly, Lisa Norton may seem the conventional girl in love in Act 1, but even there she gives Blanche's passion an uncomfortable vehemence that bursts out in her outright savagery in Act 2. 

In a powerful performance, Jim Mezon, who directed the play in its last appearance at the Shaw in 1992, brings great subtlety to Sartorius, who easily could be played simply as an ogre.  His Sartorius is a man who seems to know he is evil but takes as his justification that the rest of the world is no better.  Mezon constantly gives the sense of boiling rage barely contained beneath his coolest statements.       

Patrick Galligan paints a fine comic portrait of Harry's ever-so-proper companion William Cokane.  Rather like a young male version of Hyacinth Bucket, he values tact, suavity and propriety above all else displays unconsidered British chauvinism and adoration of wealth and title.  Galligan succeeds all the more by making keeping his character's reactions understated.

Peter Millard does a fine turn as Sartorius' Dickensian debt collector Lickcheese as does Susie Burnett as Blanche's harried parlourmaid

Christina Poddubiuk has given the production a handsome period design.  The muted colours seems to suggest the moral ambiguity of the piece and the back wall of glass provides an ironic commentary on a world where people's motives are hardly transparent.  Lighting designer Alan Brodie moves the play through the warm colours of the comic first act through increasing coldness as the characters' relations become more complex.

"Widowers' Houses" is a gem of a play that the Shaw company had made shine like new.  This production shows just how prescient and vital a play by Shaw can be.  Make sure to see it.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Dylan Trowbridge and Patrick Galligan. ©2003 Michael Cooper.