MAJOR BARBARA To 19 June.
Manchester
MAJOR BARBARA
by George Bernard Shaw
Royal Exchange Theatre To 19 June 2004
Mon-Fri 7.30pm Sat 8pm Mat Wed 2.30pm & Sat 4pm
Runs 2hr 40min One interval
TICKETS: 0161 833 9833
www.royalexchange.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 5 June
A strong centre to a production that unites intellect and passion.This is among Shaw's most blisteringly passionate plays, and Greg Hersov's blazing new production clearly reveals how much its debates remain crucial a century on. The Salvation Army turns out conscientious workers for Undershaft & Lazarus, arms manufacturers to armies everywhere, without conscience or favour.
The weapons business is like a race of its own, passed on to a foundling who shows the right enterprise. It's not so much that weapons-making has no place in a civilised tradition, but that it rises above civilisation.
Powerful capitalists are, as Andrew Undershaft says, the people who control governments. For them, there is no such thing as society. Not until Brenton and Hare's Brassneck, nearly 70 years later, proposed hard drugs as the perfect capitalist product - creating need as they satisfy it - would there be an image to equal this.
It's therefore entirely right that the conventional people should be comic nincompoops, set up to express unimaginative ideas which Undersahaft knocks down with an ease that would leave Plato's Socrates agape. Both Sam Crane as the spineless son who wants to inherit money, and whom his father dismisses as fit only for the verbal arts of politics or journalism, and Rufus Jones as Sarah Undershaft's suitor, fulfil such roles with caricaturing gusto.
Hersov hasn't managed to make the conventional sister's role tell, though Lisa Jackson is unselfish in decorating the stage. And Michael Colgan's Cousins, the Greek scholar who beats a drum for the Salvationists because he carries a torch for Barbara, is a respectable performance that doesn't quite make it into the core of the argument.
Where he's up against a trio of ace performances. Laura Cox has a ringing authority as Undershaft's aristo-born wife, making her more forceful than merely a presence to be bounced off. It's easy to see why the forceful Andrew married her.
And Emma Cunniffe brings as near a tragic sense as Shaw allows to Barbara, whose fight for righteousness disintegrates in the face of her father's arguments. Strength and purpose speak with sympathetic effortlessness through the performance, even at Barbara's lowest moments.
In the end, though, it's David Horovitch's superb Undershaft that fires the fuse of this play's explosive argument. He's like a prodigal son in reverse: kept away from the respectable family home for ages- now he comes, not impoverished but highly successful, not welcomed but forcing his family to reappraise their standpoints.
Shaw gives him the Devil's case with full Shavian brilliance. Any Faust would sign his soul to this cunning Satan (Cousins' Mephostophilis references are filled out between acts by music from Gounod's opera Faust). Horovitch pitches his voice variously between humour and passion, bringing an intensity born of self-certainty and intelligence.
It's a mark of the production's confidence that it can move from Edwardian realism to the final modern elements of the arms-factory - complete with warheads and, judging by Sarah's smart carriers, its own tourist trade and gift-shop.
Add the fine performances from the underdogs in the Salvation Army shelter - Francis Magee's violent woman-beater especially vivid - Conor Murphy's blood-spattered floor marked out as a rifle-site, on which Bruno Poet's lights can target an individual, and here indeed is a major Barbara.
Lady Britomart Undershaft/Mrs Baines: Laura Cox
Stephen Undershaft: Sam Crane
Morrison/Peter Shirley/Bilton: John Conroy
Barbara Undershaft: Emma Cunniffe
Sarah Undershaft: Lisa Jackson
Adolphus Cousins: Michael Colgan
Charles Lomax: Rufus Jones
Andrew Undershaft: David Horovitch
Rummy Mitchens: Kate Layden
Snobby Price: Jack Lord
Jenny Hill: Olivia Poulet
Bill Walker: Francis Magee
Director: Greg Hersov
Designer: Conor Murphy
Lighting: Bruno Poet
Sound: Steve Brown
Dialect coach: Poll Moussoulides
Fights: Renny Kyupinski
2004-06-07 17:40:13