Misalliance

by Bernard Shaw

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 14 December 2017

Paul Miller directs his third Shaw play at the ever-impressive Orange Tree Theatre (unfortunately I missed his The Philanderer though I saw Widowers' Houses in 2015). The new play fizzes with ideas and with almost absurd social situations, but the witticisms reveal unexpected truths and often surprisingly painful tensions, both between characters, and between the social roles people live by and their own (usually flattering) images they have of themselves.

In the hands of an excellent cast the now-unfashionable wordiness of Shaw is managed with great verve and dexterity; the speed of delivery is perhaps only possible in such an intimate space, but it certainly helps in preventing the play from being bogged down by its own verbiage. What lifts Shavian cleverness into something more probing is the deft revelations of depths of character beneath the surface brilliance of the dialogue. From the peculiar camp narcissism of Rhys Isaac-Jones's Bentley Summerhayes to the worldly-weariness of Simon Shepherd as his father Lord Summerhayes, from the brittle self-righteousness of Jordan Mifsúd's interloper to the bullying suavity of Luke Thallon's Joey Percival, we see people who can experience real pain, which their superficial behaviour can mask but not entirely conceal. 

French Without Tears

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 11 November 2015

Terrence Rattigan's reputation, skewered by the so-called 'Angry Young Men' in the 1950s, has risen again in the last couple of decades with a series of impressive revivals of his more weighty plays. 'French Without Tears', his first major success from 1936, is a farce, but as is often the case with Rattigan, there are serious undertones which point to a real, if unacknowledged, fragility in many of the characters.

This production, directed by Paul Miller, features a young cast, (two professional debuts and several recent graduates) with David Whitworth playing the only senior role, M. Maingot. Managing a farce in a small acting space with the audience on four sides and the front row on the stage floor level is quite an accomplishment, and the actors managed this with enormous vitality and skill. While at times the public schoolboy accents may have seemed a trifle overdone in the small space, the overall effect was completely convincing - another of the secrets of a successful production: if the cast is too knowing or the speaking too exaggerated the effect falls flat.