When Fiona Shaw directs Bernard Shaw one expects something sparky. What I hadn't anticipated was an event as whimsical, vulgar and perverse as this total misreading of Shaw's first play: it's a production that not only shows an adolescent preoccupation with sex but also replaces Shaw's bitterly ironic attack on capitalism with a study of individual neurosis.
Where to start? Maybe with Shaw's astonishing play, written in 1892, which shows how easily people accommodate themselves to corruption. Harry Trench, a young doctor, falls for Blanche Sartorius in the course of a Rhine tour, only to discover that her father's wealth derives from slum landlordism. Harry's savage indignation is somewhat punctured when he learns from Sartorius that his own modest income stems from the same source. By the end, however, all is put right. Sartorius, finding there is more money to be made from decency than dirt, cynically plans to repair his properties. Harry agrees to join him in a risky investment. And the hot-tempered Blanche, having rejected her lover's pious poverty, avidly reclaims him when he joins the capitalist rat race.
Clearly one of Shaw's points, in a society where the squares derive their money from the slums, is that people who live in glass houses can't afford to throw stones. With numbing literalism, Peter McKintosh's set actually consists of a stony terrace and a broken-windowed conservatory in which Sartorius ostensibly lives. Even more dauntingly, Fiona Shaw drags the play's erotic subtext kicking and screaming into the open. Harry kisses and crotch-grabs his travelling companion Cokane. Notwithstanding, Harry and Blanche don't just embrace on the Rhine but go at it hammer and tongs, observed by her father. And Lickcheese, Sartorius's sacked rent collector who uses his insider knowledge for personal profit, turns up in the last act sporting a black dress and matching beads.
None of this would matter very much - good plays outlive silly directors - if it weren't that it symbolises the production's whole shift of emphasis from the system to the individual. Shaw's ultimate black joke is that even the idealistic Harry and the impassioned Blanche end up complicit with capitalism: the happy ending is biliously ironic. So what do we get here? Blanche is transformed into a neurotically pregnant Hedda Gabler left gazing wanly at her estranged lover. Thus the most openly socialist play of the Victorian era is turned into a psychological case history; where Bernard Shaw's play attacks individualism, Fiona Shaw's production celebrates it. Pip Donaghy and Emma Bernbach, as the two Sartorii, are caught up in a punily conceptual production that tells you far more than you wish to know about its director and not nearly enough about its author.
