There is no shilly-shallying in this excellent revival of Allan Monkhouse's 1911 social comedy: within minutes, we learn that the eponymous housemaid has been impregnated by Leonard Timbrell, the scapegrace son of an upright, middle-class family. Monkhouse was also the Manchester Guardian's theatre critic, and clearly knew the value of getting straight to the point.
With great skill, he uses Mary's predicament to satirise bourgeois values. Timbrell senior, who does not even know Mary's surname, reacts to her plight by punching Bibles and issuing draconian edicts. His oppressed wife is more sympathetic but totally ineffectual. Even Leonard, who claims to be the only member of the family to have any human relationship with Mary, behaves with a determined flippancy.
But Monkhouse was no sentimentalist: he shows Mary's working-class father to be more than happy for her to live off the Timbrells' money. If the play goes off the boil a bit at the end, it is only because Leonard, a selfish sponger with pretensions to be a writer, behaves with a hard-heartedness exceptional even in a literary man.
For all that, Jack Farthing gives an outstanding display of debonair irreverence as Leonard, reminding me of the youthful hedonists in Schnitzler's Sweet Nothings. Katie McGuinness captures perfectly the pragmatism and dignity of Mary. And Auriol Smith's production, sharply alert to the nuances of Edwardian life, yields equally good work from Michael Lumsden as the patriarch and Eunice Roberts as his bullied wife.
