As a reformist who wrote well-constructed plays, John Galsworthy is very much out of fashion. To mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, the Finborough has, however, revived this little-known play from 1922 and, while it may not be gold-standard Galsworthy, it is more radical than it first seems.
The action takes place in the north London home of the upper middle-class March family. Geoffrey, the breadwinner, is a novelist forever railing at the sins of the coalition government. His son, Johnny, is a war-haunted poet who attacks the spiritually bankrupt society around him. The family’s values are put to the test when they are asked to employ their window cleaner’s daughter Faith, reprieved from hanging but lately imprisoned for smothering her two-day-old daughter, as a parlourmaid. Only Geoffrey’s guarded wife opposes the idea, seeing the prospective maid as a source of trouble, and her doubts seem to be confirmed when Johnny starts to put rather too much hope in Faith.
The play has some obvious flaws: the philosophical window cleaner, quoting Hegel and Nietzsche, seems too Shavian to be true and there is a rush of incident towards the end. But, for all the dubious symbolism and dated slang, Galsworthy raises serious issues including the inequity of the law and the perennial battle between idealists and pragmatists. When the March’s cook says, “We’ve all got feelings,” and Faith replies, “Not below three hundred a year,” Galsworthy even foreshadows Brecht’s equation of money and morality in The Threepenny Opera. I’m sure Jeremy Corbyn would not disavow the play’s conclusion that it is patronising to try and help people without also caring for them as human beings.
Geoffrey Beevers’ solidly reliable production is very well cast. David Shelley and Carolyn Backhouse as the senior Marches admirably capture the deep fissures within an enlightened family. Duncan Moore as their son Johnny has the guilt-ridden look of a man who has survived the trenches. Vincent Brimble and Charlotte Brimble, father and daughter in real life, unsurprisingly suggest a natural bond between the aphoristic window cleaner and his resilient offspring. As with most plays of the 1920s, you have to accept a measure of contrivance, but Galsworthy emerges as a sharp critic of the kind of woolly liberalism he was often thought to embody.
• At Finborough, London, until 9 September. Box office: 0844-847 1652.
