Review - Widowers' Houses

Theater Review
by Christopher Piatt

Issue No. 115, May 10 - 16, 2007

If he’d died when he was 40, George Bernard Shaw would have been well remembered as an important arts critic of his day. He knew his Wagner inside and out, and was a tough-minded supporter of a then un-cemented chap named Ibsen. But in 1892 the critic turned 41 and tried his hand at playwriting, with a lacerating look at slum housing and the (absent) scruples of capitalism. While Widowers’ Houses didn’t demonstrate the rich character work that would come later in his 50-plus catalog of plays, its wit, strategic plotting and unwillingness to appease stewards of propriety announced not just a new voice, but a new way to look at theater. You can have your cake, Shaw wryly tells us, but you should know you’re a bloody bastard for eating it.

The bright staging by Kevin Fox (usually a thespian) is so ridiculously arch it threatens to scrape the proscenium. The story of a young man who finds himself betrothed to a woman whose family fortune is in tenements gets played with ripping but controlled excess. The Victorian faux-hawk on David Parkes’s dapper slum lord; the blanched, heaving bosom of conflicted daughter-of-privilege Logelin; the host of darting eyebrows and flaring nostrils—are all hallmarks of Fox’s flamboyant but intelligent staging. That Lisa Fernandez, in the small role of a parlor maid, carries so much weight proves Houses is directed by an actor’s actor. It only heightens our enthusiasm for Shaw who, even a century later, thanks us by pointing out our vulgar hypocrisy.