Arms And The Man (Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, London)
Verdict: Strong-armed Shaw
This may be the last George Bernard Shaw comedy we see at Richmond’s estimable Orange Tree for a while. Those who consider Shaw a charlatan (like myself) should take the opportunity to eat their hats off him.
The theater manager, Paul Miller, who has done so much to rehabilitate the Irishman’s reputation, is retiring this year.
Miller’s latest revival of the great man’s work, Arms And The Man, is a spirited two-and-a-half hour satire (including two intervals) on war and the military.
And far from being heavy, it’s a frothy rom-com that allows true love to emerge through self-delusion. All objections quickly perish at Shaw’s wit’s end.
It’s a comedy packed with carefully drawn characters. The message that war is a fraud is not surprising. But it is written with a level of realization rarely found on the modern stage, writes PATRICK MARMION.
Its story is about the idealistic Bulgarian debutante Raina engaged to Sergius, a cavalry officer and national hero believed to have defeated Serbian artillery in the Balkan wars. As it turns out, he owes his life (and victory) to a logistical mistake by the Serbs, and he seems ready to lose the heart of his beloved Raina to one of the vanquished fugitives.
Throw in a subplot featuring unruly servants and Shaw’s satirical soufflé swells nicely.
Yes, some of the acting in Miller’s carefully costumed period production is unnecessarily strenuous. Alex Bhat as Sergius is a baroque jerk who looks down on others like through a faulty telescope.
Rebecca Collingwood’s flighty Raina is a scheming Shavian butterfly who fools herself and others with “noble attitudes”.
It’s a comedy packed with carefully drawn characters. The message that war is a fraud is not surprising. But it’s written with a level of realization rarely found on the modern stage. Miller’s appreciation for that will be missed.
Saltwater Moon (Finborough Theatre, London)
Verdict: touch the Canadian time capsule
Set on the windswept 1926 island of Newfoundland, David French’s Canadian drama is a sweet and captivating love story that also doubles as a cultural time capsule commemorating life on that sprawling rocky outcrop in the North Atlantic.
Here, Jacob is trying to win back the heart of Mary, a young woman he abandoned a year earlier, after running away from her family to work more than 1,000 miles away in Toronto.
Left in the lurch, Mary has become engaged to a bony rival who is the son of a prosperous local family.
Set on the windswept 1926 island of Newfoundland, David French’s Canadian drama is a sweet and captivating love story that also doubles as a cultural time capsule commemorating life on that sprawling rocky outcrop in the North Atlantic, writes PATRICK MARMION.
It is part of a trilogy of plays, and the first thing that catches your eye is not the story itself, but the region’s mixed-race accent that fuses conventional Canadian housing with Dublin.
Once you get used to it, you tune in to the life of a community still reeling from the Battle of the Somme, in which a volunteer battalion from their region was nearly wiped out in half an hour.
He’s very talkative, but the Frenchman has a way of bringing the universe into the world of this young couple. Amid muffled sounds of seagulls, foghorns and crashing waves, Jacob evokes life in 1920s Toronto, and Mary talks about life in the sticks where her sister is trapped in a ruthless orphanage.
Yet they find time to name the seas of the moon and work on each other’s affections on a small stage that features only a wrought-iron garden bench, a scattering of bark, and a Milky Way of lightbulbs twinkling in the sky. the back wall.
Peter Kavanagh’s production evokes a vivid sense of community at large, with Bryony Miller playing Mary as a proud and reserved young woman who also has a sharp elbow to dig into Jacob’s ribs. Joseph Potter, like her suitor, is charming, wisecracking, and arrogant. Together, in this intimate 50-seat theater, they bottle up the mists and salty air, imagining a passionate encounter almost a century ago.