Village Wooing

Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin 1pm €8-€12 (lunch €4) Ends Until Sep 8 086-8784001 bewleyscafetheatre.com

In Bewley’s Café Theatre’s new production of GB Shaw’s short play from 1934, the male character – apparently straight, apparently single – endures the advances of the female character – apparently interested, apparently bombshell – with the sort of disdain you usually reserve for a mound of compost that’s been dumped into your bed.

The irony is deepened by the fact that they are on a pleasure cruise. “Work is my only pleasure,” Peter Gaynor’s clenched travel writer tells Rebecca Grimes’s insouciant telephone operator and shop assistant who won her ticket in a competition.

What follows, in director Michael James Ford’s charmingly clever and unfussy production, is part fantasy, part dispute, in which the disinterested male is pursued unflaggingly by the female, while the contracts of marriage and class are laid bare.

As in Shaw’s earlier Pygmalion, social barriers are unstable: the telephone operator’s professional voice will disguise her among the leisured classes and the gentleman writer later trades his supercilious airs for the democratic good will of a shopkeeper.

The set, too, here makes it’s own pleasing transformation, but some things never change: “Bodily contact”, the prude assures his admirer, will be “neither convenient nor decorous”.

In the right circumstances, that could be a killer pick-up line.

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