Village Wooing

by GB SHAW

Bewley's Café Theatre

Everybody knows George Bernard Shaw’s famous retort when Isadora Duncan suggested that – with her wonderful body and his great brain – they should have a child together: “Yes,” he replied, “but suppose it had my body and your brain.”

That acid wit, and its instinctive retreat, is in keeping with a man who seems to have regarded sex and intimacy with amused disinterest. His marriage, to Charlotte Payne- Townsend, was famously unconsummated, and in his most popular work, Pygmalion, he gave us Henry Higgins, a man who seems to be genuinely without sexual desire rather than repressed.

In Village Wooing, his short play from 1934 “for two voices”, he creates another.

Working alone on the deck of a pleasure ship, a crotchety travel writer, known in the text as A, is approached by an effusive and attractive young woman known as Z, whose attentions, of course, he finds a complete nuisance.

“It is your privilege as a woman to have the last word,” says Peter Gaynor, who does a nice line in clenched exasperation, “Please take it.” Rebecca Grimes, charming and evenly-judged as the insouciant pursuer of a frigid male, persists though. And director Michael James Ford’s deftly handled production recognises a deeper probing in its comedy through which the peculiarities of marriage, class and society may be indexed in these exchanges, from A to Z.

Returning to the themes of Pygmalion, Shaw again satirises the flimsy constructs of class divisions, where Grimes, a village shop assistant and telephone operator, uses her mannered voice to move undetected among upper-class passengers.

Designer Andrew Murray invests his unfussy set with that subversive spirit, transforming it from a cruiser to a village shop with clever, minimal adjustment, while Gaynor’s transformation is from supercilious intellectual to considerate shopkeeper.

As ever with Shaw, arguments on the politics of marriage can be propounded at bludgeoning length and Gaynor’s character rarely gets to be anything other than irascible, but the production keeps buoyant with wit and sensitivity.

Eimear Farrell’s costumes are affectionately well realised, and even Gaynor’s houndstooth-tweed knickerbocker suit could have come straight from Shaw’s own wardrobe.

It’s that combination of indulgence and delicate irony that makes Shaw’s chaste utopia sound almost appealing, where even its most passionate declaration promises “nothing ridiculous, nothing uncomfortable, nothing unclean, nothing but pure paradise.”

Oh, Bernard, I love it when you talk dirty.

– Peter Crawley

Until Sep 8th