WIDOWERS’ HOUSES

This Victorian play was first performed in 1892. The story is about Harry Tench (a young doctor), Sartorius (a rich business man) and Blanche (Sartorius’s daughter). Harry Tench loves Blanche and wants to marry her, but there is a problem: Blanche’s father, Sartorius, owns houses that people rent, and he is a very bad landlord. Harry thinks this is wrong. How will this affect Harry and Blanche’s relationship?

BSL Performance Saturday 9 May at 4pm

* * * * The Times (22/4/09)

'I hope George Bernard Shaw’s spirit will not be grieved to hear me say it, but this revival of his first play is an absolute delight. Shaw, you see, was aiming for more than mere entertainment when he penned the first of his three “plays unpleasant” of the 1890s (The Philanderer and Mrs Warren’s Profession followed). “Their dramatic power”, he wrote, “is used to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts.”

Well, 117 years after Widowers’ Houses made Shaw infamous overnight, its tale of dodgy property deals and murky investments still stings, particularly at a time when we’ve had to look afresh at the shifting sands on which we’ve built our own property portfolios.

Shaw delivers his sermon in the guise of a wonderfully lively social comedy and while he invites us to disapprove of the slum landlord Sartorius, played here by the dependably lugubrious Roger Lloyd Pack, he invites us to disapprove of everyone else too.

A lesser writer would make Sartorius a plain rotter and Ben Addis’s Dr Harry Trench a virtuous voice of liberal good. Instead, Shaw gives the Devil his due and scuffs the wings of the angels. “Do you mean to say that I’m just as bad as you are?” asks Harry, when he realises just where his £700-a-year private income comes from. As we see young Harry fall for Blanche Sartorius on holiday on the Rhine, and Harry’s pompous pal Cokane, a gloriously robust turn from Ian Shaw, fawn over the grand Sartorius, we see the upper classes chasing money and the moneyed classes chasing propriety.

Sartorius wants Harry’s titled family to know, lest it offend them, that he is self-made. Well, hey, they say, this is 1892, whatever. But when Harry meets Sartorius’s enforcer Mr Lickcheese, sacked for spending money to repair a tenant’s staircase, he finds that his father-in-law is the worst slum landlord in London. Romance has to slug it out with social responsibility.

The cast play it with vim and accuracy. Lloyd Pack has the air of a man who always sets the agenda. If he had to carry the show alone, his steady dubiousness — and a tendency to fidget when talking — might not be enough. Lucy Briggs-Owen makes Blanche an adorable rich girl who hates the poor, Addis makes Trench upstanding yet callow and Ian Bartholomew excels as Lickcheese, whose insider trading proposal completes the loop of the characters’ amorality.

The writing endorses nobody, empathises with everybody. So you’ll face unpleasant facts, and be reminded of just how much your prosperity underwrites your pleasantness, but you’ll have a ball doing it.

Manchester Confidential (22/4/09)

‘Roger Lloyd Pack pitches his Sartorious PERFECTLY…EYE-CATCHING direction…BEAUTIFUL period costumes, and imaginative stage design, this is AN IMPRESSIVE PRODUCTION ALL ROUND’

Manchester Evening News (22/4/09)

‘Lloyd Pack…brings a WONDERFULLY WORLD-WEARY SLYNESS to his role’