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Coward’s way

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 12th March 2008

The Vortex
Apollo

Plague Over England
Finborough

Major Barbara
Olivier

The play has inspired much talk among critics of a West End transfer, and since de Jongh and I are both in the same game (and I’ve never met him, incidentally, since I strenuously shun first nights), let’s share a trade secret. We critics love to mention ‘transfer’ rumours. It makes us sound like insiders, and it lends a charming upward coda to our reviews. But reluctantly I’m doubtful about this one. For all its virtues the script is too fragmented for the theatre. There are dozens of scenes and legions of characters. It’s an outstanding tragicomic screenplay which the director Tamara Harvey has expertly condensed for the stage. If this show attains the afterlife it richly deserves it belongs on BBC1.

More polemic at the National where Nicholas Hytner’s first-rate revival of Major Barbara examines the ethics of middle-class philanthropy. Andrew Undershaft is a millionaire arms manufacturer who wants to support his estranged daughter’s favourite cause, the Salvation Army. The first challenge with the Olivier is to make sense of its helipad-sized stage so Hytner sets the opening drawing-room scene on a raised platform that focuses the eye away from the vast gaps around it. The other settings, a soup kitchen and a bomb factory, have proportions that naturally fill the space. Amazing. The Olivier warehouse feels like a proper theatre! Simon Russell Beale, as the death-dealing businessman, has chosen a role that suits him exquisitely. With his small dense torso, silvery beard and hair, cunning little eyes and sharkish smile he makes an irresistibly likeable monster. He’s well supported by Hayley Atwell, whose beautiful Barbara has a compelling innocence. The play asks whether charity is a universal necessity or a luxury of the rich. And its answer is pure Fabian comfort food.

Our so-called democracy, Shaw argues, is a totalitarian regime where the dictator-for-all-eternity isn’t a person but an abstraction called Money. Well, only a political infant would believe that and yet, without meaning to, it perfectly embodies the two warring genies that have always inspired and bedevilled the communist cause. Idealism and fatalism. As soon as the Marxists declared capitalism’s downfall ‘inevitable’, apathy became a revolutionary tactic. Shaw’s message is similarly seditious and supine. Part of him wants to urge the assassination of King Money and another part seems to accept that regicide would change nothing. In plays like these, and this is a sublime work of dialectical art, Shaw’s true purpose is to furnish the bourgeoisie with cosily subversive topics for dinner-table discussion. In a sense his entire career is an extension of the catering industry.