February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The first was the seldom-staged “Widowers’ Houses,” which Shaw completed in 1892, and the second was “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” written in 1893 but not produced until 1902.
The actual occupation of the heroine of the later play was, unsurprisingly, the “world’s oldest profession,” as the saying goes, and Shaw was reacting, in part, to changes that had taken place in British laws regarding prostitution.
In 1890, when Shaw was 34 years old, he had yet to complete a play. He was, however, working on one, with a friend, the critic, William Archer, as his collaborator. In the end, Shaw finished the play, “Widowers’ Houses,” two years later, writing on his own.
“Mrs. Warren’s Profession” took nearly a decade to get a production because it was considered controversial, but it’s been done countless times since its debut. The fact that it contains rich roles for two actresses, playing a long estranged mother and daughter in Victorian London, probably accounts, at least in part, for the plays frequent presence on the schedules of the world’s playhouses, perhaps particularly regional ones.
But “Widowers’ House” has never enjoyed such popularity, even though it is a witty, warm-hearted work requiring just eight actors, two of them on stage for moments only, in parts which are virtually walk-ons.
Now, the estimable Pearl Theatre Company has come up with a staging so brisk and so compelling that it seems more puzzling than ever that the play is so unfamiliar.
“Widowers’ House” plays like a romantic comedy, but there’s no gainsaying that fact that one of its major characters is a conscienceless London slumlord. Shaw’s impulse to approach the subject had everything to do with his membership in the Fabian Society, a socialist organization in which he believed ardently and which still active in Britain.
When Shaw went to work on the play in 1890, the British government, prodded by the newspapers on Fleet Street, was taking a rigorous look at the hardships the poor and lower-middle classes were experiencing in keeping a roof over their heads, not to mention exposing the crimes of the property owners who were gouging them so relentlessly.
One slight problem that still dogs Shaw’s play, at least superficially, is the presence in the text of a fair number of details having to do with contracts, leases and other legalities, terms which would have been common conversational currency among Britons of the period in which Shaw was writing, but which may seem impenetrable to today’s audiences.
Intelligent program material, which the Pearl always supplies, however helpful, can go only so far. It’s easy to see why Shaw, as an avid Fabian socialist, would be drawn to the subject of a slumlord posing as a cultivated, charming member of the British upper-middle class.
What isn’t quite so easy to fathom is what may have motivated him to treat the story with warmth and wit rather than the rage he very probably, and understandably, felt in his heart.
Whatever his reasons, what Shaw came up with in his first completed play ranks among the most agreeable and most entertaining of all the plays he ever wrote.
Late in 1898, the playwright, who had mainly been a critic and essayist earlier on, published two clusters of plays he termed, respectively, “Plays Pleasant” and “Plays Unpleasant.” Both “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” and “Widowers’ Houses” appeared in the later volume.
Shaw wasn’t an established playwright when the books were published, and it’s fairly clear that the reasons he wanted them in print was that their appearance enabled him to write the first of what came to be known as the “Shavian Preface,” a series of introductory essays dealing not so much with the plays to which they were attached, but with the subject of the plays.
The prefaces, in short, are perfect soap boxes for an avid, articulate Fabian. Critics have commented that “Widowers’ Houses” is the only Shaw work that could be called, without argument, a “socialist play.”
Act I of the play takes place in the garden restaurant of a tourist hotel in the Rhine city of Remagen, a location that would eventually garner a particular sort of fame as the site of ferocious fighting in World War II.
A wealthy London widower, Sartorius, is on vacation there with his strong-willed daughter, Blanche. He encounters, not entirely by chance, it develops, a well-placed aristocratic young fellow, Dr. Harry Trench, who is related by blood to certain moneyed and propertied individuals with whom, in accordance with his not-entirely-hidden agenda, he would like to make a connection.
Presenting himself as a jovial gentleman, Sartorius is, in actual fact, a fairly notorious and inherently unscrupulous London slumlord.
The rather na