February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Joseph Hurley
MAJOR BARBARA, by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Daniel Sullivan. Starring Dana Ivey, David Warner, David Lansbury and Cherry Jones. The Roundabout Theatre Company. At the American Airlines Theatre, West 42nd Street. Through Sept. 2.
In the fourth and final scene of George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 seriocomedy, "Major Barbara," Lady Britomart Undershaft, played by Dana Ivey, visiting her estranged husband’s munitions plant for the first time, is momentarily shocked into an extremely uncharacteristic silence by the vast scope and sheer elaborateness of the place.
Control freak and dowager that she is, Lady Brit’s reaction might almost seem to parallel that of a director contemplating the possibility of a major Broadway production of the play itself.
Here, after all, is a play requiring three elaborate sets and 15 substantial characters, not to mention a quartet of small, non-speaking parts who appear only in the fourth scene.
The play, if produced uncut, and given just a single intermission, as opposed to the three Shaw had in mind, lasts nearly three hours, in addition to which it makes considerable demands on its audiences, larded through, as it is, with references to figures familiar to Shaw’s hearers but nearly unknown today.
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Against the odds, however, director Daniel Sullivan and the Roundabout Theatre Company have come up with a version of the play that honors even the work’s thorniest, most complex aspects, and, as a result, succeeds on every level.
Considering the challenges imposed by the text, it’s no surprise that there doesn’t seem to have been a significant Broadway staging since the 1956-57 season, when a star-filled version arrived with Glynis Johns as Barbara, Cornelia Otis Skinner as Lady Britomart, and Charles Laughton directing and playing Shaw’s "Prince of Darkness," Andrew Undershaft. That production, at least partly on the strength of names that included, as well, Burgess Meredith and Eli Wallach, endured for an impressive 231 performances.
For the new "Major Barbara," the Roundabout’s third production in the American Airlines Theatre on West 42nd Street, designer John Lee Beatty has provided three near-staggering sets, first the sumptuous, perhaps slightly gloomy library of Lady Brit’s house in Wilton Crescent, London, impressive in every imposing, gilded, cornice-capping detail.
Before the sole interval, the scene shifts to the yard of the Salvation Army shelter in London’s West Ham district, a masterpiece of gray brick, highlighted by faded posters advertising real and imagined products ranging from Bovril and Sunlight Soap to Imperial Stout and Reliable Coffee.
If Britomart controls the Wilton Crescent sequences, her husband, the notorious Undershaft, returning home for the first time in 20 years, especially unreliable when it comes to properly identifying his three children, now grown into adulthood, rules the second half of the play, particularly as richly and wittily played by
Britain’s David Warner, who makes his American stage debut.
Barbara herself, the Undershaft daughter who has become an avid "salvationist," successfully enough to have advanced to the rank of major, occupies the corners and byways assigned to her by Shaw with an intelligence and modesty somehow utterly characteristic of the ideally cast Cherry Jones, without ever quite making a bid for outright domination.
Director Sullivan, who shaped Jones’s performance in last season’s mainly exemplary revival of Eugene O’Neill’s "A Moon For the Misbegotten," appears to have kept her rock-solid and wholly credible Barbara slightly under wraps, which may be a function of the play’s still being in relatively early performances.
As Adolphus Cusins, the Greek scholar who joined the army for love of Barbara, and who dislikes being called "Dolly," the capable and versatile Denis O’Hare seems slightly miscast, and appears to be using an odd British accent meant to suggest he has spent years studying in Greece, returning with severely altered speech.
Standouts in secondary roles in "Major Barbara" are Rick Holmes, who makes a high-flying speciality act out of the awkward Charles Lomax, the dim-witting fiancee of Barbara’s younger sister, Sarah, nicely done by Henny Russell, and the excellent David Lansbury as Bill Walker, a violence-prone client of the West Ham Shelter.
If "Major Barbara" comes down to a debate between the "secularists" and the "salvationists," with Undershaft telling Barbara that making guns is his religion, and that power is all that really matters, whether it is used to do good or evil.
Undershaft maintains that, in his religion, the only sin is poverty, since only with money can men make any impact on the lives of other men. Undershaft is often written of as one of Shaw’s "supermen," since he has used his vast wealth to create an ideal community for his workers, whereas Barbara’s "good works" are endlessly compromised by the machinations of the people she has set about to help.
If Andrew Undershaft seems unusually persuasive and sympathetic in this production, it is probably because of the charm, wit and persuasion with which David Warner’s dazzling performance is loaded, and perhaps because, to some extent, director Sullivan seems to share playwright Shaw’s sympathy for the character.
Whatever you believe, this is an outstanding "Major Barbara."