Theatre

Major Barbara
Until Jul 3
- Recommended
This event has finished
National Theatre, Olivier, South Bank, London, SE1 9PX
Rating:
© Catherine Ashmore
By Jane Edwardes

Posted: Mon Mar 10
Who looks after the poor better? The Salvation Army, which feeds the needy in return for dubious confessions and takes money from the capitalists to help them salve their consciences? Or the armaments industry which sells guns to anyone who pays while providing thousands of well-paid jobs for its workers? Nicholas Hytner’s production of Shaw’s 1905 play on the Olivier stage uses rumbling warlike music, stuffed dummies, and row upon row of weapons in Tom Pye’s design as a reminder that Shaw tends to forget the realities of war. Watching the paly today, we can’t forget that in 1905 WWI wasn’t so far away.

For three quarters of the evening, the dialogue positively fizzes as Clare Higgins’ indominitable matriarch, Lady Undershaft, rules over her cluttered sitting room and shows her faith in right and wrong. Across London, her independent-minded daughter, Barbara, attempts to win souls over to God in a far more spartan West Ham. When Undershaft, an armaments manufacturer, pays his estranged family a visit, he agrees to see Barbara’s work in the East End if she will visit his factory. It’s Barbara who becomes the convert, bowled over by the idea of persuading the well-fed to follow God, while her fiancé, a Greek scholar, improbably dreams of taking over from Undershaft. At least Paul Ready’s Adolphus has the courage to go eyeball to eyeball with his future father-in-law.

As so often in Shaw, the jaw-jaw finally takes over, but fortunately Simon Russell Beale is enormously impressive as a steely and still Undershaft, delicately exploring the loss that Undershaft feels in not knowing his feisty daughter who he longs to touch but doesn’t dare. Given the layers of emotion revealed (or perhaps inserted), it’s hard not to feel a strange sympathy both for the almost fascistic Undershaft, and for his damaged and absurdly patriotic son who is played with a wonderfully pained disgust by John Heffernan.