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Is it a turd? Is it inane? No, it’s ‘Man and Superman’, a deeply bizarre play that makes the Man of Steel’s capers look positively humdrum.
The great polymath Bernard Shaw wrote it in 1903 as a literally unstageable work that commenced with a lengthy letter to The Times’s theatre critic and concluded with ten chapters of an imaginary book by its protagonist Jack Tanner. The notorious third act is a wild trip to actual hell. Even without the letter, the appendices and the hell bit, it is tremendously difficult: a weird stew of romcom convention (it’s basically about confirmed bachelor Jack being ‘tamed’ by manipulative heiress Ann) and dense philosophical ramblings on the nature of existence (what chinstrokers call ‘a play of ideas’). And it's all dispatched with a self-mocking humour that makes you wonder if Shaw was trolling his oft-addressed middle-class audience.
Helping things go down more smoothly in Simon Godwin’s revival is smoothie Ralph Fiennes, who throws himself into the titanic role of Jack Tanner with buccaneering energy and a buccaneer’s mannerisms – for much of the first act he thrusts and sways in a way that suggests he thinks he’s at sea. It’s a bit… odd. But Fiennes pulls off the role, capering through Tanner’s earnest moral expositions with a self-deprecating lightness that somehow avoids making Shaw’s protagonist seem like a total arse.
And Fiennes is far from this brilliantly cast show’s only asset. Indira Varma is superb as Ann: she’s old enough and aware enough of her own beauty to not come across as an ingénue, more a sardonic Beatrice to Fiennes’s loquacious Benedick. Tim McMullan puts in an outstanding turn as both a Spanish bandit trapped in an existential funk (it’s that sort of play) and a surprisingly likeable Satan (see last comment). And as for the hell sequence, Godwin makes it the funniest and most accessible bit of the night, a merry deconstruction of moral truisms and middle-class snobbery that presents heaven and hell as two cliques at the same awful cocktail party.
In terms of presenting ‘Man and Superman’ as a big, mad, zippy romcom, Godwin and Fiennes have pretty much done the best job imaginable. But even with Tanner’s more icky Nietzschean utterances edited out (it's a 'mere' three-and-a-half hours long), even with Fiennes’s likeably hangdog spin on the lead, and even with Shaw’s frequent suggestion that we’re not meant to take his hero particularly seriously… even with all that, it’s hard to get away from the fact that much of ‘Man and Superman’ is dense, flailing, borderline misogynist ranting that'll bore you to tears or drive you to distraction.
I’d honestly, hand on heart, say that this show is worth your while, but it would be dishonest to pretend that parts of it aren’t excruciating. Shaw was undoubtedly a super man, but his magnum opus would test the stamina of Clark Kent himself.