Review: When We Are Married
April 9, 2009
Date reviewed: 8 April 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
From the outset we feel on safe ground with the West Yorkshire Playhouse/Liverpool Playhouse production of When We Are Married, JB Priestley’s classic comedy of West Riding mores. Colin Richmond’s set is solid, but transparent: the 1908 sitting room is the image of Edwardian respectability, with hall, staircase and (occasionally) dining room half-visible, the gateway to that strange world where servants rebel and photographers fall into drunken sleep. And the brass band plays – predictable, but wholly appropriate.
Priestley, of course, always played tricks with time and, in When We Are Married, as in An Inspector Calls, the trick is satire by hindsight. Set 30 years before its 1938 premiere, the play has great fun at the expense of narrow-mindedness and social conformity, takes telling sideswipes at class prejudice and rigid notions of respectability and ends up affirming humanity and self-knowledge.
The plot has three main interlocking elements. Alderman Joseph Helliwell (Graham Turner), Councillor Albert Parker (Paul Bown) and Herbert Soppitt (Les Dennis), three big men in the world of Clecklewyke’s Lane End Chapel, are celebrating their silver weddings when they are informed that the marriages are invalid owing to an oversight of the presiding minister. The second strand involves Gerald Forbes (Tom Lawrence), the chapel’s organist (and a Southerner!), who brings the news of the wedding debacle when about to be dismissed for too much “hanky panky” – with Alderman Helliwell’s niece (Claire Redcliffe), as it turns out. As the play progresses, Alderman Helliwell’s house also witnesses the drunken disintegration of the Yorkshire Argus photographer, Henry Ormonroyd (Tom Georgeson), and the disturbing revelations of his former inamorata, Lottie Grady (Julie Higginson).
One of the many strengths of Priestley’s comedy is that characters are very nearly caricatures – the hen-pecked husband, the speechifying bore, the pert maid, the drunken philosopher – but have the individuality to create superb acting parts all down the line. Interestingly, the two apparently downtrodden characters among the three couples are the ones that embrace the concept of freedom and use the panic to realign their lives.
Director Ian Brown’s confidence in the text and his cast is well placed. Polly Hemingway’s concentrated malevolence as Clara Soppitt and Gabrielle Lloyd’s meek, but never subservient, intelligence as Annie Parker stand out among the three couples, but Tricia Kelly, Graham Turner, Paul Bown and Les Dennis all give convincing, amusing and well judged performances.
Two outstanding contributions on behalf of the working classes come from Eileen O’Brien, splendidly anarchic and terrifyingly articulate as the drunken cook Mrs Northrop, and Jodie McNee, perfect in a part (Ruby, the maid) which 70 years ago launched the career of the great Patricia Hayes. Her scene with Henry Ormonroyd, in which he drunkenly seeks poetry and the meaning of life and she responds with an elementary school recitation is, as it should be, as touching as it is funny.
The production seldom strikes a false note, though the attempt to animate almost the only lifeless character - Nancy, niece of Alderman Helliwell - is rather strained. It provides a pitch-perfect re-creation of Priestley’s simultaneous celebration of, and hatchet job on, the old West Riding.
-Ron Simpson
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