You Never Can Tell

Synopsis

One summer's day in 1896, Valentine, a dentist in Torbay, meets and falls hopelessly in love with the high-minded Gloria, whose mother has returned with the children from abroad. The children have never met their father, so lunch with Valentine and his landlord proves very eventful. Who runs rings around whom - Valentine, Gloria, her brother and sister - the ever-present waiter, or the mysterious QC up from London? This delightful light-hearted comedy leaves you feeling glad and happy.

Our Review:

8 November 2005

Awash with critical glory at Bath and on tour, Peter Hall’s revival of George Bernard Shaw’s seaside comedy of romantic errors finally sails into a West End that seems to be bobbing on a middlebrow tide at the moment. Not that Shaw’s ironic farce involving a dysfunctional late-Victorian family arriving at a fashionable watering hole in Devon and bumping into the father they thought had ditched them long ago isn’t without it’s stormy moments.

Indeed, the play’s main battle of the sexes theme, about how the thoroughly modern daughter of an unconventionally feminist mother finally comes to an emotional accommodation with a permanently broke dentist called Valentine, is still like a sharp intake of salty sea air, mainly because Shaw seems to take delight in always showing you the flip-side of every relationship, from the apparently heartless father changing his spots to the mother discovering that there is a price to pay for social independence.

It all ends at a carnivale...

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Latest User Review

72.129.30.108) - 17 January 2006:

Saw 8 plays recently on visit from California. We voted this our favorite. Put it on your must see list. Other top choices included 'Mary Poppins, Heroes, The Producers' ...

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