Misalliance (Tabard Theatre)

It’s easy to see why George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance was a flop when it was first staged in 1910. Despite a rich array of eccentric characters and witty dialogue, this strange, uneven play never really gets its act together with its preposterous plot and scattergun explosion of ideas representing Shaw at his most whimsical.

Apparently only the second professional revival in London (following the John Caird-directed RSC production in the 1980s, starring Brian Cox and Jane Lapotaire), this moderately entertaining production at the Tabard fails to make a convincing case that Misalliance is a lost Shavian classic.

The play is set on one Saturday afternoon in the conservatory of a large country house in Surrey, home of the wealthy underwear manufacturer turned philanthropist John Tarleton. His daughter Hypatia, engaged to a clever but effete aristocrat called ‘Bunny’, longs for "adventure to drop out of the sky" – which it duly does in the form of an aeroplane crashing into the garden greenhouse. The charming, daredevil pilot and his glamorous female passenger – a Polish acrobat no less – shake up the stuffy bourgeois household, as does a young socialist clerk hiding in a portable Turkish bath, waiting to shoot the head of the family.

The play’s subtitle ‘A Debate in One Sitting’ aptly describes its rhetorical quality, where, as Hypatia says, everyone seems excessively engaged in "talk, talk, talk". Always a wordy playwright, this work does seem verbose even by Shaw’s standards, exploring a bewildering variety of ideas, especially around class, gender and generational relationships. There are misalliances not only in potential marriage arrangements, but in the clashes between the aristocracy and nouveaux riches, socialism and capitalism, freedom and materialism. Above all, Shaw takes pot shots at middle-class hypocrisy and propriety, without consistently hitting the target as he does in his better plays.

Following a rather dull, slowish start, Nick Reed‘s production gathers pace and interest after the farcical intervention of the three outsiders acts as a catalyst for other characters to express their inner desires.

Clifford Hume gives an amusingly outsized performance as the self-educated Tarleton giving out reading advice, with Roberta Mair as the wilfully rebellious Hypatia, Carrie Cohen as his warm-hearted but dotty wife and Stuart Walker as his crudely pragmatic son. James Taylor Thomas overdoes the self-centred hysterics of ‘Bunny’, embarrassing his self-possessed, ex-colonial administrator father, played by Toby Davies. Piers Hunt is the smooth-talking but not too gentlemanly pilot and Anna Marlene-Wirtz gives an attractively feisty independence to her Polish New Woman, while Rory Fairbairn’s downtrodden clerk ‘affirms his manhood’ with as much conviction as his red politics – rather too much hot air, which can also be said of the play itself.

Misalliance continues at the Tabard until 21 June 2014