MAX BEERBOHM, possibly the finest critic of his day, hugely admired Harley Granville Barker’s The Madras House when it appeared in 1910. Not only did a play about (of all things) the sale of a posh drapery store to a rich American contain a scene with “deeper and nimbler thought and richer humour than any known to me in modern drama”, but it also had a fascinating theme: “the present and future of women — women regarded from various standpoints, moral, aesthetic, economic and so on.”
Sam Walters’s 15-strong company leaves me endorsing all this, but with one big caveat. Even though The Madras House more than matches Barker’s better-known The Voysey Inheritance for intellectual scope and subtlety, the dramatic debate does sometimes seem dated. It’s a male biologist’s view of the varieties of female he has found caged in the zoo that Edwardian society has built for them — and Germaine Greer and Margaret Thatcher are obviously not among the exhibits.
Actually, two family shops in London are to be sold, one the smart Mayfair emporium founded years ago by Constantine Madras, the other a Peckham department store run by his brother-in-law Henry Huxtable. Both use the “living-in system”, meaning that their employees spend the working week in dormitories overseen by a severe lady chaperone, but it is the less-posh shop that is the dramatic focus. An independently minded salesgirl is expecting a baby, defiantly refuses to name the father and must be sacked. And the axe will be wielded either by Geoff Leesley’s Huxtable, who is also the flummoxed father of six unmarried daughters, or by Constantine’s son, Timothy Watson’s Philip, the husband of an intelligent, childless, aimless wife.
See what Beerbohm meant? Wives either cossetted or rejected, spinsters conventional or unconventional, even the mannequins who range the stage in their Paris finery — all help to broaden the picture. So do the men, who vary from Watson’s earnestly principled Philip, who hopes to advance civilisation by getting elected to the LCC, to Richard Durden’s Constantine, who has left his grimly dutiful English wife, relocated to Iraq, decided that European attitudes to women are “mad” and become a Muslim and a polygamist.
Advertisement
See what I mean by scope? Like many of Barker’s protagonists, Philip is a bit of a prig. But, when his big scene comes, Durden’s Constantine adds a surprising originality to the play’s many fine qualities. He is suave, sophisticated, articulate, sensual, as much the male chauvinist as an Afghan warlord — and, come to think of it, proof that the play isn’t as dated as all that.
Box office: 020-8940 3633