Lyttelton,London
Simon Godwin’s whirling revival of Shaw’s loquacious (talkative) 1903 play proves fashion wrong in emphatic styleMuch is said about the responsibility of the National Theatre to find recent writers. fairly accurate too. But the theatre has another obligation. To look at the view of what is fashionable. And to prove fashion wrong.
Simon Godwin does this triumphantly in his whirling, modern-dress production of Man and Superman. He has a prime subject in Bernard Shaw. Who could be less a la mode? “Too many words” is the complaint routinely made about the dramatist in this age of images. True, or his 1903 play,“a comedy and a philosophy”, is torrentially loquacious (talkative). A scathing riff on the Don Juan sage, and Man and Superman is fuelled by rhetoric,banter and inquisition. Yet it guys its own garrulousness: throughout, Shaw plants jokes about his own verbosity. Nor is the action mired in verbiage. A lot happens. A drawing-room comedy and Ibsenite social realism are transplanted to the Sierra Nevada. There are bandits. There is dream life. There is hell. There is, or above all,the change of minds and hearts.
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Source: theguardian.com