Shaw

What a big disappointment to me was the London production of "Mrs Warren's Profession" by Bernard Shaw which I saw yesterday. I have seen it a couple of times before and laughed a lot at parts of it - the part where the ageing partner in Mrs Warren's "business" proposes to her daughter I have found in the past (even on radio) to be immensely funny but here it wasn't. I admire Shaw's determination to de-bunk Victorian society by underlinging its hypocricy but this time I found many of the arguments unconvincing and tedious; he seemed to be repeating himself a lot for the sake of driving home his points. I have often had the impression that certain writers like Woody Allen, especially those who have cut their teeth on writing comedy sketches, tend, if they have a choice of going down one avenue of drama which the play's direction seems to be the one that should be followed, or down another alternative one that has a good joke in it, they will choose the second way. I have always thought Shaw incapable of this dramatic nonsense but here it seems to me he is almost guilty of much the same thing: following not so much the logic of the story but occasionally straying off to indulge in "entertaining" side-lines.
The theatre didn't help my mood. The Comedy theatre must have been built when or probably before Shaw wrote this play (1894). It's one those old, uncomfortable places which have seats tightly packed together with not much leg room; no central aisle so if, like us, you wished to go to the bar you had to prevail upon the good nature of people - most of them, like me, old and some appearing infirm as well - to stand, if they could, leaving enough room to squezze past them.
Before the show we went to a rather more modern establishment than this ancient place: a bar/restaurant/club called "Tiger, Tiger". We had a Caesar Salad for a fiver and a bottle of wine for £14. I was in the mood for a good laugh but only laughed once - no, even that wasn't a laugh, more of a chuckle.
I asked the waitress: was this the place some of our un-revered terrorists tried to bomb a few years ago. She said it was and that she there that night and would been blown to "kingdom come" if the bomb had gone off. Nice girl. One of "the slags" the bomber would have liked to kill.