TheatreguideLondon
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The TheatreguideLondon Review
What Every Woman Knows
Finborough Theatre Summer 2010
J. M.
Barrie's delightful comic fable is given as sensitive and rightly-tuned
a production as you could ask for in this staging by the new Coracle
company, making for a thoroughly entertaining evening.
Barrie has been out
of fashion for some time, his gentle humour a bit too fey for some
tastes, but What Every Woman Knows has some surprisingly sharp ironic
edges to it, all of which director Louise Hill and her cast find and
happily display, generating shocks of recognition and frequent out-loud
laughs among the gentler chuckles.
A Scots family
contract to underwrite the education of a poor student on the condition
that at the end he marry their spinster sister. She offers to let him
off the hook, but his honour makes him hold up his end of the deal,
even as he succeeds in business, goes into politics, enters Parliament
and becomes a rising star in his party, accepting her as an inescapable
burden.
Of course, he
doesn't realise that she is quietly oiling the way for him,
ghost-writing his speeches, making modest suggestions that he thinks
are his own ideas, even stage-managing his pathetic attempt at infidelity, and it isn't until the very last moments of the play
that he comes to see what every woman knows, that behind every great
man . . . .
And of course we
see it all along the way, allowing for the fun not only of appreciating
her strength and cleverness but of watching his blind egotism as it
rides toward the inevitable fall.
It's almost a
foolproof comic structure, except that it is also very fragile, and in
less expert and sensitive hands all sorts of things could have gone
wrong (She could seem too devious and manipulative, he could come
across as too vain or stupid to be worth the trouble, etc.). That none
of them do, that we happily ride along with the fable, confident that
all will work out in the end, is a tribute not only to Barrie's comic
skill, but to the director and actors.
Madeleine Worrall
lets us see the core of iron and sharp intelligence beneath her
character's mousy exterior, even if no one else onstage can. The woman
is clearly always thinking, always several steps ahead of everyone
else, so we greet every twist of plot with the anticipation of how she
will cope with it.
Gareth Glen masters
the very delicate tightrope of making the husband a vain, totally
un-self-aware stick while still showing us that there is something
there worthy of his wife's efforts and devotion, something in the man
for us to admire and wish a happy ending for, even as we are laughing
at him.
Anne-Marie Piazza
nicely humanises the Tempting Other Woman, keeping her from being just
a plot device, and Carmen Rodriguez adds some tastily acid touches as
an amused worldly-wise observer.
The only thing that
is less than completely delightful about this experience is something
that regular visitors to this tiny above-a-pub theatre will know too
well - its summertime temperatures reach sauna levels. They're in the
midst of a fundraising campaign to pay for air conditioning - please
donate.
Gerald Berkowitz
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Review - What Every Woman Knows - Finborough 2010
