KURIER

„Superman“ G.B. Shaw comes to grips with „Superwoman“

(…) „Engaging Shaw” by John Morogiello is an amusing comedy about the turbulent courtship between the Anglo-Irish dramatist and wealthy heiress, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, who later was to become his wife.

Robin Kingsland exudes an irresistible charm and esprit as “Superman“ Shaw; it is a joy to share his conceit, injured vanity, irony and sarcasm, together the aces in his pack. His sparring partner, Lottie (Amanda Osborne), is more than a match for him as she woos him; subsequently, she was to spend 45 years at the side of this ungallant Puritan and erstwhile confirmed bachelor.(…)

It is a delight to share in the pair’s witty discussions on matters such as friendship, partnership and marriage on such a high intellectual level.

Kurier-Wertung: ? ? ? ?

Werner Rosenberger
30. März 2012

Wiener Zeitung

I have no desire to marry you either.

(…) Basing his play on Shaw’s works and letters, author John Morogiello brings to the stage his view of how Shaw’s relationship with his future wife developed: from their very first meeting up to his accepted proposal. Did it really happen like this? Probably not. But might it have done? Most certainly!

„Engaging Shaw“ is full of sparkling, witty dialogue, laced with contemporary material. Two such past-masters of spirited intellectuality would appear to be predestined, perhaps condemned, to spending the rest of their lives together. The question posed is how they attain their goal, flaunting both convention and handicaps. Robin Kingsland plays a cerebral Shaw whose brilliant wit is combined with emotional paucity. Amanda Osborne presents Charlotte as a woman ready to stake her entire wit and fortune on this opportunity to win her man. They are supported by Charles Armstrong and Shuna Snow as their friends, the Webbs. This is an intelligent, well-played piece in the usual sound staging.

Wertung: ? ? ? ? ?

Alexander U. Mathé
04.04.2012

DER NEUE MERKER

We owe George Bernard Shaw a handful of excellent plays and many a joyful hour in the theatre. Those now spent at Vienna’s English Theatre are equally joyful, even if Shaw is not, this time round, the author but the hero of the piece. We learn from the internet that John Morogiello is an American playwright who has had considerable success with good commercial fare. „Engaging Shaw“, however, rises above this genre and offers us comedy of a higher order; brilliant, intellectual sparring on Shaw’s own level.

(…)

It is clear that the author has done his research, for the situation is totally convincing. We learn that Shaw spent time with the Webbs (Beatrice Webb, above all, enjoyed quite a reputation amongst female activists of the day); all three of them were members of the socialist „Fabian Society”; we also learn that Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a rich, unconventional 40 year-old Irish woman, has set her sights on this „exceptional“ target and witness just how hard it was to be to „trap“ him.

Director Andrew Hall offers us a fast-paced piece set in Victorian pomp; you have to watch like a hawk so as not to miss a single point in this match of wit, a mixed doubles in which the ball whizzes over the net, is caught and returned. The play is far from being simply about a witty author and a clever woman, it is rather about the theory and practice of intellectuals as they strive after a „new society“. In the end, however, they too remain within the well-tried constraints of partnership and even wedlock…

Robin Kingsland is George Bernard Shaw. He portrays a „sacred monster“ who is well-nigh likeable and never highlights Shaw’s vanity to the point of excess; he allows plenty of space within this brilliant head for the man’s better qualities. Amanda Osborne makes full use of the weapons at a clever woman’s disposal, a woman who only occasionally gives way to convention; when she does so, she taxes Shaw to the limit by being a pain, possessive and nagging. Not for a moment does Shuna Snow allow us to doubt the importance of Beatrice Webb in her day, whilst Charles Armstrong is delightful as a Sidney Webb who is only spared through his wife’s genuine love for him…

Robin Kingsland ist George Bernard Shaw, und er zeichnet das „heilige Monster“ geradezu liebevoll, spielt die Eitelkeit nicht unerträglich aus, lässt dem blitzenden Kopf noch eine Menge Raum für gute Eigenschaften. Amanda Osborne kämpft mit den Waffen einer klugen Frau, die nur manchmal in den Abgrund der Konvention stürzt und dann so lästig, besitzergreifend und keifend wird, wie Shaw es nicht verträgt. Shuna Snow lässt keine Sekunde daran zweifeln, welch bedeutende Frau diese Beatrice Webb gewesen sein muss, und Charles Armstrong ist bezaubernd als Sidney Webb, den nur die aufrichtige Liebe seiner Gattin davor bewahrt, untergebuttert zu werden…

The evening is a feast for intellectuals. Good mastery of English is needed if one is to grasp more than the half; but even that would remain a feast.

Renate Wagner
29.03.2012

Vienna Review

Engaging Shaw: a Playwright’s Private Comedy

A portrait of George Bernard Shaw premieres at Vienna’s English Theatre: a complicated man, put lightly

In 1913, George Bernard Shaw’s most famous play, Pygmalion, which in its various forms was to win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize, received its world premiere in Vienna. So it’s appropriate that the European premiere of American playwright John Morogiello’s portrait, Engaging Shaw, is now on stage at Vienna’s English Theatre. It is a drawing-room comedy of the kind GBS himself wrote without meaning to, his irrepressible wit glinting and bouncing through the heavy-handed political messages he was concerned to convey, but which his audiences preferred to ignore.

In Engaging Shaw, John Morogiello has affectionately turned the tables on him, putting the politics at the service of the humour. He has constructed his play largely out of dialogue extracted from the writings of GBS himself and those of two of his close friends, the crusading socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the Fabian Society and the London School of Economics. The words of Charlotte Payne-Townshend, fellow Fabian and Shaw’s wealthy future wife, however, are Morogiello’s own.

This is a witty, wordy play, and it needs a very light touch to keep it afloat. If this production tips a little now and then, the bailouts are quick, and on the whole, it bobs along quite nicely. Robin Kingsland is indeed engaging as the larger-than-life Shaw, an overgrown teenager bursting with political and philosophical ideas, smart, smug, sweet, and selfish. Even as you’re laughing, you want to throttle him, and as Shaw himself warned Charlotte: “Should you feel the urge to throttle me, be careful, for then you’ll be in love.”

And of course, before long, she is, and she plays at Shaw’s own game of self-serving unconventionality by proposing marriage herself, and moreover, a marriage without sex – without even the “once a week, on Saturday night, after I’ve wound the clock” arrangement which Sidney insists has worked perfectly well for himself and Beatrice. It’s a pity that Amanda Osborne, otherwise convincing as the charming and determined heiress, couldn’t have mastered the accent; when she tells us she’s Irish, we only half believe her. The philandering Shaw said of the real Charlotte, “Being also Irish, she does not succumb to my arts as the unsuspecting and literal Englishwoman does.” A pretty brogue would have added a you-can’t-fool-me-we’re-two-of-a-kind touch to her impish sparring, and heightened the sense that the great man had, in more than one way, met his match at last.

Shaw’s dialogue with Charlotte Payne-Townshend is mostly a creation of playwright John Morogiello, but still convincing | Photo: English Theatre

But it still works. Aided by the Webbs, who transmute their political methodology of gradualism and permeation into a marriage campaign strategy (step by step, till he can’t do without you), Charlotte eventually snares GBS in his own over-rationalized trap. A neat, three-way letter scene, in which we hear the various plots and counterplots largely in original words, shows him slipping inexorably into the chaste (and as it turned out, 45-year-long) embrace of his “dear, green-eyed one”.

Morogiello has made very clever use of the Webbs’ correspondence, turning the straw utterances of two over-earnest social reformers into ironic and self-deprecating gold. The pre-premiere audience laughed at them delightedly, not a response that generally springs to mind when one thinks of this dour pair.

A foil to the puckish Shaw, Charles Armstrong is good as the earthbound Sidney, endearingly proud of his own limitations: If you can’t fix it, feature it. Beatrice’s supposed own attraction to GBS, however, comes as a surprise, and remains unconvincing; her distraught and uncharacteristic plea to Sidney to “take me away from here” is a weak moment in the play. But this isn’t the fault of director Andrew Hall, still less that of Shuna Snow, who intelligently finds room for warmth in the role of the briskly capable Beatrice. This is a fault of the text; John Morogiello has imposed a clumsy burst of drama on an otherwise successful romantic comedy. Shaw’s occasional hints about the mother who abandoned him are intrusive, too: An investigation of that issue, and its impact on his later relations with women, in particular with Charlotte, would have been beefy matter for a psychological drama, but then that would have been another play entirely.

This work is set in the 1890s, and Andrew Hall’s naturalistic direction is exactly what it needs; the traditional sets and costumes, by Terry Parsons, are entirely appropriate. Engaging Shaw is no experimental challenge, but for footsore tourists seeking an enjoyable evening in comfortable seats, it will be just the thing.

Veronica Buckley
April 2012