BWW Reviews: CANDIDA, Greenwich Playhouse, June 7 2011

Like the many men and, especially, the many women who pitch up in drafty church halls to hear his soaring socialist speeches, the Reverend James Morrell (Keith Hill) enjoys the sound of his own voice holding forth on how to live a life. "We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it." Pithy and, to this pale pinko playgoer, appealing, but Morrell's wife, the elegant Candida (Helen Bang, all Joanna Lumleyish loucheness) must have heard quite a lot of that sort of stuff and it was grating on me after fifteen minutes, so heaven help her. And heaven, or at least luck, did in the shape of Eugene Marchbanks (Peter Rae) - son of a duke, but barely able to function, so sharp are his aesthethic sensibilities. He's a man in need of rescue and Candida is a woman in need of rescuing a man.

Over the course of 90 minutes of so, the three principals circle each other, the men sniping, the woman bemused. There's some comic relief from the not so prim and proper Prossy (Provence Maydew) and the lad about town who happens to be a curate, Rev Lexy Mill (James Billington). And as Burgess (Candida's uber-capitalist father) Donal Cox does a fine turn, all twitches, false smiles and finger-wagging, with a gimlet eye never straying too far from the main chance. 

Having simpered a bit and suffered both fools a lot, Candida has a choice to make and resolves it in a way that reflects Shaw's ideas about female emancipation and the role of women in society. Written in 1898, the play's wit still crackles and snaps and its two stereotypes of male characters are as recognisable today as then: for Marchbanks, read Kurt Cobain; for Morrell, read Bono. Under Maria Chiorando's tight direction, this menage-a-trios has much to say and says it with trademark Shavian wit.

Candida is at the Greenwich Playhouse until 26 June.

  

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