A Shaw thing
AFTER a year or more of gazing at screens, it is a joy to be back inside a theatre. For a start, there is the social pleasure of seeing old friends. Then theatre, like church, allows us all to engage in an act of communal celebration. Above all, after the prosaic realism of television drama (with the honourable exception of Inside No 9), it is a pleasure to once more encounter verbal richness and intellectual vivacity.
My first visit to a theatre since December was to the Orange Tree in Richmond to see a double-bill of Shaw Shorts (until June 26). Socially distanced as we were, it (1904), is a in which an uxorious husband relishes the fact that his wife is the recipient of amorous verses penned by a young poet. The joke is that the characters have all been to see last Shaw play to be staged at the Orange Tree before lockdownand are, in effect, re-enacting its triangular passions.
