Theatre Review: The Man Who Pays The Piper (Orange Tree)

Deirdre Mullins in The Man Who Pays The Piper (Orange Tree)

Beau in tow, irreverent 18-year-old Daryll Fairley (Deirdre Mullins) tangos home in the early hours after a night on the town, much to the chagrin of her pa Arthur (Christopher Ravenscroft), who’s waiting up to let her in. Daryll, you see, isn’t allowed a latch-key of her own, unlike her older brother. Pointing out the unfairness of this situation, Daryll expresses her desire to be “independent,” an idea which her father disdains. “It’s time you married – a man who can master you,” Arthur proclaims, reminding Daryll that, while she’s under his roof (and receiving an allowance from him), it’s he who gets to make the rules.

The contradictions inherent in this excellent opening scene resonate throughout GB Stern’s 1931 play The Man Who Pays The Piper which explores shifts in gender roles (and their economic underpinnings) in the post-World War I period, its wider social picture emerging through an intimate focus on the Fairley family’s fortunes over almost 20 years. It’s no coincidence that the play chimes beautifully with the previous Orange Tree production The Stepmother (with which it’s partially – and very effectively – cross-cast), as another examination of the way that “money matters” in familial relationships, penned by another insightful (and neglected) woman writer grappling with the changes of her time. As in Githa Sowerby’s play, the focus in The Man Who Pays The Piper is on a female breadwinner, for after her father’s death it’s Daryll who ends up being the head of the Fairley household, taking over the running of a West End dress-making firm and supporting the (ever-growing) family financially. It’s a role that Daryll views with increasing ambivalence, though, as she finds herself in the unfortunate position of echoing her father’s pronouncements about what should and shouldn’t be done in the house.

Less straightforward – and ultimately richer – than The Stepmother, Stern’s play is a fascinatingly conflicted work that never seems to resolve its feelings about its complex and compelling heroine. At the heart of the piece is an exploration of domestic power, and the suggestion that being the economic head of a household has the potential to make a man or a woman become a tyrant - or, perhaps, just someone laying down justifiable boundaries and rules. On the one hand the piece presents Daryll as a completely competent woman: shrewd and intelligent in business, mostly generous to the family’s demands. On the other, it comes close to suggesting that there’s something particularly corrupting or “unnatural” about a female assuming this role, as Daryll struggles with her work/life balance, becomes tetchy and demanding at times, and deems marriage to her ever-patient boyf Rufus (Simon Harrison) to be an impossibility.

Helen Leblique’s fluid and confident production embraces the play’s contradictions. The evening is lengthy (2 hours 45 minutes including interval) but momentum doesn’t flag, primarily because Stern’s writing is so full of surprises and unexpected developments. The play keeps you on your toes, changing mood and tone very swiftly from comedy to crisis. Ironies and incongruities abound. There’s a very surprising remarriage, a blazing row that swerves into a proposal, a wonderful moment of supreme drunken revelry. And Leblique makes even the set changes witty.

A large cast skilfully fleshes out vivid characters. Stuart Fox is hilarious as an unexpected new family member. Emily Tucker is piquant as the good-time-girl flagrantly disobeying her sister’s rules yet dismayed at the prospect of leaving behind her home comforts. As another sister, Jennifer Higham makes herself the epitome of eager-to-please timidity, while Julia Watson, as Mother, is the quintessence of daffiness. And the brilliant Deirdre Mullins captures precisely Daryll’s conflicts as she finds herself both despising and delighting in her position as the family “autocrat.”

The conflicts within the play itself are never more apparent than in a spectacularly confounding final scene which comes up with a wonderfully unusual – yet perfectly workable – solution to a particular dilemma, then backtracks and rejects it, before seeming to backtrack again, ending the piece on a memorable moment of ambiguity. Beautifully brought out in Leblique’s production, the combination of the radical and the reactionary in Stern’s writing makes The Man Who Pays The Piper an absorbing rediscovery, and one guaranteed to provoke a lot of post-show debate.

The production is booking until 13th April. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Theatre Review: The Stepmother (Orange Tree)

There’s a decidedly feminist bent to the opening of the 2013 Orange Tree season, which begins with two cross-cast, seldom-seen dramas exploring women’s lot in early 20th century England. First off the blocks is Sam Walters’s deft, intelligent production of Githa Sowerby’s 1924 play The Stepmother – a timely choice given that Northern Broadsides’s take on Sowerby’s best-known play, Rutherford and Son, is currently doing the touring rounds. Formally conventional, with echoes of Granville Barker, Galsworthy and Pinero, Sowerby’s play focuses on Lois, a twentysomething stepmother to two grown-up girls, Monica and Betty, who runs a successful dress-making business. The fly in the ointment for the hard-working Lois is her much-older spouse, Eustace Gaydon, an unmerry widower who married Lois for an inheritance that he’d expected to come to him, the bulk of which he’s now frittered away in shady business deals. The crunch comes when Lois – unaware of her husband’s actions – pledges a whopping £10,000 “settlement” for Monica’s wedding, and the self-justifying and blame-apportioning Eustace is forced to fess up to his dodgy dealings.

The Stepmother genuinely deserves the title of “rediscovery,” for Walters’s production is in fact the professional premiere of Sowerby’s play, which had one private performance in 1924 and hasn’t been staged since. While the piece certainly deserved a better fate than that, it’s not entirely unclear why it’s been neglected: there are occasional lags and flags of interest in the drama, some sketchy characterisation and - after an absolutely superb opening scene in which we see Eustace beginning his campaign of manipulation against the vulnerable, orphaned Lois - the play sometimes struggles to sustain sufficient intensity; a rather English mildness, even a triviality, sometimes settles on the piece. At its best, though, Sowerby’s writing has both bite and insight, and its demonstration that a married woman’s financial security can be entirely undermined by the husband who’s actually controlling the purse-strings certainly resonates. (As does the play’s gentle subversion of the “wicked stepmother” archetype.) In addition, the play connects nicely with previous Orange Tree productions dealing with marriage and inheritance, in particular Susan Glaspell’s Allison’s House, Allan Monkhouse’s Mary Broome, and Pinero’s The Thunderbolt.

A skilful cast also help to fill out some of the gaps. The gorgeous-voiced Christopher Ravenscroft – an actor it’s generally difficult to dislike (see here and here) – slyly subverts his natural charm as the useless, scheming Eustace; never can the assurance “we’re married people – what’s yours is mine” have rung more sinisterly. Julia Watson sketches an indelible portrait of elderly befuddlement as Eustace’s ailing aunt, and Jennifer Higham and Emily Tucker are lovely, lively presences as the daughters. And playing the multi-tasking, manipulated heroine, the radiant, sympathetic Katie McGuinness (formerly Mary Broome) conveys both innocence and tenacity, as Lois slowly realises what another character articulates: that, when it comes to apparent affairs of the heart, in one way or another it’s actually “the money that matters.”

The production runs until 9th March. Further information at the Orange Tree website.