heiress

(Peter Crawley’s article appeared in the Irish Times, 11/13.)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. (Or so Jane Austen winked.) But Henry James’s 1880 novel Washington Square, adapted for the stage in 1947 by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, wondered how that desire might alter when the roles were reversed.

Here, Catherine Sloper (an engagingly timorous Karen McCartney) is a young woman with a significant fortune but few romantic prospects. We are frequently told that she is gauche and graceless, and, more to the point, so is she: inhibited by a sardonic and implacable father (Denis Conway’s magnetic Dr Sloper) who imprisons her in the shadow of her idealised, deceased mother. When a penniless suitor arrives (Donal Gallery’s fascinatingly insincere Morris), hell-bent on marriage, she believes that youthful desire can defy elder tyranny. He, of course, smells a rat after her inheritance. In both cases, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

This vision of 19th century New York could be wrapped up snug in a reassuring costume drama, but though designer Jonathan Fensom provides a townhouse of rich detail with voluminous period dresses, his palette is admirably muted, all sepia and tobacco browns, as slyly oppressive as the portrait of Catherine’s mother, draped with a shroud. It also allows director David Grindley to focus on the play’s truer identity, as a courtroom drama with hearts in the dock.

“Suspicion?” scoffs Conway when challenged by Marion O’Dwyer’s enjoyably good-hearted aunt Lavinia. “It is a diagnosis, my dear.” Conway gives a performance of inflexible conviction, softened slightly by a cumulus of facial hair, believing that all falsehood will crumple under his wry stare. And so he builds a case, calling witnesses (Tara Egan-Langley as Morris’s sister), presenting exhibits (the fine gloves of a supposed pauper), confident that Morris will break under cross-examination.

(Read more)

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/the-heiress-review-youthful-desire-versus-elder-tyranny-with-a-cash-prize-1.2880603

Photo: Irish Times.

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