George Bernard Shaw's 'You Never Can Tell' a mix of delight and provocation at the Abbey Theatre

A lack of heart in Wilde spurred Shaw to pen a pulsing social melodrama, writes Padraic Killeen

HAVING helmed Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Folly at the Abbey Theatre last Christmas season, director Conall Morrison is back at the national theatre again this Christmas with another comedy, George Bernard Shaw’s 1897 play You Never Can Tell. The production is a blend of delight and provocation, says Morrison.

“It’s a remarkable mix of farce and melodrama and straight drama,” he says. “It’s set in an English seaside town where a mother and her three children have returned after 18 years of exile in Madeira. The children are estranged from their father and so we’re plunged straight into a family drama, but with all sorts of twists.

“Among other things, there’s a love-struck dentist involved, and it all ends with a big showdown at the hotel. Shaw takes all these tropes of a seaside farce and allies it to the most potent melodrama and pulsing social drama.”

Intriguingly, Shaw also manages to work into the play a few references to his contemporary, Oscar Wilde. “The Importance of Being Earnest had premiered just before he wrote the play and it had been an enormous hit,” says Morrison. “So, in some respects, there are echoes of Earnest in it. This is Shaw’s riposte to Wilde. He thinks, ‘Well, if this is what one witty Dublin Protestant can do, I’ll show them what another even wittier Dublin Protestant can do’.”

Indeed, Shaw — who greatly admired Wilde’s writing — had disliked Earnest for its perceived lack of heart. “Well, you always have to allow for a little bit of professional envy. Because Earnest was so successful. But Shaw did say that ‘If I come out of a play laughing, but my heart hasn’t been stirred, then I feel unsatisfied’. In You Never Can Tell, Shaw has his cake and eats it, too. He has the humour and the farcical plot but he also weaves in a lot of ideas — a lot of stuff about the complications of family. And he’s writing about what he knows. Because he had a very difficult relationship with his father, who was always either absent or drunk, and yet in many ways Shaw adored him.”

Notably, the play’s lead protagonist is a steely and independent matriarch, Mrs Clandon (Eleanor Methven), a recurrent figure in Shaw’s plays. Shaw himself was a fervent advocate of women’s rights. In light of the recent furore over the Abbey Theatre’s programme for 2016 and its lack of a new play by a female dramatist, doing Shaw now must have been interesting for Morrison.

“This is the first Abbey production since the whole ‘Waking the Feminists’ debate kicked off,” says the director. “So a lot of the lines in this play are now very much framed by that and I think that lends an urgency to those moments onstage.

“Shaw was intensely aware of the power of women in his life and in society and of the ongoing subjugation of women. Mrs Clandon in the play is a very strong woman. She’s a pamphleteer and a progressive. She’s brought up three kids on her own. So she’s the original fighting single mother. She’s got great love for her children ands a big heart, but she’s also incredibly alert to the dark machinations of patriarchy, and she fights it.”

Morrison says Shaw makes sure that there’s no casual submission there, no romantic resolution. “This woman goes right to the end of the play very clear-eyed about what levels of bullshit that men are capable of, and what levels of mendacity. She remains forcefully opposed to that to the bitter end. It’s a striking bit of drama and all the more resonant because of the recent debates.”

You Never Can Tell runs until Feb 6