Grim tale is Victorian treat

“Widowers’ Houses” Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester
Was it prescient or simply mischievous of the Exchange to stage this study of how mortgages can heap misery on people at the bottom end of the social scale, ruin lives and yet make a few people very rich?

How it chimes with our own troubled times.

Yet George Bernard Shaw’s first attempt as a playwright is also an examination of Victorian values, mimicking manners and mannerisms of those who considered themselves the upper classes.

It might just as easily have been called “Keeping Up Appearances”, as the Sartorious family of father and daughter open their home to Blanche’s suit — or Harry Trench — a respectable doctor and nephew of a titled lady, and his pompous but titled friend William de Burgh Cokane.

Blanche’s father is a self-made man, a rich and powerful landlord in his parish, but scratch the surface and all is not what it seems.

Trench (Ben Addis) despises his sweetheart’s father’s money made from slum houses in some of the poorest districts of London. When she learns the true nature of her father’s trade, Blanche too despises it — but only because the poor are not respectable and she wants a better class of tenant.

But as landlord Sartorious points out, Trench has no higher moral ground to stand on — his annual income comes from his rich aunt, the landowner, who has mortgaged the properties to get an income which pays for Trench’s lifestyle, including trips to the Continent.

Roger Lloyd Pack leaves his best-known TV role as Trigger in “Only Fools and Horses” behind to to be an equally lugubrious Sartorius, the respectable landlord whose income depends upon London’s poorest tightly packed into insanitary and unsafe homes, where the authorities turn a blind eye.

Lucy Briggs-Owen, as Blanche, looks pretty but turns into a fiery tempered scorned fiancee and her parlour maid (Vanessa-Faye Stanley), as the frequent object of her rage has a nice comic style.

Ian Shaw, as Cokane, makes the most of the insufferable, unthinking snob, but it is Ian Bartholome was the odious rent collector Mr Lickcheese who steals the show.

Shaw cleverly weaves among his tale the social niceties of address, dress, manners, conversation, etiquette and genteel appearance which coat the grim realities of Victorian England’s slumdog millionaires.