The Madras House, a play by Harley Granville-Barker. The Mint Theater Company, The Mint Theater. Directed by Gus Kaikkonen.
It is likely that the most complex and literate play currently being performed in New York, isn't the eight and one half hour marathon "The Coast of Utopia" but "The Madras House" an amazing 1909 play by George Bernard Shaw's director and friend Harley Granville-Barker. This play, written at a time of transition for women's rights, looks at the problems women faced in the world of 1909 without any sentimentality. Ostensibly about the sale of a department store, the play explores the situation of the entire spectrum of women in London and even in the Muslim world, from top to bottom: rich women, poor women, women who are pregnant out of wedlock, women who gossip, women whose husbands are unfaithful, women desperate to be married and women who are trapped in marriages that have straight jacketed them. Women whose only weapons are to flirt or to show themselves as Couturier models. None of the women in this straight talking play are immune from the struggle to define themselves and to survive in a world of men. The play hints of social forces to come, but there are no magical solutions. But the play is hardly a polemic, it is a warm and rich comedy of manners that speeds by in a short three hours.
The cast, led by Laurie Kennedy, Roberta Maxwell, Thomas Hammond and especially George Morfogen in the richly layered role of Constantine Madras act their roles to perfection. The direction is spot on, the production handsome and simple. I admired the lavish costumes, which the audience can see very well (we were in the front row making us almost participants).
"The Madras House' has a lot to say - it is a layered comedy of manners very much in the line of "The Voysey Inheritance" and in fact there is a sly reference to the former in "The Madras House" one that will have actual plot significance to those who have a familiarity with it. One thing should be apparent to audiences who see "The Madras House" and the hit adaptation by David Mamet of "The Voysey Inheritance." Harley Granville-Barker's writing is complex, working on several levels and any editing out of his deceptively sentimental domestic scenes risks cutting the heart of his work. Of the two Harley Granville-Barker plays in current production, it is "The Madras House' that keeps faith with the work of one of the giants of English theatre. "The Madras House" is worth any trouble to see it and in the case of this small intimate theater, their super friendly staff, and the bargain prices they charge, it is very little trouble indeed. We give "The Madras House" an A+ in our Broadway Bridge and Tunnel Test.