THEATRE / Marriage a la farce

ONE THING that has helped Bernard Shaw to stay in business is his ability to keep up with the times. Put on one of those old plays, and there, to everyone's amazement, is a spot-on analysis of the latest turn in Anglo-American relations, the housing shortage, privatisation, or the iniquities of the medical profession, with special reference to dentistry.

Not, however, on the subject of marriage - this being one of the few British institutions that really has shifted its ground since Shaw's time, leaving him stranded in the aftermath of the Married Woman's Property Act and the anti-feminist pamphlets of Belfort Bax, not to mention his own freakish experience of the married state.

In most of Shaw, content comes first. The more giggles, the more serious the argument. But in Getting Married, his first 'disquisitory' play, written with the naked intention of debating an important topic, all that remains is its power to amuse. On the morning of a Church of England wedding, the bride and groom decide to call the call the thing off, leaving the company to spend the rest of the play discussing all the sexual alternatives available in 1908, before concluding that a Procrustean bed is better than no bed at all.

Naturally, nothing is said about one-parent families, or the bridegroom's option of turning house- husband to allow the fiery Edith to pursue her career as a public speaker. Fifteen years earlier, in the suppressed last act of The Philanderer, Shaw sliced through the marriage bond by sending a couple off for an instant divorce in South Dakota. No such rational solution to conjugal misery appears in Getting Married, where wives remain their husbands' property, and a dirty weekend in Brighton is the only way out.

The Philanderer fails as a farce because it raises the possibility of social change. Getting Married, although it seems to be about change, only reasserts the status quo, showing a group of dissatisfied people banging their heads against the wall: a washout as a symposium; irresistible as a farce.

Its leading men are ploddingly identified as spokesmen of the Church, the Army and the landed gentry. That counts for nothing in Frank Hauser's quick-witted production. What does count is their vitality as farcical stereotypes - crusty old general, cruising lady- killer, wounded cuckold. You can find their prototypes in Shaw's earlier plays, where they have something to say. Here they function simply as contestants in a comic relay race, changing roles as ironists and impostors.

The General attacks the scandalously divorced Reggie; Reggie reveals that he was selflessly making way for his wife's lover; the lover (St John) reveals that it was Reggie's company he enjoyed, not the would-be polyandrist he is now stuck with. With every disclosure, another veil of sentiment bites the dust. From Christopher Benjamin's repeatedly punctured General to Moray Watson's right eously aggrieved Reggie and Robert Bathurst's suavely attention-hogging St John, the show allows vehement personalities to develop inside a tight comic pattern. It is not the barnstorming event I remember from earlier productions, with epigrams ringing out like pistol shots and stout parties collapsing in debris. It is more a beautifully timed dance of give and take, with running sight gags complementing the obsessive repetitions of the dialogue.

Hauser breaks the play at the entrance of Mrs George, and the second half belongs to this oracular mayoress of the coal trade. Loyal Shavians note this as the moment when the play modulates into magic realism. In performance it marks rather the disintegration of farce and the ascent into rhapsodic gush that always scuppers Shaw's syntax when he approaches the bedroom. Neither Dorothy Tutin's assault on a seducer with the fire-irons nor her entranced Earth Mother aria shakes my conviction that the role is unplayable. With that reservation, Chichester has a winner.

Anything less festive than the Actreact Company's version of Odon von Horvath's Oktoberfest is hard to imagine. Dating from 1931 and set at Munich's annual funfair, this folk play shows a community trying to make merry during the depression: the rich picking up girls on the cheap, the poor seeking a brief escape from their hopeless everyday lives.

Kevin Knight, director, designer and (with Hans Rausch) co- translator, might have devised an animated crowd spectacle with his 15-strong troupe; but with the exception of a glum freak show and a party of revellers gallumphing over the set with raised beer mugs, the action unfolds at snail's pace between dismal groups in the ominous shadow of a scaffolding revolve.

Horvath's plot centres on two couples: Kasimir, who has just lost his job and goes on to lose his girl as well; and his devoted friend Franz, a nihilistic petty crook who treats his own girl like dirt. Hovering round them is a lonely young tailor, given to lines like, 'I'm a man who has contemplated the forces of destiny' while crunching an ice-cream cone. All these near-destitute young tangle with two flesh-fancying old horrors (well played by Peter Stenson and Kevin Moore). As in Dix's paintings, it is a vision of human society reverting to the jungle: with the difference that Horvath insistently lays the blame on economic privation. 'People wouldn't be so bad if they had it a little easier. There's no such thing as a bad person.' Knight's production, by contrast, goes out of its way to incriminate them, focusing on the men's misogynistic brutality and the girls' gold-digging coquetries as though this is how nature made them. Better acting would reveal a better play.

In Fat Souls, James Martin Charlton tells the story of Fat Mags (the splendid Joanna Brookes), who takes a job as office dogsbody hoping to find life and love, only to be spurned and humiliated by a pack of preening studs who are inwardly as wretched as she is (hence the title).

Told through cartoon characters and telegraphic verse, this remarkable piece delivers a parable on the need to confront the world without a mask. The author certainly does so. He does nothing to defend himself against sneers for sentimentality and nave Christian uplift, and they do him no damage. He has created something funny, touching, and quite unlike anything else on the scene.

'Getting Married', Chichester Festival (0243 781312). 'Oktoberfest', Lyric Studio (081-741 8701). 'Fat Souls', Croydon Warehouse (081-680 4060).