Highways Hall, Reading

‘The Reading Repertory Company present three One-Act Plays: “The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet” and “How He Lied to her Husband,” by Bernard Shaw. “The Vision,” by Richard Alderman. At Highways Hall, Greyfriars Road, On Thursday and Friday, February 26th and 27th, at 7.30 p.m.’. Reading Standard, 21 February 1931. ‘The major item in the programme of three one-act plays which was given by members of the Reading Repertory Company in the Highways Hall, Greyfriars Road, Reading, on Thursday and Friday of last week, was certainly the finest production the society has yet presented to the public. It was G. Bernard Shaw’s “The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet” - the play which was banned for ten years from the English stage - and the production generally was a credit to the producer, Mr. Leonard Bradbury, and to the company as a whole. The excellent dramatic work that the producer managed to get out of a cast consisting of over twenty players was only equalled by the really marvellous manner in which he manipulated a difficult scene (with all the members of the cast in) on a very restricted stage area. The play involves a scrapping fight between a man and ten feminine viragos, a rowdy and demonstrative court scene (in which the barn is used as a courthouse) as well as countless situations that could easily have degenerated into a scramble on an even larger stage. As it was, one was never conscious of muddling and over-crowding, only of the great spiritual vitality of the production from beginning to end. The play itself - consisting of the trial of Blanco Posnet for horse-thieving in U.S.A about sixty years ago - is by many people considered one of the most striking examples of Shaw’s finest qualities. In the first place it carries its message (as any play of Shaw’s must do), its drama is vivid, the whole thing original and arresting, and the dialogue almost devastatingly frank and to the point. There are character studies, also, that stand out realistically, and smatterings of genuine, if usually bitter humour. Ruthless realism and equally ruthless idealism - Blanco’s idealisms - are combined in the simple story of how a man – “a rotten one” - as he calls himself, suddenly comes up against “his better self,” or God, as one likes to call it. One hopes that the Company will not let the production fall apart. It is a work that should be witnessed by many more of the public than those who have seen it, not only because it is a Shaw play that has probably never before been produced publicly in Reading, but because it is a genuine achievement' (Reading Standard, 7 March 1931).