Playhouse, Halifax

Advertised in the Halifax Evening Courier, 28 April 1950, giving the performance dates as 3-13 May. ‘A Bernard Shaw double “bill” by the Halifax Thespians at the Playhouse, last night, held the promise of an evening with much wit and some wisdom. And so it proved in the end, though it was some time before the wit really emerged. The plays were “The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet” and “Androcles and the Lion,” both works dealing with aspects of Shavian views on religious themes and both of the just-before-1914 Period. There was a personal curiosity about the first play, since it was one of the Shaw works not hitherto seen in production and - let us be honest - never read. Some confession must be made to a measure of tedium before the experience was over, however. The author subtitles “Blanco Posnet” a sermon in crude melodrama; he takes a courthouse of American Pioneer days for his pulpit and a self-appointed rascal who has seen the light for his preacher and moralist. In impudence, Blanco runs true to Shavian form, but there was not much evidence of vintage Shaw. The wit was often overlaid - a combined result of the near-burlesque medium of the play, which time seems to have outmoded rather than mellowed, and a cast which often did not seem able to shed its self-consciousness' (Halifax Evening Courier, 4 May 1950).