The Devil May Care

With an adaptation of an established play such as The Devil’s Disciple by George Bernard Shaw there is always the question why update it changing the conflict that is the backdrop to the drama, if it isn’t going to reveal new truths about the piece. And I’m afraid Devil May Care fails to bring anything new.

What writer and director Mark Giesser has attempted to do is use the original story to highlight the atrocities of the Philippine-American War. Where the Americans are now the aggressors struggling to take rule and as a result sink to racial intolerance and persecution to achieve their goals. This could have been incredibly powerful but when the main story is in effect a family saga or inheritance that verges on sit-com levels of humour and characterisation, any serious message is destined to be lost.

The story centres around the arrival of the absentee brother Richard Conroe who returns to his family home to claim his newly acquired inheritance after the death of his father. This wayward Devil’s Disciple inherits the bulk of the legacy over his mother Adele and younger brother Elias which stirs up a hornet’s nest of feelings towards the Richard. Add to this a British clergyman Paul Prestwick who sides with the Philippine’s and his headstrong wife Judith who Richard seems to immediately take a shine to and you have a set of characters with enough conflict for high drama.

However, this drama only ever simmers, and the long speeches and heavy use of exposition makes for a first half that seems much longer than its actual time. And the premise that when the American army come to arrest Prestwick for sedition, that Robert would sacrifice himself in Paul’s place, seems even more implausible in this version. The second half of the play goes someway to redeeming the evening with strong scenes between Richard and Judith Cullum Woodhouse and Beth Burrows here we see the internal struggles and the best acting that is less effective elsewhere. It is also in the ‘courtroom scene’ that the play gathers enough attention to be engrossing, but it is so late into the play.

They say the devil’s in the detail, but here that detail is absent in favour of trying to make conflicting comment on the larger topics that the play tackles and never quite getting there.