Plays about corporate malfeasance are not uncommon and seem most appropriate these days.
Good examples from the recent past include Glengarry Glen Ross, about life in a high-pressure real-estate firm; Other People’s Money, about a group of Wall Street sharks headed for a hostile takeover; and The Substance of Fire, about a floundering publishing business. In 1997, David Hare smartly introduced the financial disaster of Lloyd’s of London to this list with his play, Amy’s View.
Harley Granville-Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance, written in 1905, covers much of the same ground with a distinctive British dramatist style. Probing the moral conscience of its characters, the play will be admired for its closely reasoned approach.
The pace is never forced and no climax is visibly built up to give one actor or actress an opportunity for display. The strength of the play depends on the integrity of its character-building and on the effect of its persuasive reasoning.
Here is this large family of Voyseys, each bearing the marks of those conflicting loyalties, idealisms, hypocrisies and compromises that were characteristic of the solid English professional class.
The business enterprise at the heart of this drama is a highly respected and respectable family law firm, Voysey & Son, specializing in trusts and estates. Its plot complications stem from a practice started by the firm’s founder — instead of keeping money entrusted to the firm where it belonged, he dipped into the capital to speculate in the stock market.
While the clients always received the interest due to them on their capital, they would have been in for a rude surprise had they wanted to cash in their accounts. The inheritance of the title is the obligation by the son and junior partner to carry on this financial juggling act, hopefully restoring the borrowed money.
As the play opens, the firm’s founding father has long been dead and the current Voysey Sr. (Paxton Whitehead) has brought in his son Edward (Blair Williams) as junior partner and successor. When the sensitive and idealistic Edward learns about his "inheritance" and how deeply his father’s investments have eaten into his clients’ capital, he is appalled.
A moral tug of war between father and son follows, and draws in the rest of the Voysey clan. The play shifts from the offices to the family home in suburban Chislehurst, England, and the sets by Paul Wonsek are opulent and imposing.
The fine Walnut Street cast brings the needed diversity and idiosyncratic tics to the Voyseys and the characters outside the family circle. Whitehead as the senior Voysey exudes the self-confidence and commanding presence of a man who has balanced a respectable life with a penchant for robbing his best customers.
Williams does respectable work as his opposite — the conscience-ridden Edward, who is forced to confront the rest of the family with truths they’d rather ignore. His transition in the second act, however, didn’t quite win me over. The women in this play seem little more than window-dressing for those beautiful Victorian costumes.
Many characters are entangled in the fallout from Edward’s decision about how to best deal with his unwanted inheritance, but the talkative last scene leaves us with no moral conclusions that tie things neatly together.
However methodical, the play’s discussion of financial facts too often works against the concern of the viewer. This laborious work is rarely performed and has never been staged on Broadway.
It strikes me as a bit odd that this British play has no players with an accent. There is no humor, little action and no excitement in the play. And for that reason, I suggest that while it has certain merits, it is probably better read than performed.
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The Voysey Inheritance
Walnut Street Theatre
825 Walnut St.
Through April 27
Tickets: $10-$50
215-574-3550
