The 2006 Shaw Festival (Part 2)

[Part 2 of “The 2006 Shaw Festival” picks up with the Round House group’s second performance in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.  I finish out the week of festival shows, which included the two Shaws on the bill in 2006,  below and in between the performances, I make some comments on the surroundings and my observations about the festival as a whole and Canadian theater.  Also in Part 2 are the two performances I’ve already excerpted from the original report and posted on ROT, Noël Coward’s Design for Living (29 March 2012) and Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The Heiress (24 November 2012).  As I said in the introduction to Part 1, which I encourage ROTters to go back and read, I’ve omitted performance reports on all but the Shaw plays here.  For an interesting discussion of GBS and his ideas, I strongly recommend reading Kirk Woodward’s “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw,” to which this posting was intended to be a companion piece, on 3 December.]

On Wednesday afternoon, 9 August, we saw Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at the Festival Theatre, the first production of the festival where I began to notice the design, a kinetic set that was striking and intriguing.  The Round House hosted a “cocktail party” (wine, beer, and soft drinks—and hors-d’oeuvres—but no actual cocktails served) at the hotel that evening (the one at which artistic director Jackie Maxwell and the three company members appeared), so there was no evening performance for us.  Our next show was the first matinee I had selected, Coward’s Design for Living, at the Royal George Theatre in town Thursday afternoon. 

The Royal George is a converted movie theater that had been built in 1915 as a vaudeville house for entertaining the troops of World War I.  It’s a proscenium stage, as you’d guess, and seats about 330 spectators in an orchestra and a balcony, all painted in red and gilt, a little Edwardian gem of an old-fashioned theater.  I had booked the seats on line, so I didn’t check the lay-out and seat location, and we ended up in the last two seats on the house-left corner of the last row of the balcony; Mother said they were the best seats she’d ever had.  (Mom was small, and she always complained that whenever she went to a theater—movie or play—tall people always sat in front of her!)

Between the matinee and the evening show on Thursday, Mother and I had an early dinner—which we did when we had two performances on the same day—at the Angel Inn, reportedly the oldest operating inn in Canada.  (It’s pub food—perfect for what we wanted.)  The original inn dated back to 1789, but it was burned in December 1813 at the end of the American occupation.  (In reprisal, a plaque out front says, some Brits went down to Washington and burned some buildings there.  That qualifies as humor in Canada.)  It was rebuilt on the original foundations in 1816 (though the kitchen’s newer, I presume—and so’s the food).  The plaques outside the front door tell the story of Captain Colin Swayze of the British army, who some say delayed joining the retreat to rendezvous with his sweetheart near the inn.  When she was a no-show, Swayze took refuge in the inn’s basement and was killed in the basement by American soldiers searching the property.  (Surviving soldiers told a different story: it was common knowledge that a store of Royal Navy rum was kept at the inn, and the captain was denying the Americans any victory party with the British liquor.)  Legend has it that even today Captain Swayze’s ghost can be heard walking the inn late at night, and as long as the Union Jack is flown over the inn—as it does today—the ghost will remain harmless.  (In the basement, near the restrooms, is a locked storage room labeled “Captain Swayze’s Cellar – No Admittance.”  Maybe that’s where the inn keeps its rum!) 

After our meal, we walked back to the hotel to wash up and rest and then let the hotel provide us a ride to the theater for the evening show.  The hotel had vans to shuttle guests back and forth—a convenience we used on days when we went in and out of town several times in a single day.  On Thursday evening, the group saw the Goetzes’ The Heiress, also at the Royal George.  (This time we sat down center—and a tall man sat in front of my mother!) 

On Friday evening we saw our first Shaw at the Shaw.  (Sorry.)  Arms and The Man, as I think I mentioned once before, is my favorite Shaw play, and one of my all-time favorite plays altogether.  (When I was trying to be an actor—and still young enough to consider it—I really wanted to play Bluntschli.  Just another disappointment in my life.)  Though I actually heard someone from our group say she didn’t like the show (I didn’t ask her why not), I, at least, was not disappointed.  (I was surprised to hear several people comment that they didn’t know Shaw could be this funny.  I have no idea where that came from!)

Before evening performances at the Festival Theatre, it is the practice of the Shaw to have a pre-show introduction by one of the company on the Members Terrace out back.  Since we had arrived in time for the chat, we went out to listen, and it’s not anything most of us wouldn’t already know—except a little about the director’s choices and, in this case, the design inspiration (which I’ll hit later).  The guy—one of the directing interns—who delivered the intro, however, told an anecdote a friend told me years ago, about a heckler who booed when GBS appeared at the première of Arms in answer to calls of “Author!  Author!” and GBS replied, “My dear sir, I quite agree, but what are we two against so many?”  (The heckler later became GBS’s American agent.) 

Shaw’s play is set against the background of the 1885-86 Serbo-Bulgarian War (an actual European conflict)—though Maxwell’s staging moved it up pictorially a couple of decades.  The heroine’s Raina Petkoff, a young Bulgarian woman engaged to one of the heroes of the war, Major Sergius Seranoff, whom she idolizes.  One night, Captain Bluntschli, a Swiss mercenary fighting with the Serbian army, bursts into her bedroom, fleeing Bulgarian bullets.  He begs her to hide him and though Raina, the daughter of Bulgaria’s highest-ranking officer, Major Paul Petkoff, and his wife, Catherine, deems him a coward, she complies, especially when he tells her that he doesn’t carry ammunition in his pouch, but chocolate creams instead.  Raina is child-like, a romantic teen princess, enamored of heroism, gallantry, the “higher love,” and what she sees as the splendid nobleness of war.  Bluntschli, however, opens her eyes to the reality of life and she comes to realize the hollowness of her romantic notions and the values upheld by Sergius.  Raina discovers the true nobility of the “chocolate-cream soldier” through whom all her romantic dreams give way to true romance. 

Always an audience favorite, Arms was an altogether charming production.  I won’t repeat what I’ve already said about the ensemble acting except to note that it applied here as well as in all the festival productions.  Even the presence of Mike Shara, whom I hadn’t liked as Morris Townsend in The Heiress, as Sergius, the “hero,” didn’t mar this aspect of the production, though he demonstrated once again his peculiar and annoying vocal pattern.  Since none of these characters is American, I had no problem with his Canadian accent (the cast didn’t do British for this Shaw, anymore than they did for Ibsen—or, I presume, Chekhov or the Argentines of Magic Fire).  Shara’s “Dudley Do-right” voice, while still inconsistent with the other actors on stage with him, wasn’t quite as out of place here; it worked well enough for Sergius, who’s a kind of dimmer Dudley in a way.  If I’d seen this production before I saw Heiress, I might have assumed Shara was doing this voice as a character choice.  In any case, within the ensemble, the two parents really conjured delightful characters—a sort of Shavian Ma and Pa Kettle, without the hillbilly twang.  Nora McLellan’s mama reminded me a lot of the comedienne from SCTV, Andrea Martin—as Edith Prickley, perhaps.  (I believe Martin’s also Canadian, by coincidence.)  She’s bossy, frequently flustered, and in complete control of her husband.  Peter Hutt’s Major Petkoff was just a little numb in the head.  Not outright stupid—that wouldn’t really be funny, I guess—but oblivious.  Except when he’s in the field (mostly because she’s not around), he takes his orders from Mrs. Petkoff, even about military matters.  But as farcical as the set-up is—and Arms is really a farce (though, apparently, GBS had intended to write a serious anti-war comedy; he resigned himself to having created a successful farce when he couldn’t convince people that wasn’t his intent!)—Petkoff Père and Mère were a truly entertaining couple.

Patrick Galligan’s Captain Bluntschli was solid and commonsensical, which is how I believe Shaw meant him to be—the un-hero (not in the sense of the modern “anti-hero,” however—more like James Garner as Maverick in the old TV series, or maybe even his Jim Rockford), in contrast to the dimwitted Sergius (who becomes a hero in battle not so much by accident as by inanity and dumb luck).  What interested me here, though, was the casting—and it’s an element of the Shaw in general it seems.  (Again, I’m basing a conclusion on limited evidence.)  Galligan isn’t any kind of standard leading man—he’s not especially handsome, he’s short, he’s balding, and he’s prematurely (I assume) gray.  The fact that I noticed this shouldn’t suggest that it affected me in any way—the fact that it didn’t is my point.  The same casting characteristic was evident in Design, too: neither Graeme Somerville (Otto) nor David Jansen (Leo) are matinee idols, yet they were cast as characters who are presented as inescapably attractive to Gilda, a woman who is supposed to be desired by all men who meet her!  (The same casting decision didn’t seem to hold for the women, by the way—the actresses were all as attractive as their characters.  I don’t know what that says—maybe the Canadians are as sexist as the rest of us.)  I guess I liked this apparent practice because I was never a Leading Man myself, and the notion that we ordinary folks can still play those parts pleases me.  (I did have an acting teacher who told me I should go out for what he called “the sex-pot roles.”  Right!  Like any director would actually have considered me for them.  Although, I did once play Chance Wayne—much to my mother’s consternation—but those were peculiar circumstances.)  By the way, I never heard anyone in the audience remark on this casting.

Now, I have to talk about the set.  First, I’ll note that there was a stated artistic reference in this design: the Art Nouveau paintings of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) were the inspiration for the costumes (by William Schmuck—unfortunate name) and set (by Sue LePage—and I gather it was her idea).  As I mentioned earlier, this is one of the plays adapted for the festival, moved from GBS’s 1885-86 to “the turn of the century.”  Jackie Maxwell, who directed, did give some sort of explanation for doing this, but I don’t see any need except that she and LePage apparently wanted to use Klimt as an artistic model for the production.  (Some of the costumes, especially those for Mrs. Petfoff, were also reminiscent of the designs of Léon Bakst, 1866-1924, for the Ballets Russes.)  Well, I can’t object to that—I did it myself for nearly identical reasons, more for practical convenience than specific artistic references—when I moved Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan from 18-whatever to the 1920s.  (Instead of Klimt, I got to evoke Mondrian and Modigliani.  I like them better anyway.)  Mrs. Petkoff, especially, looked as if she might have popped out of one of Klimt’s canvases. 

(Actually, on a purely realistic—not to be confused with Realistic—basis, Klimt probably wasn’t the most apt model for Shaw’s interpretation of Bulgarian aristocracy.  He’s way too hip and with-it for a culture in which being able to read is a notable asset and in whose house a library contains only three books!  Mrs. P. is thrilled to pieces to have just had an electric call bell installed in that library so she can summon her servants without shouting for them—which is what Major P. thinks is sufficient.  Oh, that Shaw!  Nevertheless, I can’t complain about a little artistic license.  I sort of figure, when you do the same Shaw plays over a span of years, as the festival does—they eliminate some Maxwell calls unproduceable (Back to Methuselah, Androcles and the Lion, Great Catherine)—they probably have to shake up the creative juices now and then or get bored repeating themselves.  And, as I’ve said in other contexts, it’s not drawing a mustache on the “Mona Lisa.”

(That library bit reminds me of an old joke from my home territory.  When Spiro Agnew was governor of Maryland, before he was nominated to be Nixon’s V.P., people used to tell this one: Did you hear?  There was a terrible fire at the governor’s mansion in Annapolis.  The library was destroyed.  Both books were burned!  And Agnew hadn’t finished coloring in one yet!!) 

In any case, the set as a piece of theatrical technique was stunning.  At curtain, the stage was a wintry forestscape at night with a tiny house far up center whose doorway was lit with a warm, yellow glow.  (With no disrespect to LePage’s design, it sort of reminded me of one of those hyper-sentimental cottage paintings by Thomas Kinkade.  As art, it’s execrable, but as set design, it’s charming.  But wait . . . .)  The little house started moving slowly toward the front of the stage; about midway it was joined by a larger set piece and the former little house became the front door of a larger version, with a lighted window in the second storey.  The new construction moved further downstage and other set pieces, all in a Wedgwood blue, moved in from the wings, plus furniture for a fantasy princess’s bedroom.  The former front exterior of the house was now the interior wall of Raina’s bedroom, the former front door now the French doors to the balcony (onto which Bluntschli would soon climb).  The whole process was like a little magic show, reminiscent of the old movies, usually by Disney, I think, in which a cartoon hand sketches a black-and-white scene, then a cartoon paintbrush swishes over it and transforms the drawing into color and, immediately, reality.  I described the set as ‘marvelous,’ I think—that’s right: it was a little marvel!  (The opening sequence wasn’t used again in Arms but each set-change is accomplished by swirling set pieces moving onto place in a perfectly effective use of an old-line staging technique.)

I can’t understand why anybody wouldn’t like Arms under any circumstances (barring a really terrible production), but there was absolutely nothing in this staging that I could see might turn a spectator off.  There was a lot of laughter in the audience, so I could only assume that most of them were enjoying Shaw’s humor (whether or not they got his anti-war point).  I certainly did, even with Shara’s Sergius.  (I must say, to Shara’s credit, that director Maxwell had him constantly exercising—doing push-ups, leg-bends, and other calisthenics, including one set with his feel on an ottoman and his hands on the floor, and he executed this behavior commendably.  It reminded me of dancers when they’re not working: they never stop moving.  Sergius couldn’t stop flexing and bending!  He also did that Capt. Morgan’s Rum thing—from an old TV advertisement: every time he was near a chair, a bench, or something like that, he put his foot up on it and struck a pose—almost always in profile.)  It was only his voice (and, when playing an American, his accent) that displeased me.  (It’s odd, but Sergius, also a cad, is the farcical version of Morris Townsend, the character Shara played in Heiress.  One worked acceptably, the other didn’t.)

On Saturday afternoon, Mom and I had our second non-group matinee, Rosmersholm at the 327-seat Court House Theatre.  Our usual procedure was to take it easy in the morning, having breakfast toward the end of the serving period, sitting by the pool reading, then walking into town around 12:30 (matinees were all at 2 p.m.)—it’s a 15-minute walk from the Pillar and Post to the center of NOTL—maybe treating ourselves to an ice cream or a cold drink, and getting to the theater around 1:30.  On the afternoon of the 12th, because Queen Street was turned over to the Peach Festival, we walked a couple of blocks up and back, seeing what was on offer in some of the booths.  Instead of a lemonade or iced tea, we bought cups of peach soup, a kind of thin puree, which was a very nice refresher. After the Saturday matinee, Mother and I did our usual early meal at another restaurant (the Shaw Cafe—I’ll let you guess why it’s so named!) and walked back to the hotel.  We took the hotel shuttle to the Royal George for the evening performance of the stage adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man commissioned by the Shaw. 

Let me insert a word or two (or 200 . . .) about the Shaw program booklets.  I posted a blog article on program notes and such (“To Note Or Not To Note,” 28 August 2009).  Well, the Shaw programs were like mini-texts (and I don’t mean that as a bad thing).   Each show had a critical and analytical essay by an academic or writer that discussed some aspect of the play—something the Shaw’s taken from British theater practice.  There was always a short piece by the director, and sometimes other artists, like the composer for Crucible who explained the inspiration and source of his music or, in The Invisible Man, the playwright.  There was also a short bio of the author (and, in adaptations like TIM, Heiress, and High Society, the adaptors as well), and there was a run-down of the play’s production history (including the source material and movies or TV versions/sources).  There were also lots of pictures of previous versions, and several of the current production.  My issue with the elaborate notes in some of the programs I complained about in my ROT piece was that sometimes the directors used the program to do the work they failed to do on stage.  None of these essays or notes did that—they added a dimension to our appreciation of the play without short-cutting the stage work or trying to substitute reading for staging.  Now, I did cavil with the essay on TIM because I felt it was overthought for that production, but the general idea was great.  It was worth getting to the theater a few minutes early to read the program beforehand.

Our final show in NOTL was the matinee performance on Sunday, the 13th, of Shaw’s Too True To Be Good at the Court House Theatre.  I think I said that I’d never seen or read this play (and I didn’t read it before I went to NOTL—it’s not in my collected Shaw), so I was surprised to learn that it’s a pretty late play—1932—and what’s more, premièred in the States.  (Poland, apparently, staged the second production!  The reason was timing, apparently.  Shaw wrote the play for the Malvern Festival, which was launched in 1929 and dedicated to the plays of GBS.  The problem was that it occurred only once a year during the summer so the Theater Guild copped the first production, which was in Boston in February.)  Anyone who knows the play probably knows it’s tied up with, among other topics, T. E. Lawrence (AKA, “Lawrence of Arabia”).  (Lawrence had a relationship with GBS—who seems to have had relationships with almost everyone living at the time.  The association was so strong that TEL used T. E. Shaw as one of his aliases and even eventually changed his name legally to Shaw.  He used to visit GBS on his motorcycle, the vehicle on which he was eventually killed, three years after TTTBG premièred.)

The plot of Too True To Be Good is too wild to summarize cogently.  Its opening scene, for example, is set in a classically beautiful upper-middle-class bedroom where a classically beautiful upper-middle-class young woman (Nicole Underhay) lies bed-ridden.  The action starts when a distressed microbe (William Vickers) in human form begins bemoaning his fate.  In the next scene, The Patient teams up with The Nurse (Kelli Fox) and The Burglar (Blair Williams) to steal her own necklace and run away so she can hold herself for ransom.  That’s only the first two scenes: in many ways, TTTBG is an absurdist play, even though no one had heard of that form in the early 1930s.  Eventually, we land at an overseas military base commanded by Colonel Tallboys (Benedict Campbell), who prefers water-coloring to commanding, but actually run sub rosa by Private Napoleon Alexander Trotsky Meek (Andrew Bunker) under the nose of Sergeant Fielding (Graeme Somerville).  Other characters in this mix include The Nurse, formerly with the army and now posing as a countess (Fox); The Burglar, an ex-RAF hero turned preacher (Williams); and a church Elder (and The Burglar’s father) who’s an avowed atheist (Norman Browning).  Along the improbable way to its even more improbable conclusion, TTTBG pokes fun at doctors, preachers, the military, the aristocracy, and many others of GBS’s favorite targets.

Anyway, TTTBG is a delightfully perverse little play—up to a point.  As its title reverses a common cliché, the play reverses many common values and accepted behaviors.  The Lawrence character (Private Meek, played nicely by Bunker) is great fun—more or less running everything in his isolated army unit to the complete consternation of his colonel.  Once again, the festival cast pulled off the silliness, the Britishness (this play, unlike Arms, depicts inescapably British types Shaw is satirizing), and the individual characters with smoothness and adroitness.  The program essay cited Shaw’s preface as describing TTTBG as “funny in the beginning, serio-comic in the middle and ‘a torrent of sermons’ at the close.”  That ending concludes with a very long monologue by The Burglar which just goes on and on, delivering Shaw’s philosophical points in the most undramatic and untheatrical way conceivable, despite actor Williams’s valiant efforts to enliven it. 

The program also included an excerpt from Shaw’s note from the Malvern Festival program in which he wrote: “When people have laughed for an hour, they want to be serio-comically entertained for the next hour; and when that is over they are so tired of not being wholly serious that they can bear nothing but a torrent of sermons.”  Where’d he get such an idea?  I couldn’t disagree more, I’m afraid.  (This could very likely make someone conclude that Shaw isn’t funny!)  I’ve opined that Shaw is very hard to cut, but I’d have been very tempted to try in this case.  It really ruined the production; however important Shaw’s points are, I, at least, stopped hearing them after a minute or two.  What a come-down!  (And an unfortunate way to end our theater experience in Niagara-on-the-Lake.)  

In tribute to Shaw, director Jim Mezon (also an actor, he was Deputy Governor Danforth in The Crucible), and actor Campbell—whom we’d previously seen as The Crucible’s John Proctor—though I expected a total Colonel Blimp caricature, Colonel Tallboys was only a partial Blimp caricature.  He kept surprising me, as did all the characters.  This is the big plus of the show—not only the situation, but the characters themselves subvert your expectations.  GBS didn’t name many of them—The Patient (Underhay, who was Gilda in Design), The Nurse (Fox, earlier Elizabeth Proctor in Crucible), and the aforementioned Burglar, for instance—so they appear to be types or allegories; but they quickly go off their tracks.  (The fellow who gave the intro to Arms in that pre-show chat said that GBS had originally wanted to call those characters by labels like “The Soldier” and “The Daughter.”  That was when he still thought he was writing a serious anti-war comedy.)  The TTTBG production design, a Cubist landscape of blond wooden planks (except the opening scene, which was an ostensibly Realistic sick room “in one of the best suburban villas in one of the richest cities in England”—it was sort of like Kansas in black-and-white and Oz in color!) turned the whole experience into a kind of off-kilter dreamscape.  If only it hadn’t been for that interminable oration!

The Round House troupe had a farewell dinner at Terroir La Cachette, the restaurant at Strewn Winery, one of NOTL’s many wine-makers, Sunday evening, and we left town the next morning by bus for Buffalo and the return flight to Baltimore.  While we were away, the Brits uncovered the putative bomb plot against U.S-bound airliners (8/10—as opposed to 9/11), and we’d all been following the changing restrictions on flights in the U.S.  (Remember, none of us left anticipating additional security measures, so we were caught betwixt and between.)  We were fortunate in a small way that we drove across the border, so we weren’t on an international flight.  Nonetheless, we left NOTL about an hour earlier than originally planned to accommodate any additional screening measures in place in Buffalo.  As it turned out, there were no problems, and we got back to BWI right on time (though Mother and I found ourselves standing at the wrong baggage carousel for a few minutes because the airport had apparently labeled the wrong one for our flight and then switched, and everyone else seemed to have caught on without telling us!).  We called our Ramada as planned, waited for about a half hour for the van to arrive, picked up Mom’s car at the motel and got back to D.C. by about 6-6:30 p.m.—in time to catch up on some of the news we couldn’t get in Canada.  (The hotel had cable, and we could get CNN and PBS as well as the local network affiliates in Buffalo, but either we were out of the room at news time or the coverage was stuck on the terror plot as if it were the only news for days.  We were especially interested in finding out what had happened in the primaries that took place on 8 August.  We got a complimentary Toronto paper in the hotel, but that didn’t cover the U.S. races much, and the Buffalo stations did mention Sen. Joe Lieberman’s loss in Connecticut, but none of the others.  By the time I found a New York Times, it was days after the votes.) 

As much as I wanted to get home, I stayed in D.C. until Friday, 18 August, so I could take a reasonably convenient bus back.  We filled the time by seeing several art exhibits in Washington, and the night before I returned to New York, Mom and I went out for Maryland hard-shell blue crabs at a joint that’s been around since I was a kid.  Growing up in D.C. and Maryland, I have always loved this food.  Since I’ve lived away from the area, I haven’t had it often—the season not only has to be right (though the restaurant, open year round, told us that they now get crabs from as far away as Louisiana when they aren’t available locally), but the crabs have to be sufficiently large to be worth the effort to pull them apart.  (It’s a very labor-intensive meal and my mother was a master at getting every morsel out of one of those babies.  I’d have picked three crabs pretty clean while she was just finishing up her first!)  I’ve missed this treat for years now.  From time to time, I’ve tried restaurants that advertise “real Maryland crabs,” but I’ve always been extremely disappointed.  My conclusion is that no one who doesn’t live within shouting distance of the Chesapeake knows a thing about hard-shell blues, no matter what they say (or even where they come from).  I’ve found the same to be true of Maryland crab cakes—though that’s something even locals don’t always do well.  So this was a very special indulgence for me.  It may be the most wonderful messy meal anyone can imagine!  And, surprisingly, it wasn’t a case of the reality not measuring up to my memory—it was exactly the same.  Isn’t that rare?

[I had a little emotional hardship reediting this piece because my mother, with whom I tried to make one big trip every year, died this past May at the age of 92.  She and my father both loved going to the theater—one of their first dates, Dad told me, was to the original Broadway production of Oklahoma!.  They came up to New York City from Washington whenever I was in something (even when I told them not to come!) and they also saw all the plays I directed for middle and high schools.  (They even saw me perform in an amateur show in Berlin when I was in the army!)  Mom kept up subscriptions to several rep companies in the Washington area even after my father’s death, and if I was in town when she had a theater date, I’d often go with her.  Not a few times, I went down expressly to see a show at one of the Capital’s theaters that was of special interest—Oklahoma! and Red at Arena; Fool for Love at Round House; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Memphis, and Five By Tenn at the Kennedy Center—and our preferred New Year’s Eve celebration was to see a show and then go home to open a bottle and watch the ball drop on TV.  The Shaw was not the first theater festival we attended together (and she and my dad took in a few on their own, including the Stratford Shakespeare Festival); we went to the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and the Shenandoah Shakespeare in Staunton, Virginia, together.  The most difficult part of reediting this article was revising all the statements about my mom from present tense to past.]

The 2006 Shaw Festival (Part 1)

[On 3 December, I published an article by frequent ROT contributor Kirk Woodward, “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw,” about the great Irish playwright as assessed by Eric Bentley, the prolific American theater writer and translator.  I thought that a fitting companion piece would be my report on the Shaw Festival in Ontario, Canada.  I wrote this report on 21-26 August 2006; it originally included mini-reports on each of the plays I attended, but I’ve already excerpted the discussion of Noel Coward’s Design for Living (29 March 2012) and Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The Heiress (24 November 2012), so I decided to omit all but the two Shaw plays I saw at Niagara-on-the-Lake—both of which got a mention in Kirk’s article.  I have, however, left all the coverage of the festival surroundings and what we did to pass the time between the shows—and my general comments on the festival as a whole.]

In the summer of 2006, I spent a week with my mother in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, for the Shaw Festival.  The Round House Theatre of Bethesda/Silver Spring, Maryland, to which my mother subscribed, sponsored the trip bi-annually (in alternate years, they went to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival), and they made all the arrangements from Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport to NOTL and back (we were on our own to get to BWI and then back on the return leg), except lunches and dinners for most of the week.  (There was one lunch, on the road from Buffalo airport to Niagara-on-the-Lake; one dinner; and one cocktail party on the Round House—it was really our money, of course—and breakfasts were included in the accommodations of the Pillar and Post Inn, our NOTL hotel.)  The Round House reserved six shows, but several afternoons and most mornings were free if anyone wanted to add performances; we selected two additional shows to make a total of eight performances out of the season’s offering of ten plays.  (Mother decided that she didn’t want to go to two shows every day—though I probably would have done so on my own—and she eliminated one she didn’t want to see.  She left the rest of the selection to me.)

The trip ran from Monday, 7 August, to Monday, 14 August, but the plane from BWI was at 9:20 a.m. and Baltimore is a 45-minute drive from D.C., so when Mother saw an ad for an airport Ramada that offered a low rate for the night, plus free parking while we were away and a ride to and from the airport, we decided to drive over Sunday evening to avoid getting up at oh-dark-thirty (to arrive an hour before take-off), parking in an airport lot, and taking a shuttle between the parking lot and the terminal, or getting a limo early in the morning and then one back—which would have cost as much as or more than the motel.  (It paid off, too, because, as we found out Monday morning when we gathered at the gate with the rest of the group, there had been an accident on the road between D.C. and BWI and traffic had been backed up for about an hour.)  Anyway, because of this and the schedule of the bus I used from New York, I had to ride down on Friday, 4 August, so I had Saturday in D.C. with my mom and we took in a couple of art shows that Mother had saved till I came down.

So, on to Canada and Shaw. 

The Round House trip, as I said, left from BWI and flew to Buffalo.  A bus met us at Buffalo Niagara International Airport and we rode about an hour to NOTL.  (Because the hotel wasn’t going to be ready for us until after noon or so, we made a prearranged lunch stop at a restaurant in Amherst, New York, outside of Buffalo.  It was attached to a motel, but the meal, a buffet, was surprisingly good.)  The drive went through Niagara Falls, New York, and we had a view of the falls as we passed through (we could see the Canadian falls as we passed by, too).  The drive through town, along the Niagara River to the Lewiston-Queenstown crossing—where we crossed the border (and the river) rather than over the Rainbow Bridge at Niagara because the wait is shorter and the customs procedures are usually less arduous—revealed how tacky the town had become recently, especially with the addition of a huge casino built by the Seneca Indians in 2002 (the attached hotel opened in January ’06).  I spent a day in Niagara when I was teaching at the State University of New York at Oneonta in 1989 and it was pretty honky-tonk then, but it had ballooned in the intervening 17 years. 

NOTL, on the other hand, was pretty nice—more Cape Coddy.  There are obviously ordinances that keep certain development outside of the town’s tourist and historic center.  (In fact, we never saw a gas station, grocery market, fast-food restaurant, or drug store anywhere near the center of town.  The locals obviously get their staples—there wasn’t a Staples, either—somewhere outside of town—some mall somewhere, I suppose.)  The main drag, Queen Street, was lined with boutiques, restaurants, and about four different ice cream parlors (a very popular commodity in NOTL, it seems—everybody walked around eating ice cream).  Two of the festival’s theaters were also here (the other was a little ways in the other direction).  There were also a dozen or more art galleries in and around town—but Canadian artists may be the least interesting I’ve ever encountered.  We noticed this in both Vancouver and Quebec as well.  (I’d be surprised if anyone can name one world-renowned Canadian artist.)  The commercial part of town is only along Queen, so the blocks on either side are residential and many of the houses are 19th-century.  Many of them, both old and new, have been converted into bed and breakfasts—most of which had no vacancies when we walked around that week, suggesting they do a good business, at least at this time of year.  The town center is obviously devoted to the tourist trade, but it wasn’t cheesy like a Jersey shore boardwalk.  The weather while we were there was glorious and the town was full of people from all over the world—we could tell from the languages and accents—shopping, strolling, sitting on the benches that line both sides of Queen Street, eating at the many restaurants.  (The food in NOTL—perhaps a Canadian tendency, or an Ontario one—while not unpalatable, tended to be bland and flavorless.  Our one tasty dinner was a pasta meal we had at a restaurant with a few Italian-oriented dishes on its menu.  Maybe there’s an ordinance against spices, too.)

Niagara-on-the-Lake is located on a point of land formed where the Niagara River meets Lake Ontario.  The town has water on two sides, and I gather that this is part of what contributes to its climate that makes the land good for growing wine grapes and peaches.  (The place is alive with flowers everywhere, too!)  Those are the two major industries of NOTL, and it must be profitable because there are some really big houses in and around the town.  (It’s also a vacation spot, aside from the Shaw Festival.  I also wonder if it isn’t a retirement town or second-home community for wealthy Ontarians, too.)  There are dozens of vineyards and orchards in the area—we ate at one of the winery restaurants for the Round House “farewell dinner” our last evening there.  We had some of the wine, of course, and it’s pleasant enough for the most part—good vin ordinaire.  And as it happened, the weekend we were there, on Saturday and Sunday, was the Peach Festival.  (We had some cold peach soup before the matinee on Saturday afternoon.  Very nice.) 

The town was settled in the 1780s by loyalists fleeing the American Revolution and became the first capital of Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1792.  It was a haven and remained a British outpost into the 19th century, with a British Army division stationed at Fort George (completed in 1802).  NOTL was also the site of the Battle of Fort George during the War of 1812.  (After a fierce fight in May 1813, Americans occupied Niagara-on-the-Lake for seven months and then burned it when they left—which is why there are so few 18th-century structures in the town.)  Mother and I walked around the town in two stages—one afternoon we covered the town itself, then another we strolled along the lake shore—and there were plenty of houses all over that date from the whole span of the 19th century.  From the look of both the old and new properties, it’s clear that NOTL must mandate a strict level of up-keep of both the buildings and the grounds—not one property we saw, neither private homes nor city parks, was run-down, unkempt, neglected, or overgrown.  Part of this is certainly just because it’s Canada, which has a reputation for being well-behaved.  There was no litter anywhere in NOTL, and even when we jay-walked, the cars stopped to let us cross the streets.  (We noticed this in Vancouver also—though I don’t recall if it was common in Quebec, too.)  The town didn’t have a single stop light, either—just stop signs.  (The main intersection had the only traffic signal I noticed—a single flashing red beacon, the same as a stop sign.)  It’s nice for vacation, but living there must seem like living in Stepford!

The festival was started in 1962 by Brian Doherty, a local lawyer and theater enthusiast, as a “Salute to Shaw.”  Its first productions, performed by local amateurs, were in a disused courthouse built in the 1840s (now the black box Court House Theatre, one of the festival’s three performance venues).  It quickly attracted both critical and financial attention and became a companion to the Stratford Festival, 2½ hours west, which was launched (with more professional intentions) in 1953.  (There is, in fact, a third theater festival in Canada, the Charlottetown Festival on Prince Edward Island, devoted to “new Canadian musicals.”  I didn’t know there were Canadian musicals, much less new ones!  More on this—the Canadian musical, I mean; not the Charlottetown Festival—later.)  The Shaw is considered one of the two largest repertory companies in North America—the other being, obviously, the Stratford Festival.

The Shaw runs from April through October and November—some shows opening later and others closing earlier.  (I understood from the locals we chatted with that the weather in NOTL is awful in the late fall and winter—cold, rainy, windy, and gray.  Except for Christmas, when there’s another influx of tourists, it’s pretty bleak in the off-season.)  Like most traditional theaters, the festival is dark on Mondays (which was clearly why the Round House trip arrived and left on that day), but during the performance week there are at least two shows a day at all three theaters, and often—I’m not sure it’s not also every performance day—an 11:30 a.m. “lunchtime” performance.  That comes to 36-54 performances a week (I did the math); you can figure out how many shows a season that makes.  (There are also script readings, poetry and song presentations, discussions, chats, workshops, lectures, and demonstrations going on many days as well.  These folks keep busy.)  The festival is a true seasonal rep: no play is performed twice in a row, which means some theaters change productions three times a day.  Most actors are in two plays (a few are in only one; no one I could spot was in more than two), and there’s no apparent attempt to consider which theater houses which show when it comes to casting.  The theaters are strung out along Queen Street in NOTL: the little Court House and the Royal George are only a couple of blocks apart in “downtown”; the Festival Theatre is a few blocks east on Queen’s Parade, an extension of the main drag.  (Nothing in Niagara-on-the-Lake is all that far away from anything else.  On afternoons when we didn’t see a matinee, Mother and I walked around most of the town and its immediate environs.  We had terrific weather for it, too.) 

The company comprises some 60 actors (directors and designers, as well as other artists such as composers, are hired individually for each show), but all don’t appear every season; about 30 or so work each year, and they are on contract for the season.  Many actors live in NOTL now and consider the Shaw their permanent artistic base, doing other work like films and TV (all those U.S. TV programs that are taped in Toronto and Vancouver are in many of the company’s credits) as well as other stage work from time to time, but returning to the Shaw regularly.  Some of the actors in 2006 were in their fourth or fifth season in NOTL, but others were into double digits.  (The other artists also come back year after year, but they aren’t part of the permanent company.)  Loyalty from both sides—the artistic director at the time, Jackie Maxwell (currently in her 14th season), still worked with artists who started at the Shaw before her arrival—is clearly an attribute of this community.  The actors who live in NOTL have bought homes and are raising families there.

The Shaw Festival mandate, as they call it, is to showcase the plays of GBS and his contemporaries.  (I don’t know if the idea when the festival was originally conceived was to restrict itself to Shaw’s plays only, but the inclusion of plays “written in Shaw’s lifetime” has been part of the concept for decades, in any case.)  Considering that GBS lived almost a century (1856-1950; the festival celebrated his sesquicentennial earlier in 2006), the definition of “contemporary” leaves a lot of leeway—and covers a lot of territory stylistically!  In 2000, the festival expanded its mandate to include plays written about the period of GBS’s lifetime, so now they do modern plays set in that almost-century.  The ’06 season included two Shaws (Arms and The Man and Too True To Be Good)—which I gather is the practice—plus an Ibsen (Rosmersholm) and a pair of Chekhov one-acts (The Bear and The Proposal, under the umbrella title Love Among the Russians).  Coming, I suppose, in the category of plays by Shaw contemporaries (though at the end of his century) are Design for Living (1932) by Noël Coward (1899-1973) and The Crucible (1953) by Arthur Miller (1915-2005).  (I’m guessing that Crucible was “in” because of Miller’s life dates since it isn’t “about” Shaw’s lifetime: it’s set in 1692 and was written three years after Shaw died; even McCarthyism, its subtext, really started after GBS’s death.  It’s kind of a stretch, I guess—a policy evidently known as “Jackie’s elastic mandate.”)  Two adaptations from novels could go either way—the source material is contemporary to GBS and the setting is, consequently, of that period, too, though the adaptations are much later.  Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The Heiress was adapted from Henry James’s 1881 Washington Square in 1947 (which would barely qualify as “Shaw’s lifetime”), and the story is set in 1850.  The première of the festival-commissioned stage adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1897 The Invisible Man qualifies because the 2006 play is set within Shaw’s life.  Another new play, Lillian Groag’s 1997 The Magic Fire, is set in the immediate post-World War II years in Argentina, barely fitting into GBS’s life span.  The final entry of the 2006 bill, Cole Porter’s High Society, is the 1997 stage adaptation of the 1956 film musicalization of Philip Barry’s 1939 Philadelphia Story.  Once more, the source material fits into the Shaw life span, but the qualification is again the setting: 1930’s Long Island (the musical having been transferred from Philadelphia’s Main Line for reasons comprehensible only in Hollywood).

The Round House booked High Society, The Crucible, The Heiress, Arms and The Man, The Invisible Man, and Too True To Be Good, leaving the other four available as options.  Mother, as I said, didn’t want to go twice every day (two of the scheduled shows were already matinees because we had evening activities those nights), and she also decided that she’d seen the Chekhov one-acts enough (including, I daresay, one that I had directed with seventh- and eighth-graders), so we decided to select two additional shows.  I wanted to see the Ibsen and Design for Living, so I left off Groag’s Magic Fire, about which I didn’t know anything and which just didn’t sound interesting to me.  The festival described the play as “set against a backdrop of the turbulent post World War II years of Buenos Aires.”  A memory play (the narrator is the grown-up 7-year-old daughter of one of the families), it is the “story of two immigrant families, the Bergs and Guarneris [who] had left their European homelands to find a better life, leaving behind Hitler, Mussolini, poverty, and persecution.  But now, with the rise to power of General Juan Perón, they face the potential of Argentina’s descent into fascist terror, in the dying days of Eva Perón, the infamous Evita.” 

So I booked the Coward and the Ibsen, and I have no regrets over my decision.  I did a private reading (a bunch of actors sitting around in someone’s living room) of Design many years ago, and I’ve seen the considerably bowdlerized 1933 flick (Cary Grant, Frederic March, Miriam Hopkins), but I’d never seen the play—and I figured a Coward would be fun, assuming the cast can pull off his comedy-of-manners style—which they did, wonderfully.  As for the Ibsen—well, I’d always rather see an Ibsen than some unknown, less-than-intriguing quantity, snobbish as that may seem.  Some years ago, one of the theaters off Union Square did a multi-year series of all of Ibsen’s plays in chronological order in good-quality showcase-level productions, and I tried to catch any that I’d never seen before.  But I saw Rosmersholm over five years ago, so I figured this would be a good chance to see another staging with better production values—and it was. 

Let me make a few general remarks—some, perhaps, only semi-justified generalizations based on minimal evidence.  (I’ll brave it—so sue me.)  First, the quality of the productions was excellent.  The acting and directing was top-notch, and the festival appears to promote ensemble playing over star-turns—and it accomplished this remarkably.  Maxwell, who addressed us at our cocktail party (which a trio of company members also attended), said that she wouldn’t do a play like Lear (wrong festival, of course, but what the hey . . .) if she didn’t have a Lear available, but I didn’t have the impression from this season that they focus on star roles.  Of course, they weren’t doing Candida or Major Barbara, and maybe that would’ve left a different impression.  She said the same thing, sort of, about directors: if a director she wanted to match with a play wasn’t available, she’d postpone that show until the director was free.  It’s possible, of course, that actors who want to be stars don’t make the Shaw a home the way most of the company seems to.  It wouldn’t be their kind of work environment, I wouldn’t imagine.  (But I also got the impression, both from ordinary life observation and from some recent reading about Canadian theater, that this is part of the Canadian cultural character.)

It also seems characteristic, at least of the Shaw, that directors don’t put themselves and their artistic personalities forward and stamp the productions.  Several of the productions we saw were “adaptations” (not wholesale reworkings, but changes of setting and period)—Rosmersholm was moved to “somewhere in Europe between the wars” (it looked about 1930 to me); Arms and The Man was reset in the “turn of the century”; and the Chekhovs were designated “adaptations” in the program, though I didn’t see them so I don’t know what changes were made (the pictures all looked 19th-century to me).  But those were essentially design decisions (and some language in Rosmersholm); in all other respects, the directing was straightforward, though I don’t know if that’s a provision of the Shaw, or if it’s a general characteristic of Canadian directors.  I don’t say this is a fault—the work was solid all around—but there was nary a hint of idiosyncratic directorial interpretation on any festival stage as far as I could see.

As good as the acting and directing were—and there were no names in either category that really stood out, though a few were generally familiar (Bernard Behrens, for instance, who did a wonderfully fractious Giles Corey in The Crucible)—the design and tech was truly superb.  One of my conceivably unwarranted generalizations was that Canadian theater’s major accomplishment is not acting or directing, which is good but not astonishing (secondary generalization: potentially star Canadian actors end up in England or the U.S.), or even writing (name two internationally recognized Canadian playwrights—John Herbert, author of 1967’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, is one; who’s another?), but in production work.  (Designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch, who helped Tyrone Guthrie design the thrust theater for the Stratford Festival, was British, but worked extensively in Canada just at the time that Canadian theater was starting to become “not British.”)  Even the work in the tiny Court House (which is set up as a thrust, so there’s only one wall—and it’s the architectural back wall of the room) had some interesting design aspects in the shows.  Four other shows each had some startling, clever, or surprising design elements.  I don’t want to give the impression that the sets overwhelmed the acting—that wasn’t so—but the design and tech was outstanding in ways the acting and directing wasn’t.  (I remember going to a show at a nearby school when I was in college—a production of Cocteau’s The Wedding Party at the Eiffel Tower—and a friend and I left afterwards saying to each other, “What a wonderful set.  Too bad the actors kept getting in front of it.”  That wasn’t the case in Niagara-on-the-Lake.)

One characteristic of the acting, which I think must be a unique attribute of Canadian actors, was that they can shift back and forth pretty successfully and easily—or, at least, convincingly (for the most part)—between American characters and Brits.  They did well with both the Barry-Porter-Kopit upper-class Long Islanders of High Society, the Massachusetts settlers of Salem in Crucible, and the 19th-century New Yorkers of The Heiress.  Then they also nailed Coward’s toffs in Design as well as the denizens of small-town England in The Invisible Man.  And remember, these were often the same actors crossing over from one show to another.  (They also obviously handled the shifts from Cowardy and Shavian comedy to the heavy drama of Crucible and Rosmersholm, not to mention the melodrama of Heiress.  This isn’t something American can’t do, of course, but we don’t tend to do it very much in our theater since this kind of rep isn’t common here—outside of college theaters, I guess.  It’s still worth pointing out, though.)

You may notice that I don’t make the same compliment regarding going from straight plays to musical comedy.  As I suggested earlier, “Canadian” and “musical” is not a pairing I’d have come up with.  In another potentially unwarranted generalization, I’ll suggest that musical theater isn’t a Canadian metier.  As far as performances are concerned, High Society, which was the first of our shows on Tuesday evening, was the most lackluster show of the trip.  Now, I have to acknowledge that part of the problem with High Society was certainly the material, so maybe the Canuck actors could’ve done better with better material—say, My Fair Lady (since we’re talking Shaw).  The movical was presented at the 850-seat Festival Theatre, opened in 1973.

[This ends Part 1 of “The 2006 Shaw Festival”; please come back to ROT on 11 December when I’ll post Part 2, which begins with the production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible on Wednesday afternoon, 9 August, and finishes up the week of our visit to Niagara-on-the-Lake.  The performance reports for Arms and The  Man and Too True To Be Good also appear in Part 2, along with some pithy observations.  I hope ROTters will return.

[The question regarding Canadian playwrights is kind of a cheat, by the way.  John Herbert (1926-2001) isn’t so well known as his play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, which became an international success in 1967.  It’s probably a mark of something about Canadian culture that the play is not only unrecognized by most people as a Canadian creation, but that its world première was in New York City because no theater in Canada would produce it until 1969.]

Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw

by Kirk Woodward

[As Kirk says in his opening paragraph below, he’s written for ROT before on the subject of Eric Bentley and George Bernard Shaw (the posts are noted below).  He’s now returned to the blog with a commentary on Shaw as limned by Bentley, drawn mostly from Bentley’s 1947 book Bernard Shaw (New Directions Books; also the 1957 revision).  As Kirk says, Bentley and Shaw are the two writers he enjoys reading most. and, I dare add, among those he admires most as well.  That doesn’t at all mean that he can’t see their deficiencies and faults, and his criticism here is evenhanded and equitable, even as it ends up being largely laudatory.  That’s not unexpected, of course, since both writers are eminently praiseworthy men.  If you are a Shaw fan, as I am, you will find here lots of interesting facts and ideas.  If you don’t know the great Irish playwright, the grandfather of My Fair Lady and The Chocolate Soldier, this is an interesting start on becoming acquainted with the writer who had ideas about all manner of topics.]

I suppose the two writers whose work I most enjoy reading are Eric Bentley, the writer on drama, and George Bernard Shaw, the playwright. I have written in this blog before on both Bentley (“Eric Bentley – An Appreciation,” 4 December 2012; http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2012/12/eric-bentley-appreciation.html) and Shaw (“Bernard Shaw, Pop Culture Critic,” 5 September 2012; http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2012/09/bernard-shaw-pop-culture-critic.html). The two share the characteristic of longevity: Shaw (1856-1950) lived to be ninety four, and Bentley (b. 1916) as I write this is still with us at the age of almost one hundred.

But the two have more significant connections. It appears that they never met, but Shaw is one of the two artists Bentley is most identified with. (Bertolt Brecht is the other.) Bentley wrote that “perhaps I was the first to write a book on Shaw without ever having met him.” This is not actually so; H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) was the first, with George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905). Mencken never met Shaw either.

But Bentley has written extensively, and more significantly than Mencken, on Shaw. Aside from frequent references scattered throughout Bentley’s writing, there is the book Bernard Shaw (1947, amplified by additional material in 1957); an obituary, “Bernard Shaw Dead,” in In Search of Theater (1953); an essay, “Shaw in 1978,” in Thinking About the Playwright (1987); and a video interview about Shaw (also featuring the actor Philip Bosco) for the television program Theater Talk (PBS, 11 May 2011; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws-oNJaCxes).

Of these works, in the video interview Bentley, sounding magisterial and rather British (he was born in England and migrated as a young adult to the United States) is particularly good on Shaw’s “feminism” and his handling of sexual and gender roles. His eulogy is a fine summary of Shaw at his best, and the 1978 essay of Shaw is an equally good commentary on Shaw at his worst, when he supported some of the most brutal dictators who have ever lived.

And then there’s the book Bernard Shaw. Shaw himself approved of it, writing (at the age of 91) that it was “the best critical description of my public activities I have yet come across.” In the foreword to the book, Bentley describes how his earlier ideas about Shaw – mostly unfavorable – came to seem insufficient to him, and how he determined to deal more thoroughly with Shaw’s complexities as an artist and a thinker.

The first time I read the book, some years ago, what impressed me the most was the complexity; I could hardly make heads or tails of it. I often simply could not understand what Bentley was saying. I’m sure I read the book with insufficient attention; I’m sure I’ve gained at least some sense of the context of the book since the first time I read it; and I’m sure I was partly thrown by Bentley’s completely unacademic approach to writing.

Bentley has said that he believes criticism should read like one person talking to another about something important to both of them, and that’s how he writes. Although Bentley was Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University for many years, in his books, unlike many academic writers, he doesn’t rely on the opinions of others; he doesn’t always back up his contentions with sources; he doesn’t base his conclusions on scholarly consensus. He considers himself an authority, and writes like one. And he feels no need merely to present a thesis, to defend it, and finally to summarize it, tying everything up neatly. If a subject is complex – and Shaw is a highly complex subject – then Bentley honors the complexity.

I imagine he learned much about this approach to writing from reading Shaw himself, who never hesitates to make bold assertions, to contradict himself when he feels it necessary, and to present himself as the final authority on many questions. How Shaw does these things, and why, make up much of the substance of Bentley’s book.

Obviously, then, there is much too much in the book for me to boil it down to a few pithy sentences. Nevertheless, I am going to take a slightly systematic approach here, listing a few of the things commonly said about Shaw’s work, and offering some of Bentley’s responses. I won’t always write that “Bentley says . . .” but I will indicate when I’ve drifted into my own opinions or phrasings. Unless otherwise identified, indented quotations are from Bentley, not Shaw.

SHAW’S PLAYS PROMOTE HIS SOCIALIST BELIEFS.

Shaw was a socialist nearly all of his adult life, and he promotes his economic beliefs energetically in a number of books and prefaces, most systematically perhaps in his book An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928). Even there, however, he is not a typical “socialist writer,” and his work tends to make both socialists and Marxists nervous. He often emphasizes points that seem minor to other theoreticians, and dismisses points that others regard as major.

Shaw’s speech is “slanted” the wrong way. He does not include his audience in an embrace. He does not court the approving smirk of any group. Not content with “bewildering the bourgeois,” he bewilders the liberal too.

The reason for this (Bentley says) is that the essence of Shaw’s work is aesthetic and ethical. Shaw creates art with ethics as its subject.  This can be seen even in his writing about economics:

It was Ruskin who . . . argued that economics is not a realm of impersonal laws but a realm of human regulation, potentially a branch of human welfare. It was Ruskin who taught Shaw that there are only three ways of procuring wealth – working, begging, and stealing – and that capitalism condemns many to beg by allowing a few to steal.

This insight strikes me as a powerful one, and one that cuts across various economic theories. Shaw’s economic theory, then, is at heart an ethical one. And John Ruskin (1819-1900) was not primarily an economist, but an art critic! Ethics and aesthetics.

And it is remarkable how seldom socialism makes an overt appearance in Shaw’s plays. It frequently appears in his prefaces; but, Bentley points out, the prefaces were ordinarily written after the plays, taking themes from the plays and elaborating on them, but in ways the plays do not. Shaw mostly saves his promotional statements for his prefaces and speeches, letting his plays make his points by inference – one can almost say that his characters illustrate what Shaw feels must happen in a world in which socialism is not the rule.

SHAW’S CHARACTERS ARE JUST MOUTHPIECES FOR HIS OPINIONS.

This is one of the most frequent criticisms of Shaw’s dramaturgy, and some outstanding critics have made it. However, it’s so seldom true that it may be considered almost always false. Bentley does point out that “one of Shaw’s worst tendencies is to create characters who have no function except to illustrate a point” (for example, the Burglar in Too True To Be Good). However, even then, those characters are not necessarily mouthpieces for Shaw’s opinions.

In fact, one of Shaw’s most important qualities is “his unequalled gift of sympathizing with both sides.” Anyone who has acted in one of Shaw’s plays can testify to this. Perhaps the best known examples are the Inquisitor in St. Joan, whose speeches Shaw deliberately makes as plausible as Joan’s, and Undershaft, the capitalist prince in Major Barbara with an answer for everything.

One reason Shaw’s critics accuse him of being a puppeteer to his characters is that they talk so well. But, as Bentley points out, even in that respect, “. . . Shaw’s way is the dramatist’s way. For him ideas perform like characters. In aid of this special gift he re-introduces the pre-naturalistic convention that stage characters may be endowed with an artificial amount of self-consciousness.” Shaw’s characters do know, and articulate, a great many things about themselves that in “everyday life” they might not. (A vivid example is Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion, with his acute awareness of his own social position.) But this does not mean they are speaking for Shaw; instead, “[In Shaw] every person is right from his own point of view.”

A good corrective for the idea that Shaw uses his plays as mouthpieces for his ideas is to read them again, and to read as many of them as possible. One then notices, as Bentley says, that “Shaw has seldom used his drama of ideas for the depicting of easy ideal solutions for hard real problems.”

In other words, Shaw is a real dramatist. His plays show people in emotional conflict. What’s more, as Bentley says, Shaw’s characters “hardly ever duplicate each other.” How could they? Shaw asserts “that man is primarily a feeling, not a thinking animal,” and he approaches his characters that way. Emotions are explosive and unpredictable.

Many great moments in Shaw’s plays occur when a character finds herself or himself behaving in a way that astonishes the character as much as it astonishes other people. Notable examples can be found at the conclusions of The Devil’s Disciple, Pygmalion, The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, and the significantly titled Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. 

Even so, some say, Shaw’s characters may not be his mouthpieces, but nevertheless. . .

SHAW’S PLAYS DO PROMOTE HIS IDEAS.

Which ideas? For example, Bentley points out, Shaw promotes, not one, but three different ideas on how the human species can be improved: eugenic breeding (Man and Superman), longevity (Back to Methuselah), racial triumph of non-Europeans (also Back to Methuselah, the Chinese in Part Three, “The Thing Happens”). “The remarkable thing,” Bentley says, “is the nonchalance with which each of these recipes is adopted and dropped.”

Does Shaw actually believe in the ideas he proposes? Only, says Bentley, to the extent that they help us to see ourselves as we are. In other words – my words – they are essentially poetic images, against which we can size up our own lives and our beliefs. With ideas, as with characters, Shaw is using them dramatically, as characters who help us see ourselves ethically:

[Shaw] communicates, not directly, but by impersonation.

When we ask what Shaw has been doing if he has not been contributing to philosophy, theology, or science, the answer is that he has been making a moral analysis of contemporary civilization.

If we take him too literally, we run the risk of missing his critique of our times. “The final conflict,” Shaw writes, “is not then between . . . scientific arguments, but between the cruel will and the humane will.”

Shaw has said many things which as they stand are not true. Yet he is much less deceiving than many writers with Truth on their sleeve and Facts in their filing cabinet. For he knows that the distinction is not between Truth and Untruth but between partial truth with one motive and partial truth with another.

SHAW CAN’T BE TRUSTED IN WHAT HE SAYS ABOUT SCIENCE.

Or is it rather science that can’t be trusted? Shaw clearly sees the limits of science, as he demonstrates vividly in The Doctor’s Dilemma, and in his fervent protests against animal vivisection. In Bentley’s words:

The new priest [the Scientist], moreover, is inferior to the old in two important respects. First, he has no help to offer either in morality or in that expansion and development of consciousness which is the fruit of “religious experience.” Second, his authority undermines itself by too frequent changes of doctrine: the cloak of infallibility sits ill on priests who change their minds.

Again, Shaw’s view of science, like his view of everything else, is ethical.

Bernard Shaw used to incur ridicule when he inferred that if you began by baking a dog for the furtherance of science you would end by baking your mother for the furtherance of science. Yet atrocities very like this were perpetuated in the German concentration camps. Again Shaw’s remark was extravagant; but again its extravagance was as nothing compared with the extravagance of what actually happened.

SHAW’S RELIGIOUS BELIEFS WERE VAGUE / JUVENILE / DEISTIC / BORROWED . . . ETC.

It is usually a mistake, in my opinion, to assume what a person’s religious beliefs “really” are, based on what they say they are. I have had a great deal of experience to the contrary. In the case of Shaw, Bentley points out that, again, Shaw’s “religious” beliefs frequently appear to change either in substance or in expression, for the reason that, again, he is not writing as a theologian but as an artist trying to get us to take a good look at ourselves.

The famous Shavian “life force,” for example, is sometimes presented as a conscious being, sometimes as a principle of natural evolution. “Shaw is not talking about God in the Christian sense but about human ethics. . . . It is chiefly a use of religious language” (italics mine). So “God” becomes “a symbol for the ideal,” “hell” the condition of living in poverty and ignorance.

There’s no question that Shaw was always fascinated by religion. (He did define the word more widely than many people do.) He was also an acute observer of its history. He lived in an era greatly influenced by the Enlightenment, and he saw its effects, which we can also see today:

When religion is mainly negative, the rejection of religion seems mainly positive, and men can be enthusiastic about a vacuum.

It’s exciting to throw off the shackles of old beliefs, but something will replace them. Bentley paraphrases Shaw:

Free thought has overthrown theology but, through doing so, has come to value reason too highly. In fact the whole weakness of free thought lies in its rationalism. A double weakness: it is weak in itself, and it fails to see the strength of its antagonist, religion. Once a free-thinker realizes that he has feelings and thoughts within him which science only pooh-poohs he will return to any church which claims these feelings and thoughts as its own.

Whatever the specifics of Shaw’s beliefs may have been, what he was not was a pessimist. Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb, in their outstanding biography O’Neill, point out that while Eugene O’Neill had children, O’Neill resolutely turned his back on the present and the future (and on his children), preferring to contemplate and emotionally live in the past; while Shaw, who was childless, faced resolutely towards the future.

Shaw prefers the optimist to the pessimist conclusion because he is alive and intends to go on living. He is interested only in a philosophy that one can accept as one’s philosophy of life. Pessimism is not such a philosophy because if one really believed it one would not wish to live at all. Optimism – at face value an attitude as arbitrary as pessimism – has more vitality because it is necessary to continued living. And that life should continue is a presupposition of all moral philosophy. On at least one occasion Shaw grants that pessimism has more to be said for it than optimism. But this only strengthens his main argument. If all the evidence is for dying and we go on living, then we are all the more compelled to accept existence “irrationally” as a wager.

SHAW IDEALIZED HORRIBLE DICTATORS.

This is certainly true, although it needs to be carefully examined. As I said above, Bentley is much harder on Shaw in his 1978 essay than he is in his book, where his main point is not to criticize Shaw’s sentimentality about dictators (although he does), but to illustrate that, as he says, Shaw frequently uses character names (Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin) as shorthand for ideas. In any case, the larger issue – Shaw would say it is larger – is that

Shaw has always been seeking, like Plato before him[,] a way of uniting wisdom and power.

If Shaw more than once mistook an actual disastrous human being for an ideal, so did Plato. It is ironic, though (and extremely painful), that Shaw fell into this trap, because a central element of his ethics is the distinction between the ideal and the real, a distinction he says he learned from Ibsen.

Bentley calls this distinction “the struggle of the inner light of genuine conscience and healthy impulse against conventional ethics,” and it’s a theme that recurs throughout Shaw’s writings as early as in Mrs. Warren’s Profession (written in 1893, although first produced in 1902), which presents prostitution not as a moral failing, but as an economic necessity. Our ideals and our realities are often quite different. Shaw uses the contrast as a rich source of comedy; one thinks, for example, of how disappointed his listeners are when the Swiss mercenary soldier in Arms and the Man admits that he fills his holster with chocolates, which he finds much more useful than bullets.

But Shaw also sees the tragedy in the dichotomy, since, he claims, we tend to build society on the misleading ideals rather than on the troublesome realities. Bentley points out Shaw’s “. . . increasing uneasiness over the gulf between theory and practice, talking and doing, right and might,” a theme that achieves tragic proportions in Major Barbara (1905) and Saint Joan (1923).

SHAW DIDN’T LIKE SHAKESPEARE.

He did – he loved Shakespeare. But, as Bentley says, “Shaw is not a literary critic at all. . . . Shaw has not denied the existence of aesthetic criteria; he has only said that they are not paramount.”  In Shaw’s analysis of literature – for example, Shakespeare – Bentley explained:

Shaw is only discussing orders of morality. . . . His limitation is that he does not trouble to understand the drama of earlier periods on its own terms. He is merely disgusted by Webster and Congreve. . . . his complaining of the lack of philosophy and higher motive in (for example) the history plays [of Shakespeare] shows only that Shaw is judging Shakespeare by the standards of Ibsen. . . . Shaw is confessing that he likes only what Shakespeare has in common with Ibsen and is not interested in what he has in common with Webster. . . .

*  *  *  *

I hope I have provided enough examples to show that Bentley’s book on Shaw is provocative and worthwhile for more than just its insights on Shaw himself. My recent re-reading of the book has helped me get beyond my growing conviction that a great deal of what Shaw says is just plain wrong – that he is the Prince of Special Pleading. But, as Bentley points out, Shaw’s method is impersonation (he is a dramatist, after all) – he makes provocative statements and stands behind them. And, as Bentley does not point out, Shaw, an Irishman, is skilled in blarney.

Besides, Shaw’s spirit – I wonder if he would object to my putting it that way – shines through almost everything he writes, and it is bracing, challenging, and encouraging. As Bentley says,

He is one of the few important modern artists who have not been dismayed by their own estrangement. . . . Shaw declined the easy path of the disillusioned radical into pessimism or other-worldliness. His sense of catastrophe and failure is balanced by his genius for admiration and love.

[I met Bentley once—somehow I was invited to a birthday reception at Applause Books on the Upper West Side—his 70th, I think.  I have no idea how I got on the guest list, but I went anyway.  I remember chatting with Bentley—can you actually chat with Eric Bentley?—but I don't remember about what!

[I was at the time editing the in-house newsletter for a now defunct stage directors’ organization, the American Directors Institute.  ADI arranged conferences for directors and artistic directors with speakers and panel discussions, covering many topics of interest to its constituency.  ADI’s founder and artistic director, Geoffrey Shlaes, had invited Bentley to be the keynote speaker at one of those conferences, and he declined.  I wish I’d kept the two letters he wrote to Shlaes turning down the invitation, but I ran excerpts from it in Directors Notes in the Winter 1986 issue of that house newsletter.  with ADI’s members.  Among Bentley’s provocative thoughts, the theater writer wrote: “I don’t believe in a Director’s Theatre. . . .  No director is needed: the function is properly performed by either the playwright (Molière, Brecht) or the leading actor (Booth, Irving)” and “A constant irritant is the Nutty Production.  You set a story in another time and another place—the more inappropriate, the better.  That is how to make your name as a brilliant young director.”  He also declared that “while in technology there is progress, in the arts there is not; otherwise Arthur Miller would be a better playwright than Aeschylus.”  Along with his disparagement of directors, Bentley also called dramaturgs “Ph.D. gofers” and warned that he’d “remove [dramaturgs] one day before removing [directors].”]

[Eric Bentley . . . ever the iconoclast.

[As for the great playwright: he was easily one of my favorites as an actor.  In fact, I once declared that I hoped to do his plays all my life as he wrote parts for me from my young manhood right up until old age.  Things didn’t quite work out that way, but I still have an affinity for the plays.  In August 2006, my mother and I joined a group from Bethesda, Maryland’s Round House Theatre to travel to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, for the Shaw Festival.  The Shaw plays we saw there were Arms and the Man(my all-time favorite Shaw; Captain Bluntschliis one of the roles I always wanted to do) and Too True To Be Good, both of which get a mention in Kirk’s article.]