Re-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1934 to 1950

by Kirk Woodward

[This is the final installment of Kirk Woodward’s series of commentaries on George Bernard Shaw from his reading of the Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963).  The four previous parts, covering the plays written from 1885 to 1902, 1901 to 1909, 1909 to 1920, and 1918 to 1933, were posted on ROT on 3 and 18 July and 8 and 23 August, respectively, and I recommend going back, either before reading part 5 or afterwards, to catch up on Kirk’s thoughts on the great playwright—not so much because part 5 is informed by what came before but because Kirk’s considerations are more than worth reading for their own sakes.  (In my introduction to part 4, I noted that Kirk’s written on ROT before about GBS and listed his past blog articles. I also recommend having a good look at those as well.)]

THE SIMPLETON OF THE UNEXPECTED ISLES (1934 / 1935) – People in society are known by the company they keep, and Shaw’s plays are often known by the prefaces they consort with. This play suffered because of the reputation of its “Preface on Days of Judgment.”

It begins calmly enough, with Shaw’s usual sleight-of-hand switching of categories:

When we refuse to believe in the miracles of religion for no better reason fundamentally than that we are no longer in the humor for them we refill our minds with the miracles of science, most of which the authors of the Bible would have refused to believe.

Religion is the mother of skepticism: Science is the mother of credulity. There is nothing that people will not believe nowadays if only it be presented to them as Science, and nothing they will not disbelieve if it be presented to them as religion. I myself began like that; and I am ending by receiving every scientific statement with dour suspicion while giving very respectful consideration to the inspirations and revelations of the prophets and poets.

This mild scrambling of preconceptions suddenly takes a sharp turn:

But what of the people who are incapable of restraint except that of intimidation? Must they not be either restrained or, as the Russians gently put it, liquidated.

Then Shaw, for not the last time making a fool of himself over the Soviet Union, gives a merry and sanitized rationale for the state murders carried out by Lenin and Stalin, which gives an unpleasant punning quality to the term “Days of Judgment.” This effect spilled over into Simpleton, and many saw in it a similar enthusiasm for improving the world by killing people.

The Simpleton itself has no explicit relation to its dire preface, except in one ugly passage:

If the angels fail us we shall set up tribunals of our own from which worthless people will not come out alive. When men no longer fear the judgment of God, they must learn to judge themselves.

Aside from its enthusiasm for governmental murder, The Simpleton is Shaw at his most avant garde. It must have been quite a novelty for its first audiences. “Why don’t you do The Simpleton?” Shaw once asked a producer. “It is a lovely play.”

It is certainly a most interesting one. Not to keep harping on age, but Shaw was nearly eighty when he wrote it. It is unusual, imaginative, daring; for the time its ideas about polygamy and mixed-race marriage were shocking. The dialogue is consistently clever.

Three little scenes (the Prologue) introduce us to the Isles – tropical lands that have recently emerged from the sea – and we observe their oddness and unsuitability for normal British ideals. A place, in other words, where strange things can happen.

We then see the Simpleton – a nebbish of an Anglican clergyman – explore what the Isles, in succeeding years, have become. Four people – two English, two not – have become the group parents of four children, to all appearances the most beautiful young people imaginable.

But the Day of Judgment arrives, and it turns out to be the day of Shaw’s judgment:

The Day of Judgment is not the end of the world, but the end of its childhood and the beginning of its responsible maturity.

The four children are among those who just disappear. They were Ideals – their real names were Love, Pride, Heroism, and Empire. So there is a thematic relation between the play and the preface after all. Those who do not work and produce, as Shaw sees they should, ought to and will disappear – however that happens.

“The Six of Calais” (1934) dramatizes Jean Froissart’s (c. 1337-c. 1405) story of the six merchants who surrender to King Edward III to be hanged in return for his lifting the siege of their city, and whose lives are spared through the queen’s intervention (from Froissart’s Chronicles). Shaw adds a twist to the story that gives it a lively comic ending.

In his fine preface Shaw claims that in this play “I am not driving at anything more than a playwright’s direct business,” which is that

Life as we see it is so haphazard that it is only by picking out its key situations and arranging them in their significant order (which is never how they actually occur) that it can be made intelligible. . . . All interpreters of life in action, noble or ignoble, find their instrument in the theatre; and all the academic definitions of a play are variations of this basic function.

Despite Shaw’s disclaimer, it is worth noting that the play does present a revolt of the proletariat of the time against the ruling power structure, and that the religious expressions of the six burghers are distinctly Protestant.

THE MILLIONAIRESS (1935 / 1936) – in his “Preface on Bosses,” Shaw identifies, but does not solve, an issue that afflicts Democratic societies but equally bedevils Socialist thought: the fact that some people rise to the top, whatever that “top” may be, regardless of the obstacles, and often the laws, around them.

Both Socialism and Democracy promote equality; but the fact is that some people cannot help triumphing over circumstances. They seem to make money in spite of themselves; or they get into higher and higher positions of power, or both. (This can even happen in the United States!)

The tyranny of the talented individuals will remain. Again I ask what are we to do with them in self-defence? . . . The problem is how to make sure that the decisions shall be made in the general interest and not solely in the immediate personal interest of the decider.

It comes as a shock to realize that Shaw, who has solutions for everything, has no solution for this problem, except that we become more aware of the situation and its dangers. “What are we to do with such people?” he keeps asking.

Worse, he can’t help admiring them, as his descriptions of Mussolini and Hitler in the preface make clear. Hasn’t he urged the Superman on us? Could they by any chance be Supermen?

The Millionairess uses money as the arena for demonstrating this dilemma – it stays out of politics, although the same points apply. Epifania, the title character, finds herself required to raise a large amount of money out of almost nothing, and she does. Shaw calls the play:

a comedy of humorous and curious contemporary characters such as Ben Jonson might write were he alive now.

The comparison with Jonson (1572-1637, author of Volpone and The Alchemist) is apt in the sense that Jonson wrote comedies that are forceful but difficult to stage successfully. So is The Millionairess. Katherine Hepburn, Shaw’s ideal for the role, did play it on stage, and must have been perfect for it with her brittle voice and angular bearing. Aside from Hepburn’s performance, the play has proven problematic.

Epifania, the title character, is driven, focused, and humorless. “There is nothing one can get,” she says, “but more money.” She ignores any other values. She is a parody of Shaw’s women who are miles ahead of the men around them. Epifania is miles ahead of everyone, but not in the service of Life, just in the service of herself.

Does she remind the reader of anyone?

SAGAMORE. He is taking an action against you.

EPIFANIA. An action! Very well: you know my invariable rule. Fight him to the last ditch, no matter what it costs. Take him to the House of Lords if necessary. We shall see whose purse will hold out longest. I will not be blackmailed.

If you read the role in the voice of, say, a billionaire you envision, you will understand the feel of the whole play. At the end of the play, Epifania has gotten everything she wants; some people have benefited from her activities, some have suffered from them; but she is indifferent to all results except that she is on top.

I am surprised at how highly I think of this play, contrary to my expectations. Shaw isn’t preaching, he’s presenting, and, like Ben Jonson, presenting without sentimentality. Productions that offer the play as a fun evening of theater probably won’t work. But if Shaw isn’t offering easy solutions, he’s identifying a problem, or trying to. All the more credit to him.

“Cymbeline Refinished” (1937) – Shaw scorned the last act of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline for years as jumbled and confusing. When he was invited to write a new fifth act for a production, he read the play again.

I began by reading the authentic last act carefully through. I had not done so for many years, and had the common impression about it that it was a cobbled-up affair by several hands, including a vision in prison accompanied by scraps of quite ridiculous doggerel. For this estimate I found absolutely no justification nor excuse. . . . My notion that it is a cobbled-up pasticcio by other hands was an unpardonable stupidity. The act is genuine Shakespear to the last full stop, and late phase Shakespear in point of verbal workmanship.

However, Shaw also realized that the only way to do the act successfully is to do it full-out, in particular the masque, which requires special handling. So he wrote an alternate ending that does not require unusual staging.

To my ear his verse, although it scans as iambic pentameter, is not otherwise poetic. But the act is efficient, and Shaw excuses himself: “All I can say is that the temptation to [rewrite someone else’s play], and sometimes the circumstances which demand it, are irresistible.”

GENEVA (1939) again looks at politics, but this time the setting is the League of Nations instead of Downing Street, and the cast of characters features the dictators of the time, stand-ins for Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco (but not, notably, Stalin).

The preface, on the other hand, was written in 1945, six years later, after World War II was over.

It seems to me to go off the rails after a while, in its summary of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s careers (“those poor devils”), and in its repetition of the hope that the human species will achieve longer life spans.

Shaw could hardly resist drawing morals not based on experience, and making predictions based on the idea that everyone else thought the way he did.

But it is fascinating to see how the war and the world looked to an intelligent man in 1945, and much of the preface is highly quotable:

England will do nothing outside her routine until she is thoroughly frightened; but when England is frightened England is capable of anything.

The drawback to England’s capacity for doing impossible things when in danger is her incapacity for doing possible things (except repeating what was done last time) in security.

It is sometimes better not to think at all than to think intensely and think wrong.

Ethical victories endure. Discoveries cannot be guaranteed for five minutes.

At the age of 89, Shaw seems less certain of his ideas about the Life Force than in earlier years. He writes for example that

Civilizations have never finally survived: they have perished over and over again because they failed to make themselves worth their cost to the masses whom they enslaved.

Do the “experiments” of the Life  Force have any value if they can’t be passed on? Shaw says, in fact:

All the evidence available so far is to the effect that since the dawn of history there has been no change in the natural political capacity of the human species.

On the other hand,

            It is life that is natural and infinite.

Infinite? Really? In that case – but I digress.

Shaw says that he found the key for the tone of Geneva in a translation of the comedies of Aristophanes by his friend Gilbert Murray. The result is a play of remarkable vigor for any playwright, much less one 83 years old. It is a farce, and the characterizations, as is the case in On the Rocks (part 4), have no depth, nor are they meant to.

Played with energy and speed, it must have delighted its first audiences, with its topical references to current international relations that Shaw kept rewriting as the news changed. The first production ran for a remarkable 237 performances in London, followed by a tour.

Then World War II broke out, and the play plummeted in popularity. It is hard to read it today, with its back and forth debates of rational concepts. It was not robust enough to account for the activities of dictators who turned out to be both brutal, irrational, and genocidal.

“IN GOOD KING CHARLES’S GOLDEN DAYS” (1939) is a title taken from the old satirical ballad “The Vicar of Bray.” The play brings together on stage not only Charles II but, among others, Isaac Newton, Charles Fox (the founder of the Quakers), the actress Nell Gwynn, and the artist Godfrey Kneller (who was included because Shaw’s first choice, William Hogarth, could not quite be fitted in the play’s date of 1680).

I can hardly express the pleasure this play gives me. That an 83-year-old wrote it is remarkable; that anyone can write such a warm, smart, sparkling play is little short of miraculous.

It began as a film script, and I think it would be better known if it had been used as one. It would have been a sort of seventeenth-century My Dinner with Andre, with dialogue and relationships between characters as the focus.

On stage, its two acts are of drastically different lengths, and there is no dramatic climax. Reading the play this time, I felt that the second act, a dialogue between Charles and his Queen, is stronger than I previously thought. However, it doesn’t give us anything much that we didn’t know after Act I.

Beatrice Webb, reading the play while it was being written, said, “If he can bring in some sort of striking incident into the play and not limit himself to sparkling talk, it may turn out A.1.” He did not, but perhaps he felt that inserting that kind of incident would be artificial.

However, if Shaw could repair the last act of Cymbeline, I can repair at least the last moments of Good King Charles. After [The clock strikes five.], insert:

VOICE. (Offstage) Your Majesty! Your Majesty! Would it please you to come out as soon as you can? Your brother has got himself in a bit of mischief!

CHARLES. Odsfish! And I have a Council meeting. I must go, etc.

That would help.

In any case, the play is by no means a failure on stage. It is lovingly revived periodically, and in 1957 it was a surprise off-Broadway success, running for almost two years. For actors it is a delight; and it has a glow and a kindly spirit unique in Shaw’s work. “Golden” is an appropriate word.

Which is not to say that the play is all sweetness and light. There are ferocious arguments over art, religion, science, and politics; there is a fist fight; there is much discussion of the perils of being a king. Charles is thinking about his own death, which does not seem to him to be too far off.

“The world must learn from its artists,” Kneller says, “because God made the world as an artist.” Shaw wrote this play as a great artist.

“Playlet on the British Party System” (1944) is an imaginative visualization in dialogue form of the rationale of the British parliamentary system, included in Shaw’s book Everyone’s Political What’s What. At the age of 88 he could, apparently effortlessly, devise an informative, well-crafted piece like this. Remarkable.

BUOYANT BILLIONS (1946-1948 / 1948) – Shaw finished this play in his early nineties, and, remarkably, wrote three more shorts ones after it. The play is brief, the plot disconnected, the themes familiar. There are Shavian mots but they sometimes seem formulaic, for example: “I am never happy. I dont want to be happy. I want to be alive and active. Bothering about happiness is the worst unhappiness.”

“Shakes Versus Shav” (1949) – a Shaw contribution to the Malvern Festival, where many of his later plays were first performed. This is a play for puppets acting out a rivalry between Shaw and Shakespeare, including the two of them thwacking each over the head.

The little play shows Shaw’s professionalism: he knew just what was expected in a puppet play. The dignified preface includes an answer to people who feel the man from Stratford was too low-class to have written Shakespeare’s plays.

FARFETCHED FABLES (1949-1950 / 1950) has a preface that reprises Shaw’s favorite themes, including the Life Force, equality of income and talent, official lying, miracles, the Roman  Catholic and Anglican churches, Marxism, Democracy, leadership testing, education, the atomic bomb – it’s a long preface – and art:

As events as they actually occur mean no more than a passing crowd to a policeman on point duty, they must be arranged in some comprehensible order as stories.

The play itself consists of six scenes (one a long monologue), each set further in the future than the one before, none that make one want to be there. Shaw’s fecundity at the age of 93 is impressive.

“Why She Would Not” (written 1950) is the last play Shaw wrote; opinions differ on whether he completed it or not. It’s a straightforward set of five short scenes tracing the relationship of a woman who likes her well-to-do life and a man who, as he succeeds in business, changes her situation in ways she doesn’t like. Whether Shaw thought the playlet was finished or not, it could use a concluding punch at the end.

*

Most of my conclusions about Shaw’s plays are included in the survey above. The variety of settings, plots, and characters in his plays is astonishing. Critics have pointed out areas of life that he does not include; but look at how much he gets in! He is, as I said, a professional writer: he can produce a serious play, a comedy, a farce, a sketch, an occasional skit, even on demand.

Certainly not all his writing is equally successful; he lived a long time and wrote a great deal. He has many successes, and some of them are successes indeed. In particular I was surprised at my positive response to several of his later plays. I felt this reading project introduced me to gems I either was not familiar with or had underappreciated.

Obviously Shaw was not a typical commercial playwright. He wasn’t just writing plays; he was creating a theater that at that time really didn’t exist, and along those lines he intended to do what he could to improve the world through his writing. Shaw’s major themes are easy to spot, including:

·         The clash between ideals and reality, and the related conflict between what people profess to believe, and what they really believe when the chips are down.

·         The Life Force as an always-developing instrument working in human life, and the obsolescence of traditional religion, particularly Christianity and its beliefs as traditionally understood. (We should note however that Shaw’s objections to orthodox Christianity do not stop him from frequently using its language.)

·         Woman as the primary instrument of the Life Force, and their general superiority to men.

·         The importance of the superior person, the Superman. (Why “man”? Why not “woman”? In his plays they are usually the ones leading the advances.)

·         The need for Socialism (noted mostly in prefaces), and the futility of Democracy in the face of the inequalities of individual ability. (This dilemma is the context of The Millionairess.)

·         The basic lack of worthiness in the professions, including medicine, law, politics, the military, and the clergy.

·         The importance of work as the supreme value in life.

Shaw isn’t a thinker with a lot of depth. After a while one notices his favorite points appearing over and over, almost reflexively, like pebbles in a pudding. I began to wish that some of these themes would not pop up so often – they seemed rote, and I began to get bored by them. 

However, it makes sense to me that Shaw’s themes might be themes of interest to a writer of comedy, as Shaw unquestionably was. For instance:

·         Comedy is always about the clash between the ideal and the real. “Take my wife – please!” contrasts the ideal of marriage and its reality. And so on.

·         Comedy thrives on energy – a slow comedy is probably not a comedy at all – so life could easily be conceived of as the Life Force by a comedian.

·         Comedy is usually about sexual relations. Ralph Cramden’s wife Alice on The Honeymooners (U.S. television sitcom, 1951-55) could be a character out of a Shaw play.

·         Comedy often includes Supermen – and then typically knocks them down, as Shaw also sometimes does.

·         Comedy, in the form of satire, frequently mocks the professions; Molière in particular was a master of this.

What can we learn from Shaw’s plays today? Obviously the task is not to be like Shaw. His era and generation are gone. More to the point, few of us can match his humor, his intelligence, and his enormous curiosity about everything in life.

And we don’t want to emulate Shaw’s faults, not that that hasn’t been done. He is the master of special pleading, of assumptions snuck into an argument as though they were facts, of straw men, of mistaken and misapplied “factual evidence.” He uncritically accepts the obsolete and misleading “facts” Marx embodies in Capital (1867); his Bible scholarship is shaky. His admiration for dictators, his naivety about Stalin and the USSR, and his growing enthusiasm for executions are horrifying.

Outweighing all these things is Shaw’s basically ethical viewpoint, which as Eric Bentley points out in his book Bernard Shaw is at the center of all his interests – economic, religious, and political. He does not care much how we got where we are. He is interested in where we are going, and he wants us to understand that our actions today determine what the future will be like.

Looked at from that point of view, Shaw’s plays are a continuing challenge to us to live in ways that count, to do everything we can to help the world be what it can be. Shaw uses the word “love” carefully, often redefining it as he does every other expression of the ideal. But his plays urge us, in particular, to work out the implications of the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” in the personal, but even more in the public, sphere.

[Well, that concludes Kirk Woodward’s remarks on George Bernard Shaw—at least for the time being.  As I observed in the fourth installment of this series, Kirk’s been a devoted and thoughtful fan of Shaw’s for a long time, so it wouldn’t surprise me to hear from him that he’s writing something else Shavian.  (Just a hint, Kirk: There are still the writer’s collected critical pieces on which to comment! ) 

[I know that any ROT-reader who’s followed this series will have picked up something interesting about GBS, and perhaps even something useful.   For the time being, however, ROTters who haven’t gotten enough Shaw for the moment may turn back on this blog not only to Kirk’s own past articles, but to several reports on productions of Shaw plays: “Two Shaw Plays (Shaw Festival 2006),” 25 September 2012, and “The 2006 Shaw Festival,” 8 and 11 December 2015.]

Re-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1918 to 1933

by Kirk Woodward

[This is the fourth in the five-part series of commentary on George Bernard Shaw’s works by Kirk Woodward, based on his reading of the Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963).  Parts 1, 2, and 3 of “Re-Reading Shaw,” covering plays written between 1885 and 1902, 1901 and 1909, and 1909 and 1920, were posted on 3 and 18 July and 3 August, respectively.  Though you can easily read the segments in any order you wish, I do recommend going back and catching Kirk’s earlier remarks if you haven’t been following the series because his thoughts on the great Irish writer’s works and ideas are well worth hearing.  Kirk’s been a fan of Shaw for a long time, I daresay since his high school days at least, and while he recognizes the playwright’s errors and misjudgments, he has a pretty clear view of the man’s indisputable strengths as well.  (Kirk’s written before on GBS for ROT; see “Bernard Shaw, Pop Culture Critic,” posted on  5 September 2012, and “Eric Bentley on Bernard Shaw.” 3 December 2015.) ]

BACK TO METHUSELAH (1918-1920 / 1922) – I avoided this play – actually a linked series of five relatively short plays – for years, possibly because its subtitle, “A Metabiological Pentatuch,” scared me off. Shaw says he wanted to write a “world classic,” on the order of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt or Goethe’s Faust (1806 and 1831).

Frustrated by the slow pace of change in society, he envisioned a world in which one or two, then a few, then an increasing number, then all people would live not for perhaps seventy years but for three hundred years or longer. Given all this time, Shaw felt (or claimed to feel), people would become wiser and would handle life better.

This idea – one can hardly call it an argument, because it’s only stated and not argued – strikes me as riddled with flaws. Is there any reason to believe that longer lives would be wiser ones? This seems highly debatable to me, and Shaw certainly doesn’t “prove” it. It seems to me his thesis comes down to hoping that humans will eventually do better than they’ve done so far. I can’t imagine sustaining that thesis for some 400 pages, and I don’t think Shaw sustains it, either.

Isn’t it possible that people with shorter life spans would accomplish more because they were aware that they only had so many years left to them? I have known this to happen more than once. And do people in general live as though they know what their life spans will be? Don’t we live to a significant extent “in the moment” – and if we don’t, shouldn’t we?

Shaw promotes what he calls the “Life Force” (borrowing the term, and the idea of “creative evolution,” from Henri Bergson, 1859-1941), and in support of this idea he employs a remarkable amount of Christian imagery in Methuselah (and elsewhere), but he doesn’t extend that belief to the survival of personality beyond death; he finds the idea of immortality “terrifying.”

Well, then, would people find living three hundred years less terrifying than living seventy? For that matter, by Shaw’s logic shouldn’t people who believe in a “life after death” be more productive and wiser, rather than less? But Shaw dismisses that idea out of hand.

The evidence of wisdom in the “long livers” of the plays is scanty. They are unable to understand the simplest metaphor (Shaw mentions this, then drops the subject); they are completely self-absorbed; the ones who live the longest are downright scary. They kill without compunction. Exactly what is this presentation supposed to persuade us to believe?

Eric Bentley points out that, as a matter of fact, Shaw posits two means for improving humanity. One is living longer; the other is putting Asians in charge of the world. (Race is a frequent subject in the five plays, always to the disparagement of the English.)

One of the many garbled lines of thought in Methuselah is the issue that we might call talent versus experience. Shaw’s idea of extended lives assumes that experience will make people wiser. This is debatable; possibly wisdom is a given while experience is a variable? In any case, Shaw is aware of cases – Mozart, for example – in which a person seems to be born with remarkable ability that centuries of experience could not provide. But Shaw does not follow up on this hint; it does not lead where he wants to go.

And the other side of that coin is that Shaw recognizes that learned characteristics are not passed on from one individual to another. How then are the Life Force’s “experiments” productive? One can point to examples of people’s influence that continue, sometimes, for years; but nothing says they will withstand the fall of a civilization, and war often reverses years of human progress. And what about lives that have no influence, people that live in obscurity and die in silence? Are they total failures of the Life Force?

It seems to me that Shaw’s “Life Force” is really the Victorian idea of Progress, dressed up. That’s an idea that notoriously today is hard to accept for many people.

Wikipedia says that “Critics found the five plays strikingly uneven in quality and invention.” Truer words were seldom spoken.

In the Plays, Methuselah itself is preceded by a fragment called “A Glimpse of the Domesticity of the Brothers Barnabas,” a draft of an act that was discarded before the play was produced, interesting primarily because it contains a very funny spoof of Shaw’s friend the writer G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), impersonated as Immenso Champeroon.

Following that, the first three plays of the five strike me as almost unreadable. The characters are routine, the gags (they are gags) frequently feel forced, and the logic of the situation, as I said, is all over the place. 

Then, unexpectedly, comes a piece of pathos: in the fourth play, “The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman,” the gentleman in question is clearly Shaw, or close enough – a senior citizen too old to adapt to the new times, but by no means valueless, holding on for dear life to his ideas as best he can. But the long livers are both unpleasant and ruthless, and the Elderly Gentleman comes to a bad end. In the final play the envisioned future makes one happy to be a short liver.

Two observations seem to me useful in considering Methuselah. One is by Arthur and Barbara Gelb in their book O’Neill (1962), their excellent biography of the playwright Eugene O’Neill. They note that O’Neill, who had children, showed minimal interest in them and looked backwards in nearly all his plays, while Shaw, who was childless, invested his attention in the future.

Methuselah is not in my opinion a satisfactory vision of that future, or a desirable one, but the point is that Shaw did care about the future; he wanted it to be better than the present.

The other observation is by G. K. Chesterton, who described Shaw as a man who, when he notices that the baby’s bathwater is dirty, says, “Get a new baby.” Since humanity is living in unsatisfactory ways, Shaw says, get a new species.

Three oddities about Methuselah:

The saying that the late Senator Robert Kennedy frequently quoted, “Some see things as they are and ask why. I see things as they might be and ask why not” is from the first section of the play – spoken by the serpent in the Garden of Eden!

And Shaw envisions two elements of today’s life that did not exist in his time – cellular phones (represented in Methuselah as tuning forks) and Internet “sexting” – by a politician!

JITTA’S ATONEMENT (1922 / 1923) is a collaboration with Siegfried Trebitsch (1868-1956), Shaw’s translator into German and also a playwright. Shaw’s relationship with Trebitsch is worth a play in itself. Most commentators feel that he was an inept translator, but Shaw credited him with making him a success in Germany before there was much interest in his plays in England.

Shaw, wanting to help Trebitsch financially, took the German’s most recent play and created an English version of it. Shaw was hardly adept in German:

At first I was preoccupied with a quite minor matter. I can neither claim knowledge of the German language nor plead ignorance of it.

He had someone make a literal translation of the play, and working with it and the German text, fashioned an adaptation that made a play of complications and suspense about adultery – a “well-made play” (with a strong Ibsen influence) – into an absorbing and highly intelligent melodrama, an intense and exciting play. Shaw made the ending more positive than Trebitsch’s conclusion. He says:

Trebitsch, being a German poet, has a certain melancholic delicacy which escapes my comparatively barbarous and hilarious occidental touch. I could not help suggesting, by a few translator’s treacheries here and there, that the ill-assorted pair settle down on reasonable human terms, and find life bearable after all.

Once again, Shaw’s professionalism is impressive. The original of Jitta is the kind of play Shaw seldom endorsed as a reviewer, but he takes his assignment seriously and makes a version of it that is both entertaining and humane. 

SAINT JOAN (1923) – According to Holroyd’sBernard Shaw, after Methusela Shaw thought he had written himself out. However, he had thought about Joan of Arc for some time, and her canonization by the Roman Catholic Church in 1920, along with urging from his wife, fired his imagination. His masterful play about Joan is widely assumed to have clinched his winning the Nobel Prize. (The prize was actually awarded for the year 1925, leading Shaw to say that he won the prize for a year he hadn’t written anything.) 

After Methusela, Saint Joan is a relief. Joan was a real person, and although Shaw certainly makes her over in his image (and, according to Holroyd, also the image of T. E. Lawrence, 1888-1935, “Lawrence of Arabia”), he does not indulge in flights of fancy that don’t take off, but dramatizes the actual events of her life – again, of course, in his own way.

His preface to the play makes interesting reading, although it shares some dubious characteristics with other prefaces: he exaggerates, he presents opinions as known and confirmed facts, and when you think he’s said everything he could possibly say, he still has pages to go.

His perpetual argument with the idea of a personal God leads him to use the Christian vocabulary in sometimes inventive and sometimes unscrupulous ways. One wonders if the Roman Catholic Church was grateful for his advice on how it ought to reform.

Nevertheless, he is on the trail of facts, he is entitled to his own opinions, and his evaluation of the Joan literature is that of a writer perceptively writing about other writers.

In the play Saint Joan, the characters are so well drawn and the dialogue so interesting that one can believe Shaw is giving an exact picture of what actually happened. He is, as he acknowledges, giving his picture. The fact that the trial scene is based on the original transcripts lends the play a patina of authenticity; but the rest of the dialogue in the play is Shaw’s invention.

He writes candidly that in particular he makes Joan’s primary antagonist, Bishop Cauchon, more reasonable than the record supports. In making that point, Shaw reveals a major principle about the way he writes dialogue:

The things I represent these [characters] as saying are the things [that Shaw believes] they actually would have said if they had known what they were really doing.

The characters, in other words, see themselves more clearly than people ordinarily do – they reveal themselves as though they were as conscious as Shaw is of their natures. One sees this technique throughout Shaw’s plays. A particularly glorious example is Eliza Doolittle’s father Alfred in Pygmalion, whose lectures on middle class morality are both hilarious and extraordinarily self-aware.

A common objection to Shaw’s plays is that he writes them like a pamphleteer. This is not correct, for the most part. But it is true that Shaw’s characters tend to talk like pamphleteers. They state positions and support them with arguments that probably would not often be heard in everyday conversation.

Their awareness is Shaw’s, and he lends it to the characters; but using such a dramatic convention does not make Shaw a propagandist. As he puts it, the characters are (usually) saying what they could say “if they had known what they were really doing.”

In his preface Shaw mentions the people who feel the play is too long, and could be easily cut. He has great fun describing what the play would be like if certain theater managers got their hands on it. But he is certainly aware that Scene 4 of Saint Joan, for example, is a lengthy discussion between English and French church officials and soldiers, in which the plot is not advanced and Joan does not appear.

But the scene is central to the play, because the characters give voice to the mighty forces that will collide over Joan, burn her, experience her influence for centuries, and eventually declare her a saint. For Shaw, and I think for us, that’s where the real story of the play is.

In many ways Joan is the same woman we see in other plays by Shaw – the woman who sees through men’s pretentions, and easily shows them up. And in many ways the men in the play are familiar Shaw characters too – representatives of public positions that in private they know are foolish, but that they still defend, for reasons that are either selfish or expedient.

The irony, of course, is that Joan really does believe in God, really does believe in the church, really does believe in France – which is more than can always be said of the men who kill her, or connive at her killing.

THE APPLE CART (1929) – Shaw would never admit it, but he was not above seeming to agree with other people now and then. The Apple Cart led many to believe he approved of monarchy, because its protagonist is King Magnus, who thwarts political opposition by announcing that he intends to resign his throne, run for office, and win.

In his preface to the play, Shaw claims that his play teaches lessons about democracy, not monarchy, and that’s probably correct, but he also had a fondness for monarchs – don’t deny it, Mr. Shaw! – particularly Queen Victoria (1819-1901), as Sidney Weintraub documents in his book Shaw’s People (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). A monarch, after all, though not a superman, does have a leg up.

The preface includes some trenchant observations on democracy (and a speech by Shaw on the subject as well), but little of that matters in the play itself, which is set in an unspecified future and has a dreamlike atmosphere despite its political setting.

The nation involved is not really England; the cabinet does not really act like a cabinet, or the King like a king. (Noel Coward played Magnus in a 1953 revival, one of the few roles not written by himself that he played; he must have been marvelous.) Crises turn into bits; arguments turn into quips; the big political event in the second act – I won’t give away the surprise, such as it is – is entirely imaginary.

The play is, basically, a fairy tale, an almost absurdist comedy about politics. He hardly even tries to keep the elements of the play in touch with each other. An interlude between acts shows the King and his mistress (modeled, Holroyd says, on the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, 1865-1940); and the Queen, who appears immediately afterward, apparently sounds a great deal like Mrs. Shaw herself. What are they doing there?

Oscar Wilde’s observation that “I can resist anything except temptation” becomes, in The Apple Cart: “I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.” I am afraid I do not believe that.

TOO TRUE TO BE GOOD (1931 / 1932) – a brilliant title. The preface begins with an assertion that almost makes it seem Shaw has run out of things to say and is scraping bottom:

Our capitalistic system, with its golden exceptions of idle richery and its leaden rule of anxious poverty, is as desperate a failure from the point of view of the rich as of the poor.

One recalls the song in the movie White Christmas (1954) about the sad plight of generals after they retire from the Army. . . . Shaw’s point, of course, is that capitalism is not good for anybody. But it is awfully difficult to make the case that making lots of money harms the rich – however true that may be – without causing some eye-rolling.

Shaw does not improve things when he asserts that the best system for administration is that of the Roman Catholic Church (with a nod to the recently converted G. K. Chesterton), which he sees as identical to that of Stalin’s Communist Party.

The play itself has nothing to do with any of that. It finds Shaw so discouraged by World War I and its effects that he can’t maintain his characteristic optimism:

They are all . . . falling, falling, falling endlessly and hopelessly through a void in which they can find no footing. . . . This dreadful new nakedness: the nakedness of the souls who until now have always disguised themselves from one another in beautiful impossible idealisms to enable them to bear one another’s company. The iron lightning of war has burnt great rents in those angelic veils. . . . Our souls go in rags now. . . . I have no Bible, no creed: the war has shot both out of my hands.

In such a world, there is no point writing a play that tries to convince people of ideas; what would it convince them of? So the play is fantastical, close to absurdist, barely connected from one end to the other. It does tell, more or less, the story of a pampered young lady who regains her health when she runs away with a pair of criminals.

However, this summary ignores most of the play, which begins with a giant microbe sitting by her bedside; introduces a British Army officer who is primarily interested in painting, and an enlisted man based again on T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”); and ends with the speech from which I just quoted, a message of despair.

There is energy to the play; but it is the energy of desperation. Audiences found it mystifying, and it had a short initial run. Perhaps it was in more than one sense too true to be good. [editor’s note: For more details on Too Good, see my ROT reports “Two Shaw Plays (Shaw Festival 2006),” 25 September 2012, and “The 2006 Shaw Festival (Part 2),” 11 December 2015.  ~Rick]

“Village Wooing” (1933 / 1934) appears to have been inspired by a woman named Jisabella Lyth, the postmistress of Ayot St. Lawrence, the village where Shaw lived. She and her husband had hardly moved there when he died, leaving her not well off.

Shaw, ordering stamps from her, would send each request in a signed letter. He never acknowledged his purpose, but she was able to sell the autographs and supplement her income.

Shaw imagined himself – although he denied it – as a widower increasingly involved, over three scenes, with Mrs. Lyth as one of his unerringly deft and funny women, much like Gracie Allen (1906-1964; American vaudeville and TV comedian and wife of George Burns). The play is a delight, charming and fun. The woman, as nearly always in Shaw’s plays, is an instrument of the Life Force and gets her man.

ON THE ROCKS (1933) begins with a jaw-dropping preface on what Shaw calls “extermination” or “killing as a political function.” “Extermination,” he writes, “must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly.”

The cheerful tone of the discussion is chilling. “Every Government is obliged to practice [extermination] on a scale varying from the execution of a single murderer to the slaughter of millions of quite innocent persons,” he writes – quite a sliding scale.

As an example, he uses Jesus. Then it occurs to him that the execution of Jesus was not a particularly good idea, Jesus being the kind of non-conformist Shaw prizes. So Shaw begins to talk about tolerance, leading up to an imagined dialogue between Jesus and Pilate that Jesus actually wins, due to his cleverly quoting both himself and Shaw:

By their fruits ye shall know them. Beware how you kill a thought that is new to you. For that thought may be the foundation of the Kingdom of God on earth.

This roller coaster ride of a preface has almost nothing to do with the play, in which a Prime Minister, faced with social upheaval, takes a pile of books by Marx with him on a rest cure and returns to propose a Socialist overhaul of the country. At first it looks like he may get away with it; but it’s too late, the country is on the rocks for real, and he resigns.

This bare-bones description of the play ought to suggest its nature as an exercise in wish fulfillment for Shaw that ends in deep disappointment even though it is his own fantasy. It’s also true that the dialogue is generally lively and entertaining. Holroyd says that at recent productions, people have been surprised at how timely the play is.

However, the storyline wanders; domestic issues wind through the play, tangentially related to its theme, and their resolution follows the climax of the political dilemma, a strange anticlimax.

Generally, instead of plot, Shaw is writing situations; instead of characterization, he is presenting personality traits. Instead of names, the characters could just have their functions written on signboards – “The Socialist,” “The Royalist,” and so on.

[I’ve been publishing Kirk’s Shaw series one section every couple of weeks, as you’ve seen.  Part 5, the final installment covering plays from 1934 to 1950, will be coming up on 2 September.  I hope ROTters will return to the blog to read Kirk’s final comments.]

Re-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1909 to 1920

by Kirk Woodward

[Below is the third installment of Kirk Woodward’s series of articles on the theater writings of George Bernard Shaw, based on his reading of all six volumes of the Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963).  The first and second segments, covering, respectively, plays written from 1885 to 1902 and 1901 to 1909, were posted on 3 and 18 July.  While it’s not necessary to read parts 1 and 2 before you read part 3, it’s helpful—and I recommend reading the whole series in whatever order in any case because, whether or not you’re a Shaw fan (as both Kirk and I are), he’s an endlessly fascinating figure and Kirk’s take on his work and ideas is more than worth reading.]

MISALLIANCE (1909-1910 / 1910) – The preface, “Parents and Children,” begins aggressively enough in tone to raise suspicions that Shaw wrote it out of frustration over his marriage and his wife Charlotte’s fear and revulsion (according to Michael Holroyd’s 1997 biography Bernard Shaw) at the idea of having children.

Whether this is so or not, the preface ferociously redefines all the aspects of childrearing that Shaw can think of – children are “slaves,” doctors are “quacks,” “the family ideal is a humbug and a nuisance.” Underneath one can feel Shaw’s pain from his own childhood. 

The preface does calm down somewhat as it goes along, although Shaw continues to make statements that are, to say the least, arguable, for example that “families are not kept together at present by family feeling but by human feeling,” an assertion that to say the least takes in a lot of territory.  

“We must reconcile education with liberty,” he says; urges toleration; and writes, “What is needed in dealing with children is not logic but sense.” Ultimately, “Fine art is the only teacher except torture.”  

In a sense the preface is written backward; an acknowledgement that few families resemble each other comes toward the end, when it would have been more helpful at the beginning.

Misalliance, a long play in one act, although usually performed with one or two intermissions, is a play that Shaw does seem to have written by starting to write and seeing what happens, rather than by plotting it out first.

It and its preface have an interesting relationship: the preface expands on the themes and topics in the play in ways that the play only lightly suggests.

The play itself is a romp, or perhaps we should say, a ripping good time. Unfortunately the characters in the play are not really very interesting. Aristotle may have been on to something when he said that plot is the soul of the drama.

The play has precious little plot, so it sails along on the strength of its dialogue, but it’s hard to be interested in anyone in it. Nothing very good or bad is going happen to them. It feels like a Heartbreak House where no one is particularly worried, depressed, or threatened.

In the middle of the play, an airplane crashes; it turns out to contain, not a bomb, but a young female Polish acrobat, vibrant enough to stir up a great deal more talk about marriage. She is definitely a dea ex machina, if not for the storyline, at least for the play itself.

Holroyd writes:

The extravagant ideas and incidents that cluster within the second part of Misalliance . . . all help to establish Shaw’s kinship with Ionesco . . . and show him to be, in R. J. Kaufmann’s words, ‘the godfather, if not actually finicky paterfamilias to the theater of the absurd.’ G.B.S. was familiar with early modernist experiments and had his own agenda for clearing away the dominance of the well-made play.

Shaw even comes close to “breaking the fourth wall,” the imaginary separation of the stage and the audience. We will see more of this kind of daring.  I forgot to mention that there is also a mysterious intruder with a gun who hides in a Turkish bath.

The play, in other words, is not a model of tight construction. I wonder if Shaw, who was criticized for borrowing the plots of other plays, was irritated when people criticized him because he didn’t.

“The Dark Lady of the Sonnets” (1910) – Shaw knew Shakespeare’s verse, including the Sonnets, backwards and forwards. He wrote this one act “occasional piece” as part of an effort to create a British Shakespeare National Theater. In it Shakespeare, pursuing his “Dark Lady,” has an unexpected encounter with Queen Elizabeth.

At least the first half of Shaw’s preface, in which he describes why he decided to use Mary Fitton (1578-1647) as the “Dark Lady” in this playlet, is engaging, and the preface contains a line that sets him extremely high in my estimation.

He describes spending his days at the British Library reading, and making the acquaintance of an obsessed Shakespeare researcher named Thomas Tyler, a friendless and solitary man of “astonishing and crushing ugliness,” disfigured by two large goiters on his face.

Shaw struck up an acquaintance with Tyler because “I am not,” as he declares magisterially, “to be frightened or prejudiced by a tumor.” That surely is (to use W. S. Gilbert’s words from H.M.S. Pinafore) “greatly to his credit.”

Shaw had a remarkable ability to make friends, many that one would assume would be his enemies. He was also, of course, a handful, leading Oscar Wilde to call Shaw “an excellent man; he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him.” Friendship is complex; but Shaw did have many friends.

FANNY’S FIRST PLAY (1911) is the surprising answer to the trivia question: “Which play by Shaw had the longest initial run?” It ran for 622 performances, an astonishing number, and deserved its long run. It is a charming comedy.

The preface is short and one of Shaw’s best:

Mere morality, or the substitution of custom for conscience, was once accounted a shameful and cynical thing: people talked of right and wrong, of honor and dishonor, of sin and grace, of salvation and damnation, not of morality and immorality. The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

Fanny’s first play – meaning the first play she has written – is a play within a play; she has invited several London critics to see her work (they don’t know she wrote it) and tell her what they think. Shaw has fun with this concept: he doesn’t name himself as the actual author, and he models the critics on reviewers of the time. (One of them, Arthur Walkley, who also suggested the idea that became Don Juan in Hell, liked this concept so much that he helped the actor who played “him” with his makeup and movement.)

The play within a play is the only one by Shaw to have a group of young people as its central characters. They and their parents make up most of the play. The young people have all been in jail recently for various hijinks, and those experiences have helped them reach authentic understandings of who they are. Their parents are shocked, and must do their own growing.

Although Shaw calls the play a potboiler – it certainly is an audience pleaser – it contains a number of his themes: women who are miles ahead of men; the way people pretend to be anything but who they really are; the idea that we are better off doing what we want to do, and taking the consequences, than spending our time doing what we think we ought to do in order to please others.

Shaw writes in the preface:

Is it any wonder that I am driven to offer to young people in our suburbs the desperate advice: Do something that will get you into trouble? . . . I hate to see dead people walking about: it is unnatural.

ANDROCLES AND THE LION (1912 / 1913) – Shaw said he wrote Androcles to “show what a play for children should be like.” With its dancing lion, it has reminded many of a British Christmas pantomime. It had a short initial run (55 performances), apparently because it was reported to be irreligious. In fact it characterizes its Christians fairly, if skeptically. The preface is another story.

Shaw’s hundred-page preface (for a two-act play, and seven more pages of explanation follow it!) is titled “Preface on the Prospects of Christianity: Why Not Give Christianity a Trial?” Christians excited by the title might want to calm down. Shaw seldom accepts anyone else’s definition of a concept, a belief, or anything else. He redefines everything.

In this case, he redefines Christianity, re-creating Jesus in his own image. This is not a unique phenomenon, as Fr. Raymond Brown, in An Introduction to the New Testament (Doubleday, 1997) has pointed out:

In The Quest for the Historical Jesus . . . A[lbert] Schweitzer passed judgment on more than a hundred years of such “historical Jesus” research. He contended that most of the investigation . . . told us more about the investigators than about Jesus, for they were describing their own mirror-image reflection.

Here is Shaw:

I must still insist that if Jesus could have worked out the practical problems of a Communist constitution, an admitted obligation to deal with crime without revenge or punishment, and a full assumption by humanity of divine responsibilities, he would have conferred an incalculable benefit on mankind, because these distinctive demands of his are now turning out to be good sense and sound economics.

Shaw’s preface can be intelligent. But it is limited both by his Enlightenment-based scholarship, which has been in many cases superseded; and by his assumptions, which rule out anything he would call supernatural – this from a man who champions the Superman and the Life Force! – who therefore has to assume that toward the end of his ministry Jesus became delusional.

Needless to say, Shaw has no belief in Jesus’ resurrection, which leaves him the problem of accounting for what motivated Jesus’ followers to have the effect they did on the world. He explains this by asserting that the apostle Paul basically invented a new religion using Jesus’ name. This explanation too is seldom today considered credible on the evidence.

Anyone creating a new Jesus story confronts the same problem: the gospel texts and the other New Testament books are the only source materials from the period (the gnostic writings come significantly later).

So anyone trying to pick and choose a Jesus story from those sources is like Dickens’ character Mrs. Todgers (in the novel Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843-44) “a dodgin’ among the tender bits with a fork, and an eatin’ of ‘em.” Making a “version” of the story means choosing the parts one likes, based on one’s own assumptions, and discarding the parts one doesn’t like.

Shaw buttresses his narrative with by now familiar overwrought assertions:

The attitude of the Roman Emperor and the officers of his staff towards the opinions at issue were much the same as those of a modern British Home Secretary towards members of the lower middle classes when some pious policeman charges them with Bad Taste, technically called blasphemy…

After the preface the play is a relief. Androcles shares with The Devil’s Disciple (and others of Shaw’s plays) the theme of a person – numerous persons in this case – who with death imminent finds out what she or he really believes. It is hardly a play for children.

But it is exceptionally well written. Shaw takes religion seriously. The theological discussions in the play emerge from the characters and their situations. Androcles is a wonderful character. So is the lion. The second act is a marvel of dramaturgy: everyone gets a moment.

“Overruled” (1912) – In his preface, Shaw writes about “my playlet, which I offer as a model to all future writers of farcical comedy.” “Overruled” is farcical in its situation: a man and woman, in love with each other on a ship, find that their spouses are also on the ship – and also in love with each other. Aside from this, the play is not a farce but a comedy, in which sex is thoroughly discussed and analyzed.

Shaw’s preface, remarkably serious-minded considering the play that follows it, begins with a discussion of what Shaw calls “polygamy” and most of us would call “infidelity;” jealousy as a learned response; the lack of statistical information on sexual behavior; revenge; farce; sex on stage; realistic stage scenery; the purpose of art; and the failure of farce to fully illustrate sex. It’s hard to think what he left out.

Noel Coward was familiar with Shaw’s plays (Shaw defended him when Coward was accused of plagiarizing the plot of You Never Can Tell for 1921’s The Young Idea). The situation in “Overruled” reappeared in 1930 in Coward’s brilliant play Private Lives.

PYGMALION (1912-1913 / 1913) – Shaw’s biggest popular success is not this or any of his plays, but the musical My Fair Lady (1956), based on this wonderful play about the dictatorial, oblivious language teacher Henry Higgins and the flower seller Eliza Doolittle whom he teaches to act like an upper-class lady.

                     

Alan Jay Lerner, librettist and lyricist of My Fair Lady, took significant pieces of dialogue intact from Shaw’s play. He also brought Higgins and Eliza together at the end of the play, which Shaw would have strenuously objected to, except that he had died in 1950.

My own reading of the play is that Lerner is correct in his estimate of the trajectory of the plot, and Shaw is not; I find his notes about what happens to the characters after the curtain goes down unpersuasive. On this matter opinions, of course, differ.

What I think is unarguable is that Pygmalion is a brilliantly written play, a practically flawless comedy, with an original and engaging plot, vigorous characterization, and frequently hilarious dialogue based, not on gags or jokes, but on the characters themselves.

Shaw claimed that he didn’t work out the plots of his plays in advance, but wrote them as the words came to him, without any thought for structure, and this same comment is often made about his plays as an objection to them. For example, C. D. Warner, in The Library of the World’s Best Literature (1917), writes:

As a playwright, Shaw has never been particularly interested in problems of construction. In his earlier pieces, he was satisfied to pour new wine into old bottles. The content of these early plays was new, but the structure was based upon the pattern which Pinero had previously borrowed from T. W. Robertson. In his later plays, Shaw has introduced no notable improvements in technique. At times he has discarded altogether the pattern of “the well-made play”; at other times he has reverted to the loose and easy pattern of the Elizabethan “chronicle-history”: but in such experiments as these, he has merely revolted against the rigors of contemporary dramaturgy without offering any acceptable substitute for the structure which he has attempted to discard. As an architect of plays, Shaw is certainly inferior to Pinero and Jones, and possibly to Galsworthy. He has never made a pattern so remarkable as that of ‘The Thunderbolt’ or ‘Mrs. Dane’s Defense’; and he has never built a structure so self-sustaining and so rigorous as that of ‘Strife.’

The plays of Bernard Shaw may lose their potency within a score of years, because they were so novel at the time when they were written.

I see contradictions in this passage. In any case, it’s possible that Shaw wrote some of his plays by starting at one end and writing until he was finished, without prior calculation. It’s equally possible that he was so aware of the requirements of play structure that he didn’t have to think much about it.

But it’s just as likely that a number of his plays were carefully plotted in advance, whether on paper or in his mind. The structure of Pygmalion is impeccable. It’s just a marvelous play in every way.

  

“Great Catherine” (1913) is a raucous playlet about the Russian Empress and an English military man. It has no obvious purpose – Catherine is not even a superman! – beyond contrasting the presumably sexually uninhibited Catherine with the rigid Englishman for laughs; it premiered at London’s Vaudeville Theater. The preface begins by defending the play’s version of history, but gives that up and settles for observations on theater:

Playwrights do not write for ideal actors when their livelihood is at stake. . . . [But] in the long run, the actors will get the authors, and the authors the actors, they deserve.

“The Music-Cure” (1913 / 1914) was written as a curtain-raiser for Magic (1913), a play by G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936). A spindly young man who has had a breakdown, and can only play popular songs on the piano, is confronted by a brilliant, forceful lady classical pianist. They work out a sort of duet and decide to get married. Shaw subtitled the play “A Piece of Utter Nonsense”; it took him nine months to finish. From the preface:

This is not a serious play: it is what is called a Variety Turn for two musicians. . . . As a last desperate resort a pianola behind the scenes can be employed; but the result will lack spontaneity.

There is, however, no pressing reason why the thing should be performed at all.

“O’Flaherty V.C.” (1915 / 1917) – “V.C.” stands for “Victoria Cross,” England’s highest military honor. O’Flaherty, who has won it, is an Irish peasant lad who went to fight for England in World War I because his home life in Ireland was so frustrating, irritating, stultifying, and boring.

As a truth-telling experience the play ranks with John Bull’s Other Island, but Shaw tells us in his preface that it was designed as a recruiting poster for the Irish. In effect it says, “Join the English Army – your life in Ireland is so wretched that fighting for England can’t be any worse.”

Remarkably, England’s military was not enthusiastic about the play, particularly one in which a character says “It’s in the nature of governments to tell lies.” Eventually it was allowed to be produced, in 1917, for troops already in Belgium.

“The Inca of Perusalem” (1916) is Kaiser Wilhelm II, then fighting England in the World War. We see him in disguise, on a romantic errand. In the course of the play he makes it clear how little control he has over the actual war. One cannot imagine this approach was very popular at the time.

“Augustus Does His Bit” (1916 / 1917) is one of several short plays Shaw wrote during World War I. The play is a satire on the way England is conducting it, and it mocks everybody except the troops. 

Augustus is a War Office official, a nincompoop and straight man to two comedians, one his clerk and one, a woman, trying to steal a confidential list on a bet, which she does. With the war in such hands . . . . Shaw knows how to write comedy scenes, and does.

“Annajanska the Bolshevik Empress” (written 1917, performed 1918), a variety show sketch, is a spoof on the Russian Revolution and to my mind remarkably unfunny. Annajanska is a princess who has escaped and become a Bolshevik. Good luck with that, honey.

Apparently it went over like a house afire because of its performers. Shaw says the only compliment he got on his writing was from a friend who commented, “It is the only one of your works that is not too long.”

HEARTBREAK HOUSE (1913-1919 / 1920) – Shaw had a hard time getting this play produced, despite his substantial reputation as a playwright. It was finally produced to, it appears, a number of critical yawns. My guess is that many in his audience were suffering from World War fatigue.

In any case, I find the play, which Shaw called a fantasia on Russian – that is, Chekhovian – themes, one of his most appealing. Heartbreak House is a play about weakness. Captain Shotover, the owner of Heartbreak House, is substantially insane, and his guests are all damaged goods; even the billionaire in the play is a timid fellow.

So many of the characters in Shaw’s plays strenuously try to justify themselves. The characters in Heartbreak House know that that effort is futile.

[For those who haven’t been following Kirk’s series, I’ll restate the plan (such as it is).  There are five segments in the collection and I’m running them every couple of weeks.  The next section, covering plays from 1918 to 1933, will appear (as if by magic—which, of course, is how computers work) in about two weeks.  I hope you’ll come back to ROT to read Kirk’s further thoughts on the Irish playwright and his works.]