Re-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1901 to 1909

by Kirk Woodward

[This is part 2 of Kirk Woodward’s series, “Re-Reading Shaw,” his commentary upon reading all six volumes of the playwright’s Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963).  The first section, covering plays written from 1885 to 1902, was posted on ROT on 3 July, and though there are some references to earlier parts of the series in later ones, each section substantially stands on its own.  Nonetheless, I strongly recommend reading them in order to get a sense of the sweep of Shaw’s work over the 65 years of his playwriting career.  (Even before the Irishman turned to writing for the theater, he had a significant career as a respected music and theater critic.)]

MAN AND SUPERMAN (1901-1903 / 1905) begins with the inscription “To Arthur Bingham Walkley” (1855-1926), drama critic for the Times of London, who Shaw says suggested that he write a play about Don Juan, the fictional womanizing libertine.

Shaw then goes on to write a preface of dumbfounding folderol, crammed with assertions like “It may seem a long step from [John] Bunyan to [Friedrich] Nietzsche, but the difference between their conclusions is merely formal” (like hell it is), and the claim that his Don Juan character is a direct descendant of the original fictional Don.

There are in fact only the small differences that he is neither a womanizer nor a libertine – he’s only a society radical who has written a book called The Revolutionist’s Handbook (which Shaw has written and attaches to the play, and in which Shaw, following his usual pattern, redefines the concept of Revolution into something unrecognizable).

The high-sounding nonsense of the preface leads into a lively comedy of social relations, mixed with a heavy dose of discussion and enough plot to make one think it might equally well have been a novel.

It is a four act play, and in Act III a famous “set piece” interrupts the plot, a discussion between four main characters of the original Don Juan story – Don Juan, Dona Ana, the Commodore (her father), and the Devil – that has become known as “Don Juan in Hell.” Hell, in Shaw’s vision, is the place where everyone is completely entranced by ideals.

The four characters are played by the actors who play their counterparts in the other three acts. (Some productions cut this act; occasionally the act has been performed by itself.) I had not realized until this reading of the play that the third act is not all that different from the others.

They are all filled with talk about ideas – if not Shaw’s ideas, at least ideas of interest to Shaw; but in Acts 1, 2, and 4 the ideas belong to their characters, and are not arbitrarily assigned to them.

I do not feel the same is true of Act III, “Don Juan in Hell.” In the rest of the play Jack Tanner, the Don Juan character, is so extreme that he comes across as a bit loony (“possibly a little mad,” Shaw says in his description). But in Act III he, as Don Juan, clearly speaks for Shaw.

I am not saying the scene is only a pamphlet – the dialogue is very clever – but from the time Don Juan begins his series of monologues on the subject of the Life Force and Woman as its instrument, I find myself increasingly irritated by the repetition of concepts that aren’t original, difficult to understand, or fundamentally very interesting, and are repeated so often that taking a swig every time a character says “Life Force” would make a potent drinking game.

What is this Life Force, exactly? I remember listening to a recording of “Don Juan in Hell,” as performed by Charles Boyer, Agnes Moorehead, Cedric Hardwicke, and Charles Laughton, with my friend Steve Johnson. When it was over, Steve said he didn’t think Shaw was clear whether the Life Force was personal or impersonal. Is it blind or mind?

It seems to me that Steve is correct and that Shaw wants to have it both ways – or at least to allow his audience to think that it could be either. In any case, the Life Force, Don Juan says, “needs a brain . . .” “The Life Force is stupid.” Personally I am not sure Don Juan is putting the blame in the right place.

“Every child,” Shaw says in another preface, “is an experiment by the Life Force.” But an experiment requires a scientist or an observer – an experimenter, one who stands above the experiment. Shaw does not appear to notice this.

The third act does not begin with the “Don Juan in Hell” scene, incidentally. It begins with an extraordinarily articulate group of brigands in the mountains of Spain. Of course they are articulate. In this play everyone talks. (At one plot point, the chief brigand exclaims, “A dramatic coincidence!”)

One sees in Man and Superman Shaw’s ability to draw on a huge range of reading and to synthesize what he reads.

In the case of this play, Walkley, I suspect, challenged Shaw to write a Don Juan play to goad him into writing something with more sex in it than Shaw usually chose to include. Shaw answers him by writing a play about the sexual instinct, which he sees as an instrument of the Life Force that uses woman’s manipulation of man to advance the species.

One can get tired, however, of Shaw’s continual insistence in the play on the sexual instinct and on how woman drags man along – or rather about the talk about it by John Tanner, the title character (both the Man and the Superman). At least I do.

Act IV seems to me a bit schematic, although I have not seen it performed and might feel differently if I saw it staged.

It was while reading Act IV that I realized that the play is Shaw’s version of what he thinks Shakespeare should have written in Much Ado about Nothing. (Matt Wolf made this same point in a review of a London production of Man and Superman in the New York Times, 11 March 2015.)

Shaw severely criticized the characters of Beatrice and Benedick:

Paraphrase the encounters of Benedick and Beatrice . . . and it will become apparent to the most infatuated Shakespearean that they contain at best nothing out of the common in thought or wit, and at worst a good deal of vulgar naughtiness. . . nothing more than the platitudes of proverbial philosophy, with a very occasional curiosity in the shape of a rudiment of some modern idea, not followed up. (The Saturday Review, 26 Feb 1898)

Shaw attempts to correct Shakespeare’s alleged insufficiencies by making his Ann Whitefield tricky, and his John Tanner full of complaints about being entrapped by women and the Life Force. As with the character of Julius Caesar, it seems to me that Shaw does not surpass Shakespeare here – rather the contrary.

About that “Superman”. . . not a bird, or a plane . . . Shaw took the term from Nietzsche’s “Übermensch,” but a better translation might be Over-Man, or perhaps Beyond-Human. Shaw uses the term to suggest that humanity might somehow outgrow itself and become something greater – “the ideal individual being omnipotent, omniscient, infallible, and withal completely, unilludedly self conscious: in short, a god.”

Shaw knows at some level how unappealing  this sounds; but it’s the Devil, interestingly, who says, “Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human.” Shaw’s plays illustrate the Devil’s comment more than once.

The word “superman,” along with the concept, has lost its charm and now seems as ghastly as Nietzsche’s other futuristic idea, the “Eternal Return,” which Shaw nods to in Act III but doesn’t otherwise promote, being allergic to an “eternal” anything. Shaw uses “the Superman” aspirationally but fails to suggest any way it might actually be an improvement on our present condition.

As Shaw grew older and more frustrated with the pace of change in society, he appears to have begun to think he had discovered the Superman in real human beings – for example, in Lenin and Stalin. The size of his mistake is the measure of his desperation.

JOHN BULL’S OTHER ISLAND (1904) – Shaw’s play about Ireland, his homeland, written for and rejected by the Abbey Theatre because, as William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), the theater’s manager, said, it was technically too demanding to produce, but also, as everyone understood, because Shaw presented the Ireland of his day realistically:

It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland.

Shaw actually understates the matter. The play is an attack on everything an Irish audience could possibly believe about itself. Shaw claims that he gets his effects by telling the simple truth about things, but in fact he frequently goes out of his way to be as obnoxious about them as possible; his denials of this are disingenuous.

It makes sense that the play had to succeed in London before it could be performed in Dublin; success at least took a bit of the sting off it.

(As a tip of the hat to the Abbey Theatre, the third act includes a long scene in which a large group of people sit and talk – the kind of staging for which the Abbey was most noted.)

There are three prefaces to the play, less overbearing in tone than some of his more didactic introductions, dated 1912, 1906, and 1929. In the first, Shaw predicts how events will work out in Ireland; as he admits in a note, he was completely wrong. In the second, written for the play’s first publication, he analyzes the Irish and English national characters. In the third, he summarizes the ghastly historical events – the Easter Rebellion, the Black and Tans, partition – that shaped the Ireland we know today. In the course of these essays he makes trenchant observations on colonialism, for example:

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.

Acquired rights are deduced from political constitutions; but political constitutions are deduced from natural rights.

A political scheme that cannot be carried out except by soldiers will not be a permanent one.

We settled the Irish Question, not as civilized and reasonable men should have settled it, but as dogs settle a dispute over a bone.

What is left of John Bull’s Other Island, now the Irish Question has been (more or less) settled? The play became famous when King Edward VII, at a special performance, laughed so hard that he broke his chair, and it was a commercial success for Shaw. But the humor is of a particular kind. It’s a comedy of reversals – in particular, reversals of the ideas that the characters have about themselves.

In this sense it resembles the plays of another Irishman, Eugene O’Neill, whoseThe Iceman Cometh (1939 / 1946) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1941-1942 / 1956) also dramatize the destruction of illusions. O’Neill is not a funny writer; Shaw’s tone here, of course, is comic, but also bitter. “My way of joking is to tell the truth,” says the former priest, Keegan, who has a lot of Shaw in him; “It’s the funniest joke in the world.”

Broadbent, the English businessman who in 24 hours manages to dominate an entire swath of Ireland, is a version of Undershaft, the arms dealer in Major Barbara, but without Undershaft’s self-awareness; and there is nothing humorous about Undershaft anyway. As the Irish character Larry Doyle says in the play, “I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not unreal.”

There’s a fine line between illusion and poetry. Shaw tells us that our poetic image of Ireland is an illusion – and that the same is true of most of our lives. Whether or not that’s so, poetry is forbidden territory for Shaw, although Keegan’s “vision” at the end of the play sticks in the mind. I see it as a bleak play, a decade and a half before the melancholy Heartbreak House. One wonders what the King was laughing at.

“How He Lied To Her Husband” (1904) was written as a curtain raiser for “The Man of Destiny,” which wasn’t long enough for a full evening. It is a telescoped version of Candida, with a married woman and a younger man who idolizes her. When the poems he wrote about her are lost, and presumably found by her gossipy sister-in-law, she becomes utterly realistic, and the poet is disillusioned. Then the husband comes home...

“How He Lied,” like “The Glimpse of Reality,” is a marvelous short play, funny and smart, and well worthy of production.

MAJOR BARBARA (1905) – This play has an excellent reputation. When I first read it years ago, my impression was that it (like Saint Joan) was essentially a tragedy – that is, a play about a mighty conflict between powerful forces that will not yield.

I still feel that “tragedy” describes the play at its best. This time around, though, I see more clearly what Shaw is up to, and I can’t applaud it. It is in Major Barbara that Shaw shows among the first definite signs of the ugly pattern that will disfigure his later life – his admiration for dictators, primarily Stalin, at times Hitler and Mussolini as well, and others in theory.

“Major” Barbara is a Salvation Army officer, working to save the lives and souls of the poor, and her father, Andrew Undershaft, also dedicates himself to lifting the living conditions of his workers – except that his business is weapons and munitions, so he is equally to be credited for good working conditions, and for countless brutal deaths throughout the world. He offers to underwrite the work of the Salvation Army. Barbara finds this outrageous; the Army finds it a miracle. Barbara’s faith is shattered.

Undershaft’s position is that there is no active force in life except money; that poverty is the only evil, and abundance the only good; that the only moral question is whether one is well-off or not. Shaw astonishingly writes his preface to the play, not as though he were Shaw, but as though he were Undershaft – as though he believed exactly what Undershaft believes, even to the point that, as the arms czar says, a person doesn’t really believe in something until he’s ready – not to die, but – to kill for it.

For me, the effect of this is ghastly – not that the character of Undershaft should feel this way, because that’s appropriate, but that Shaw should appear to. This preface and play prefigure Shaw’s future fascination with dictators, and his cheerful acceptance of executions as a means of improving the world.

The critic Eric Bentley, in general an admirer of Shaw, called him out on this point, asking: is killing really the only way to improve the world? Are there no alternatives? Shaw becomes unsettlingly ready to accept the sacrifice of human life for the benefit of – human life! Reading the preface and play this time around made my skin crawl.

Murder is also the theme of “Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction” (1905), a lunatic farce in which the victim, among other actions, eats some of the ceiling. There is a whisper of a theme here about the role of ideals in our lives, but mostly you can’t hear the whisper over the knockabout farce.

THE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA (1906) – The first play in the collection is one I had always avoided on the understanding that it wasn’t top drawer Shaw. To my delight, it turns out to be a well-crafted melodrama about the dangers of being a Professional, whether in medicine or some other field (this play includes Shaw’s famous – and accurate – aphorism that “all professions are conspiracies against the laity”).

The core of the plot is a story of sexual desire – a doctor lusts after the wife of a potential patient, a dishonest, slippery con man who also happens to be a brilliant artist. Perhaps the doctor ought to save the artist’s life because of his potential for great contributions to society? On the other hand, the man is essentially a sociopath, and if his life is not saved, the doctor may be able to marry his wife! People who consider Shaw’s plays “bloodless” might want to consider what happens in this one. The dialogue is clever throughout.

“The Interlude at the Playhouse” (1907), written for the opening of a new theater, is a comedy sketch for the theater’s actor-manager, scheduled to give a speech, and his wife, trying to prepare the audience to like it. Except for a bit of preaching at the end, it is consistently funny, showing again that among many other things, Shaw was a fine comedy writer.

GETTING MARRIED (1908) has a preface on marriage almost a hundred pages long. Is there that much to say about marriage? “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But that was Tolstoy, not Shaw. However, this is one of Shaw’s more agreeable prefaces, because it is one of his least utopian.

We shall in a very literal sense empty the baby out with the bath by abolishing an institution which needs nothing more than a little obvious and easy rationalizing to make it not only harmless but comfortable, honorable, and useful.

This is not always the note we hear in Shaw. (Another exception is the waiter's speech from You Never Can Tell quoted in the first article in this series.)

The preface is long, among other reasons, because Shaw doesn’t consider any social problem to be separate from society as a whole. “Until we abolish poverty,” he says, “it is impossible to push rational measures of any kind very far.” This perspective opens the door a good deal wider than does a simple proposal for the liberalization of divorce laws, which is Shaw’s basic recommendation.

The preface predictably contains numerous unsupported generalizations delivered as settled fact. But there are also shrewd observations. Among these are reflections on the advantages of large families; on the difference between the “what” of a problem (identifiable by popular opinion) and the “how” of its solution (probably requiring expert help); and on Othello’s feeling for Desdemona (“this is not what a man feels about the thing he loves, but about the thing he owns”).

Getting Married and its preface have a comfortable relationship: the preface illuminates the play, or the play illuminates the preface, take your pick. Shaw wrote the play in one long act, in which the characters try to figure out what marriage is and what they think of it.

There is a central situation – an engaged couple read a pamphlet about marriage just before their wedding ceremony, and it frightens them – surrounded by many other existing and potential marriages.

There is a lot of talk – too much for the play to support – and yet another female character entering toward the end to give the play a boost. “Marriage,” says a Wisdom character in the play, “is tolerable enough in its way if youre easygoing and don’t expect too much from it. But it doesn’t bear thinking about. The great thing is to get the young people tied up before they know what they’re in for.”

THE SHEWING-UP OF BLANCO POSNET (1909) – Blanco Posnet is a one-act play, set in the American West. A notable fact about Shaw is that, while his ideas remain basically consistent and reappear in play after play, the plays themselves have a great variety of forms and settings. In externals, one play by Shaw seldom resembles another one. Shaw certainly had never been in the American West, and his picture of it has been picked at, but it does the job.

Shaw being Shaw, of course, Blanco Posnet is not a typical Western, being a story of spiritual redemption. Posnet says, toward the end of the play:

By Jiminy, gents, theres a rotten game, and theres a great game. I played the rotten game; but the great game was played on me; and now I’m for the great game every time. Amen.

The play suggests that there are good points in Christianity, but that there is something greater; in this play, Shaw doesn’t make explicit what that is. We can guess he means the Life Force, but an audience member who knew nothing about his theories would have to work hard to extract specifics from this play. In any event, the basic effect of it is highly spiritual.

Blanco Posnet was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office – the censor of the stage – who denied it a license for performance, on grounds of blasphemy, unless Shaw agreed to make changes including removing references to God from the play – leaving in it, as Shaw pointed out, all the things one would expect God would oppose.

Shaw refused to make the changes; Yeats and Lady Gregory (1852-1932) arranged for the play to be produced unaltered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where the Lord Chamberlain could not block it.

The preface to Blanco Posnet tells the story of the battle with censorship and the attempt to have it abolished – an attempt that did not succeed until 1968, eighteen years after Shaw’s death. Since then the British theater, needless to say, has flourished. (Blanco Posnet finally had its U.K. premiere in 1909, but for only two performances, in a “private club,” not a licensed theater.) 

“Press Cuttings” (1909) – Shaw burlesques the government’s treatment of the Women’s Suffrage movement in a nearly absurdist sketch demonstrating once again that women and men are practically different species, men being buffoons, and women, brilliant. Reading the sketch works best if one imagines the Monty Python troupe doing the all roles, including the women.

The Censor predictably refused to license the sketch if names resembling those of real politicians and military men were used. Shaw therefore changed the names of the General and Prime Minister to General Bones and Mister Johnson, borrowing them from minstrel shows and thereby making his point even more satirical.

“The Fascinating Foundling” (1909) was written for a charity event at the request of the Prime Minister’s daughter, and Shaw came through with a lively sketch that touches gently on a few social issues but mostly presents people trying to get what they want, totally oblivious to anything else. Fast and funny.

I am not saying that Shaw’s characteristic themes don’t ever pop up in these short plays. The title of the dashing “The Glimpse of Reality” (1909 / 1927) is almost a summary of Shaw’s entire output. The glimpse occurs to a nobleman about to be murdered by well-organized scoundrels; he understands for the first time who he really is, and ironically his insight makes the murderers think he is crazy, so they spare his life (for a price).

This is a really excellent little piece and I’m surprised it’s not more often performed. If you didn’t know the author was Shaw, I’m not sure you’d guess; but who else could the author be?

[As I said in the first installment  of Kirk’s Shavian commentary, there are three more sections of “Re-Reading Shaw” and I’ll be posting them every couple of weeks.  Part 3 of the series covers the plays Shaw wrote between 1909 and 1920; I hope you’ll come back to ROT at the beginning of August to read what Kirk has to say about the period of the great writer’s work.]

Dispatches from Israel 7

by Helen Kaye

[Last spring, my friend and frequent ROT-contributor Helen Kaye sent me a couple of her Jerusalem Post reviews, but I was so loaded on the blog at the time that I couldn’t shoehorn them in for posting until now.  As late as this is, I’m running Helen’s “Dispatches from Israel 7,” the latest in her occasional series of drama notices from Tel Aviv, where she lives, Jerusalem, and frequently elsewhere around the country.  Below are presented Helen’s assessment of a Hebrew translation of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and a British Play, Daytona by Oliver Cotton, both produced in Tel Aviv by Bet Lessin.]

The Taming of the Shrew

By William Shakespeare

Translated by Dori Parnes

Directed by Udi Ben Moshe

Bet Lessin, Tel Aviv; 10 January 2016

Scrumptious, irreverent, farce with an edge! This is a 21^st century Shrew to revel in from A – Z and back again.

It starts with a nifty monologue by Yossi Segal on how it’s the guys’ turn in these our “anything you can do I can do better,” days and never lets up for 100 captivating, rollicking minutes.

Dori Parnes has worked his usual sleight of hand with Shakespeare’s text. His wordplays, puns and other verbal pranks preserve Shakespeare’s spirit via up-to-the-minute Hebrew that has the audience in stitches.

Then there’s Udi Ben Moshe’s rib-splitting visual pranks as well as his thoroughly smart take on what this play’s about (won’t be a spoiler – sorry!) that carries through to Lily Ben Nahshon’s enclosing set of doors and revolving panels, Orna Smorgansky’s apt-to-all-times costuming, Adi Cohen’s clever music and Keren Granek’s no-nonsense lighting.

We all know the story. Rich merchant Baptista (Ilan Dar) has two daughters; blond Bianca (Agam Rodberg), a sweetie (?), and redhead Katarina (Maya Dagan), the shrew. Until Kate marries (a remote possibility), Bianca cannot, and who in H… would marry Kate? Enter Petruchio (Yuval Segal) and we’re off!

Shrew is all about Kate and Petruchio, so you’d better make sure you have good ones. Dagan and Segal have us rooting for them from the getgo.

Dagan’s Kate is bruised and bruising, violent and vulnerable, smart and smarting. When we meet her she’s in riding pants and a shirt, mean as an adder, and unloved to boot. We watch, enthralled, as she succumbs oh-so-gradually to being loved and to the elation of partnership.

Yuval Segal’s Petruchio is a riot from his s*#t-kicking grin to his beef-cake swagger compounded by Israeli macho. He transforms too, from gold-digger (“I’ve come to wive it wealthily in Padua)” to joyous appreciation of endless possibilities, getting there with more changes than a chameleon.

Not that the other actors are standing about. We have Vitali Friedland’s yummy, slippery Grumio, Yaniv Biton’s ebulliently posturing Tranio, Ilan Dar’s gorgeously clueless Baptista, Agam Rodberg’s fleety flirty Bianca, Mordy Gershon’s marvelously inept Hortensio among the splendid rest, not forgetting the delicious cameos by Yossi Segal and Albert Cohen.

This is a Shrew with brio in shovelsful, but you know what it has most of? Ease and fun!

*  *  *  *

Daytona

By Oliver Cotton

Translated by Yosef el Dror

Directed by Alon Ophir

Bet Lessin, Tel Aviv; 16 March 2016

They’ve made a life for themselves after That Time. What happened Over There is never talked about. Not ever. This evening in 1986 Elli (Liora Rivlin) and Joe (Rafi Tavor), now in their 70s, are rehearsing to Frank Sinatra’s “Dancing Cheek to Cheek” for tomorrow evening’s Seniors Ballroom Dancing event. They’ve won cups that are squashed on a shelf in the living room of their modest Brooklyn apartment. It’s not the cups, it’s the dancing, you see, and in a bit Elli is off to get her dress for the competition.

Then Billy (Avi Oria) arrives. No luggage, but enough Chinese takeout for a small army. He’s all smiles, talking a mile a minute, apparently oblivious that Joe’s welcome is, shall we say, lukewarm. He’s on the run after putting three deliberate and lethal bullets into one Franz Gruber in the swimming pool at his vacation hotel at Daytona, Florida; SS Franz Gruber, now blameless Chaney, formerly a sadistic killer at Stutthof  concentration camp, and whom Billy recognized because of the birthmark on his neck.

After all, where else would he go?

Now? Now he arrives, 30 years after disappearing without a word, demanding his brother’s help.

Yes, Billy and Joe are brothers. The relationship between them and with Elli, when she returns, is the meat of Cotton’s tight family drama. You have to gulp a bit, here and there, but dramatically, theatrically it works. Orna Smorgonsky’s set and costumes – lots of beige and browns - and Nadav Barnea’s lighting add to that.

Director Ophir has wisely elected to avoid pathos, reflected in the actors’ speaking reticence. We get the sense (as it should be), that there’s so much they’re not saying and this adds real punch to their performance.

Rivlin’s Elli is tightly reined in. Even when she spills her guts – and she does – she doesn’t raise her voice; her voice and body are barely there, she holds with effort onto Self. Oria’s Billy is at once overwhelmed at the enormity of what he’s done yet convinced of its correctness and he lets us see the conflict. Rafi Tavor as Joe is more volatile. Of the three, he’s the one who’s managed to grip at life more securely but Billy’s arrival shakes him to the core and Tavor does a gorgeous job with that.

The gulp or two aside, Daytona has heart.  Its humanity holds us.

[Helen’s previous contributions to ROT include “Dispatches” 1 through 6 on 23 January 2013, 6 August 2013, 20 November 2013, 2 June 2015, 22 August 2015 (which also includes an article Helen wrote on the Israel Festival), and 6 October 2015.  (I also posted another of Helen’s JP reviews, Molière’s Tartuffe, on 2 November 2014 as a Comment to “Dispatches 3.”) ROTters might also enjoy looking back at ”Help! It’s August: Kid-Friendly Summer Festivals in Israel,” 12 September 2010; ”Acre (Acco) Festival, Israel,” 9 November 2012; “Berlin,” 22 July 2013; “A Trip to Poland,” 7 August 2015.]

“Anatomy of a Broadway Flop”

by Michael Paulson

[The following article was published in section C (“The Arts”) of the New York Times of 23 June 2016.  “Anatomy of a Broadway Flop” is presented as a sort of theatrical post mortem of four big Broadway musicals that failed this season.  I know little about three of the shows in the article aside from the Times reviews, but I think that Michael Paulson, the acting theatrical ME, was probably gentler than I suspect the shows deserve.  If I didn’t know better, I’d come away from the article thinking, ‘Gee, they made a couple of little mistakes.  That’s hardly worthy of a death sentence.’  But I can attest at least in the case of Bright Star, the only one of the four plays covered here that I saw, that the creators and producers didn’t do much right from my perspective (see my report on 11 April—I didn’t pussyfoot!).  Bright Star almost certainly wouldn’t have even made it to a Broadway stage (or, probably, even the Kennedy Center) if the name Steve Martin hadn’t been attached.  (I doubt Edie Brickell carries that much weight.)  Bright Star shouldn’t have been in the lofty position it finagled for itself and couldn’t sustain its unearned prominence.  (It’s sort of the theater counterpart of the Peter Principle: the show rose to its level of artistic incompetence and failed.  I’m sorry for the artists who’ve lost their jobs—but theater, especially commercial theater, isn’t a jobs program.)

[American Psycho, with a book by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and music and lyrics by Duncan Sheik, began previews at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre under the direction of Rupert Goold on 24 March 2016, opened on 21 April, and closed  on 5 June.  The review-survey website Show-Score gave American Psycho an average rating of 62 based on notices that were 49% positive and 30% negative with 21% mixed.  American Psycho won Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Sound Design, Outstanding Lighting Design, and Outstanding Projection Design, plus five additional Drama Desk nominations and two Tony Award nominations (Best Scenic Design and Best Lighting Design).  The musical also received eight Outer Critics Circle Award nominations of which it won two (lighting and projection design) and two Drama League Award nominations.

[Bright Star has a book by Steve Martin, music by Martin and Edie Brickell, and lyrics by Brickell and began previews under the direction of Walter Bobbie at the Cort Theatre on 25 February and opened on 24 March; the show closed on 26 June.  Show-Score reported that Bright Star received 66% positive reviews, 18% negative, and 16% mixed, accumulating a score of 67.  Bright Star won one Theatre World award for Carmen Cusack’s performance and one Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music; the musical was nominated for six additional Drama Desks and five Tonys (Best Musical, Best Book, Best Original Score, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role, and Best Orchestrations).  It also won two Outer Critics Circle Awards (Outstanding New Broadway Musical and Outstanding New Score) from seven nominations, and one Drama League Award (Cusack) from two nominations; it also received two Fred and Adele Astaire Award nominations.        

[Disaster! began previews at the Nederlander Theatre on 9 February, opened on 8 March, and closed on 8 May.  Directed by Jack Plotnick, Disaster! has a book by Plotnick and Seth Rudetsky based on a concept created by Seth Rudetsky and Drew Geraci using popular songs of the 1970s.  Show-Score gave Disaster! an average score of 65, with 67% of its reviews positive, 26% negative, and 7% mixed.  The jukebox musical was nominated for one Tony for Jennifer Simard’s featured performance and one Drama Desk Award for the featured performance of Baylee Littrell.

[Tuck Everlasting, with a book by Claudia Shear and Tim Federle, music by Chris Miller, and lyrics by Nathan Tysen, started previews under Casey Nicholaw’s direction at the Broadhurst Theatre on 31 March, opening on 26 April and closing on 29 May.  Show-Score’s rating of 63 was based on an average of 45% positive notices, 24% negative, and 31% mixed.  Tuck received one Tony nomination, for the costume designs of Gregg Barnes, and won a Theatre World award for the performance of actress Sarah Charles Lewis.  There were also three nominations for Outer Critics Circle Awards, two Drama League Award nominations, and two Fred and Adele Astaire Award nods.]

Roger Bart in “Disaster!” (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

The woeful wordplay writes itself. “American Psycho” met a gruesome end. “Tuck Everlasting” was not immortal. “Bright Star” ran out of fuel. And “Disaster!” proved to be — well, you can finish that one yourself.

Broadway is a brutal business, in which real success is enjoyed by a handful of shows, while a vast majority crash and burn. And this season was especially tough, because one show, “Hamilton,” gobbled up much of the attention, enthusiasm and awards that motivate potential ticket buyers.

For musicals that opened this spring, it was an especially unforgiving season. Broadway is increasingly saturated with long-running hits, and four musicals that opened last fall — “School of Rock,” “On Your Feet!,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “The Color Purple” — reached the new year still running strong.

“People don’t have to go to their ‘I don’t know, maybe I’ll like it’ show when there are so many ‘You’re going to love it’ shows to see,” said Jordan Roth, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns five of the 40 Broadway houses.

Ultimately, shows fail because not enough people buy tickets to see them. Maybe the title wasn’t as popular as the producers thought, the performers not as appealing, the stories not as dramatic, the songs not as memorable. And, in an era of high running costs, many producers can no longer afford to wait to let an audience build.

Four shows flopped this spring at a total loss to their investors. Here, based on interviews with a variety of Broadway figures, is an autopsy report of sorts for “American Psycho,” “Disaster!” and “Tuck Everlasting,” all of which closed in recent weeks, and “Bright Star,” which wraps up on Sunday.

Benjamin Walker in “American Psycho” (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

‘American Psycho’

The run 27 previews, then 54 performances after opening April 21 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.

The story A hunky and status-obsessed investment banker who is (or at least appears to be) a sex-crazed serial killer in New York City in 1989.

Cost to produce $9.8 million

Onstage The title character, Patrick Bateman, was played by Benjamin Walker (“Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson”); the cast also featured a reunion of the “Next to Normal” co-stars Jennifer Damiano and Alice Ripley.

Offstage An A-list creative team: music by the singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik (“Spring Awakening”), set design by Es Devlin and direction by Rupert Goold (“King Charles III”). The lead producer was Jeffrey Richards.

What were they thinking? The title is well known and has an established fan base through the polarizing 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis and the cult film adaptation in 2000. The musical seemed sexy and fearless, with a critique of the go-go ’80s that might resonate in this era of intense discussion about income inequality; an initial production, at the Almeida Theater in London from 2013-14, received some encouraging reviews. The show was scheduled then to go to Second Stage, an Off Broadway nonprofit, for further development, but the rights holder was so confident of the prospects that it forced the cancellation of that production and moved straight to Broadway.

Critical response Divided, but several of the most influential critics hated it. The show was nominated for two Tony Awards, for scenic and lighting design, and won neither.

Why it failed It was always going to be a risk. The blood-drenched material (at one performance, a misfiring blood pack splattered an audience member) was unsuitable for families and unappealing to tourists, who make up a large constituency of Broadway ticket buyers. But the show proved divisive even for adventurous theatergoers. Some raved about its bold look and daring content, but others suggested it underplayed the satire; many found the explicit and misogynistic violence offensive. Also noteworthy: British-developed shows satirizing the United States (see “Enron”) have recently tanked on Broadway.

Carmen Cusack in “Bright Star” (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

‘Bright Star’

The run 30 previews, then 109 performances after opening March 24 at the Cort Theater.

The story Inspired by a news account of a baby found in a valise, the musical, set in North Carolina in the 1920s and the 1940s, tracks the intertwining stories of a young soldier and the editor of a Southern literary magazine.

Cost to produce $10.5 million

Onstage Instead of going with a well-known star, the show’s creative team chose Carmen Cusack, who had been with the project from the start; she got great reviews and was nominated for a Tony Award for her Broadway debut performance as the editor, Alice Murphy.

Offstage The comedian and musician Steve Martin and the singer-songwriter Edie Brickell collaborated on the score. The show was directed by Walter Bobbie (a Tony winner for “Chicago”), and the lead producer was Joey Parnes, who had shepherded “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” into an unlikely hit.

What were they thinking? The producers and creators were encouraged with what they saw at two pre-Broadway productions, a premiere at the Old Globe in San Diego in 2014, then a run in 2015 at the Kennedy Center in Washington; they believed that the cultural cachet of Mr. Martin and Ms. Brickell would attract audiences and that a combination of buzz and awards would broaden the appeal.

Critical response Mixed. Charles Isherwood of The New York Times praised the show as “gentle-spirited, not gaudy,” but Terry Teachout described it in The Wall Street Journal as “a really bad bluegrass-pop musical.” The show was nominated for five Tony Awards, including for best new musical, but won none.

Why it failed Although some were charmed, few were wowed, making it hard to build word of mouth. As an original musical, not adapted from a film or novel, and with a complex plot, it was hard to explain to ticket buyers. Some found the show’s denouement laughably predictable. The musical was nostalgic; it was often described as quiet, or small, which has worked for some recent musicals (“Once,” “Fun Home”), though not this year. As “Bright Star” struggled at the box office, Mr. Martin and Ms. Brickell, among others, lent the production more money to keep it running, and on about a dozen occasions Mr. Martin joined the band onstage for an instrumental entr’acte, but it was not enough to save the show.

A scene from “Disaster!” (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

‘Disaster!’                              

The run 32 previews, then 72 performances after opening March 8 at the Nederlander Theater.

The story A spoof of 1970s disaster films (particularly “The Poseidon Adventure”), the show depicted the misadventures of the passengers and crew members on an ill-fated floating casino in New York City in 1979.

Cost to produce $6.5 million

Onstage Seth Rudetsky, a Broadway booster and a co-writer of the musical, starred as a disaster expert and enlisted several stage notables to ham it up alongside him, including Roger Bart (“The Producers”), Kerry Butler (“Xanadu”), Adam Pascal (“Rent”) and Faith Prince (“Guys and Dolls”).

Offstage The musical featured jukebox classics from the disco era and was directed by Jack Plotnick, who wrote the show with Mr. Rudetsky. The lead producer was Robert Ahrens.

What were they thinking? This show was an effort at counterprogramming — it had two successful Off Broadway runs, in 2012 and 2013-14, and the producers hoped that the enthusiasm for a campy night out could be replicated on Broadway.

Critical response Mr. Isherwood, writing in The Times, praised the show as a “delirious goof,” but other key critics were less impressed; in New York magazine, Jesse Green called it “a tiny entertainment that should probably have been left in a basement rec room.” Jennifer Simard’s uproarious performance as a nun with a gambling problem received the only Tony nomination; she did not hit the jackpot.

Why it failed The musical struck many as an extended, one-gag skit, without enough star power, spectacle or drama to justify Broadway prices (or a two-act running time), and it sank.

Andrew Keenan-Bolger and Sarah Charles Lewis in the musical 

“Tuck Everlasting.” (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

‘Tuck Everlasting’

The run 28 previews, then 39 performances after opening April 26 at the Broadhurst Theater.

The story A young girl who meets an immortal family in the woods of rural New Hampshire and must decide whether to drink from the water that would allow her to live forever.

Cost to produce $11 million

Onstage The Broadway veterans Terrence Mann (“Pippin”), Carolee Carmello (“Parade”), Michael Park (“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”) and Andrew Keenan-Bolger (“Newsies”), along with an 11-year-old newcomer, Sarah Charles Lewis.

Offstage A beloved children’s book, published in 1975 by Natalie Babbitt, was the key ingredient. Add in the hitmaker Casey Nicholaw as director and choreographer, changing pace from his go-for-the-guffaw spectacles — “Aladdin,” “The Book of Mormon” and “Something Rotten!” The musical’s initial book was by Claudia Shear, and then the producers added Tim Federle to help revise it for Broadway; Chris Miller and Nathan Tysen did the score. The lead producer was Beth Williams.

What were they thinking? An initial production in Atlanta was well-received; Mr. Nicholaw has a track record of commercial success; and family-friendly musicals often do well on Broadway.

Critical response Tepid, with a few exceptions. The show was nominated for one Tony, for costume design; it did not win.

Why it failed Without big stars, it had low advance sales, and some argued that its leafy logo was unhelpful. The story is a bit of a fairy tale — often hard to execute. Adults perceived it as a show for children, and family shows without the Disney imprimatur are hard to sell. “Tuck” was sweet and lovely, but those are not the adjectives a musical needed this season to be heard above the din.

Re-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1885 through 1902

by Kirk Woodward

[About two months ago, Kirk Woodward wrote me that he was “going to read all six volumes of [Shaw’s] ‘Collected Plays and Prefaces.’”  He was taking notes as he read, he said, and “almost certainly have a Shaw article in my future.”  Well, a month later, Kirk sent me not one article on the great Irish playwright, but five, all based on his close reading of the six- volume Bernard Shaw: Complete Plays with Prefaces, (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963).  He arranged the sections in chronological order according to the years in which Shaw finished writing the plays (the years of first productions are often much later); the first installment is published below.  I’ll post the remaining four articles of “Re-Reading Shaw” over the next two months (more or less), one every couple of weeks or so.

[I see no point in telling you, even in précis, what Kirk found to say about the writings of Shaw.  As regular ROTters will know, Kirk’s a longtime fan of Shaw, even as he recognizes the playwright’s shortcomings and deficiencies.  I’ll let you all discover for yourselves what Kirk has come up with.  Besides, Kirk’s comments are all tailored to each play and its preface—though some themes do emerge.  I will add that one of the wonderful benefits of Kirk’s somewhat monumental task is that we all get to learn something about the many Shaw plays we haven’t read or seen ourselves—of several of which, I’ll admit, I’d never even heard.  Beyond that, I hope you’ll read Kirk’s remarks here with the same relish I did (it was piccalilli), and that you’ll come back for the next four installments.  ~Rick]

I’ve recently finished a lengthy and surely noteworthy task: I’ve read all six volumes of Bernard Shaw: Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963 – from here on I will call it the Plays), including, as the introduction to the first volume says, “some sixty plays and playlets, ranging from three-page Beauty’s Duty to four-hundred page Back to Methuselah. . . . His Prefaces, Notes, Handbooks, Postscripts and other ancillary prose total almost as many words and pieces as the plays themselves.”

All in all we are talking about some 4,600 pages of material. Remarkable enough, and Shaw, of course, over the course of his long life (1854-1950), wrote a great deal more than that.

I have always enjoyed reading Shaw, but I realized that my reading was spotty: some plays I had read, some I had not, some I had only read pieces of.

My impression is that Shaw is not an academic favorite – that professors of literature tend to think of him as a journalist, an impression with some justification, since he worked as a journalist for years, a brilliant one, and the prefaces to his plays, in particular, give the impression that he writes them to promote ideas he’s got about various problems in society.

Every year or so I hurl at [the reviewers] a long play full of insidious propaganda, with a moral in every line. They never discover what I am driving at: it is always too plainly and domestically stated to be grasped by their subtle and far flung minds; but they feel that I am driving at something: probably something they had better not agree with if they value their livelihoods. (From the Preface to “The Six of Calais”)

However, although the point has been made before, it’s worth noting again that Shaw’s prefaces and plays don’t necessarily have a one-to-one relationship to each other. Occasionally a preface will clearly be written in support of a play, but frequently it either tangentially relates to the play being discussed, or it carries a polemic far beyond what the play suggests.

Eric Bentley has pointed out in his book Bernard Shaw (New Directions, 1947), for example, that although Shaw was a Socialist and frequently wrote supporting his position, there is little direct championing of Socialism in the plays themselves.

Shaw’s major rhetorical game in his prefaces is to make his points with such energy that both readers and opponents find him difficult to answer. Bentley, in his essay on Shaw in Thinking about the Playwright (Northwestern University Press, 1987), accurately writes:

The very tone of Shaw’s writings . . . shames the reader or listener into feeling he is the deluded ignoramus who needs to have his consciousness raised by this engine of enlightenment [Shaw himself]. It is odd that Shaw is held to be fond of discussion, since what his rhetoric tends to do is: put topics beyond discussion. Brilliance after all doesn’t make one see. It dazzles. Clever rhetoric bewilders.

As we go along I will note exceptions to Bentley’s comment, where Shaw’s tone in a preface is more genial, but I will also note places where his prose has the effect of a battering ram.

On, then, to the plays, in chronological order of the year their writing was completed. Shaw’s spelling and punctuation are unusual (he does not put a period after abbreviations or, often, an apostrophe in contractions); when I quote him I reproduce them.

TRIFLES AND TOMFOOLERIES is Shaw’s title for a collection of six of his short plays:

. . . there is a demand for little things as well as for big things, and . . . as I happen to have a few little things in my shop I may as well put them in the window with the rest.

He wrote a number of these. In these pieces the titles of the shorter plays will contain lower case letters.

Releasing himself now and then from the requirement to improve the world, he is able to be just a working playwright, at his most human. For example, in many of the plays he exercises his enthusiasm for silly names. My favorite, a character only referred to, is Roosenhonkers-Pipstein.

The dates after the name of each play indicate first the year in which it was written, then the year it was first performed. In Shaw’s case both dates matter: sometimes he could not get a play produced for years after it was written.

I am not aiming for completeness in these essays. To be thorough about Shaw would require a book, or more likely a library. I will simply record points that interest me. This is not, so to speak, a six month residency abroad, just a city bus tour with a chatty guide.

WIDOWERS’ HOUSES (1885-1892 / 1892) – Shaw’s first play, originally a collaboration with the drama critic William Archer, who gave Shaw a plot for a three act play that Shaw used up by early Act III. Archer didn’t like what Shaw had written and the project languished for seven years, until the newly established Independent Theatre needed material and Shaw dusted off and completed his old manuscript.

The atmosphere of the play is upper class (the first line is “Two beers for us out here”). The drama is somewhat primitive; in particular, the male lead, Dr. Trench, has a companion or confident unfortunately named Cokane who appears to exist only so people will have someone to talk to. Act III is somewhat hard to follow.

But the resolution is clear: everyone decides there is no alternative to accepting the income generated by the unscrupulous slumlord Sartorius. All of us, in other words, are at fault for poverty and its conditions. The play was performed two evenings by the Independent Theatre and caused quite a fuss.

THE PHILANDERER (1893 / 1905) – Shaw wrote in 1930 about his second play:

There is a disease to which plays as well as men become liable with advancing years. In men it is called doting, in plays dating. . . . I make no attempt to bring the play up to date. I should as soon think of bringing Ben Johnson’s [sic] Bartholomew Fair up to date by changing the fair to a Woolworth store.

With the passage of even more years, The Philanderer doesn’t seem dated at all, because it’s now definitely a period piece, and a good one.

It is a heady mix of elements: a man who effortlessly attracts women, and two women who are attracted to him; a doctor who has discovered a disease by dissecting animals, and is crushed to find that it isn’t really a disease at all and that his patient is going to live; an Ibsen Club, where the members (men and women) try to apply the Norwegian’s lessons to everyday life; and so on.

Shaw was 39 when he wrote this play, and his skill is already noteworthy. It is produced now and then, and the roles in it are terrific; actors must love to perform it. Shaw knew how to write for them.

MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION (1893-1894 / 1905) – that is, prostitution; she’s a madam, a businesswoman who provides well for her staff. If that sounds like Undershaft in Major Barbara, that’s because the situation is the same – except that in this earlier play Shaw doesn’t try to pretend that money is the only value in the world. From the preface:

Mrs Warren’s defence of herself is not only bold and specious, but valid and unanswerable. But it is no defence at all of the vice which she organizes. It is no defence of an immoral life to say that the alternative offered by society collectively to poor women is a miserable life, starved, overworked, fetid, ailing, ugly. Though it is quite natural and right for Mrs Warren to choose what is, according to her lights, the least immoral alternative, it is none the less infamous of society to offer such alternatives. For the alternatives offered are not morality and immorality, but two sorts of immorality.

At this point Shaw’s focus is humane. That will change; he will come to put systems above individuals, the very thing he originally sets out to attack.

The first act of the play briskly – too briskly – sets up the kinds of character reversals Shaw will develop throughout his writing, but they lack the clarity he will later achieve. There is an early “hidden secret” in Vivie, the daughter’s, parentage: because of her mother’s occupation, the men don’t know who her father is, so who can she safely marry?

However, this issue largely evaporates. The dramaturgy is creaky: everybody has to be brought together, everybody has to say things that set the others off, and in the last section of the play Vivie starts to sound like an automaton.

A widely repeated quotation comes from a character in this play:

I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.

This statement, like Hamlet’s “To thine own self be true,” is rousing, but it too is ironized by its context in the play, which is written to demonstrate that poor women often cannot choose their circumstances. The play raises that subject, but it doesn’t seem to me to really dramatize it.

ARMS AND THE MAN (1894) – set in Bulgaria, during and immediately after a Balkan war; but the setting is domestic, and the events so romantic that they were later turned into an operetta (The Chocolate Soldier, 1908, with music by Oscar Straus, which Shaw hated). [editor’s note: I posted a report on Arms from a visit I made to Canada’s Shaw Festival; see “Two Shaw Plays (Shaw Festival 2006),” 25 September 2012, and “The 2006 Shaw Festival (Part 2),” 11 December 2015.  ~Rick]

Some of Shaw’s plays feel like school assignments, not surprisingly since he always has a didactic purpose somewhere in mind. Arms and the Man, however, is a delightful play about the gap between ideals (that is, illusions) and facts, and it does not feel like an assignment at all. Shaw certainly never aimed to make an audience happy – heaven forbid! But I can’t think of any play that makes me happier. It is, to put it colloquially, a peach.

CANDIDA (1894-1895 / 1897) – Shaw’s continuing theme of the struggle between romantic ideals and concrete reality takes an interesting turn in this play about a romantic triangle. The three are a Christian Socialist minister; his wife, the Candida of the title; and a poet, Eugene, more than a decade younger than Candida and intensely in love with her. Eugene tries to disabuse Candida of her illusions about her husband so she will leave the minister for him.

But does she have illusions about either man? And doesn’t the poet desire her in order to replace one set of illusions with another? At the end of the play he seems – perhaps – to have found a way to live without romance. But we must figure out what that means for ourselves. Shaw subtitled the play “A Mystery.”

Shaw had a hard time getting the play produced, but once it succeeded (first in the United States, then in England) it became a sort of craze. The character Candida is charming, and more than that, she is maternal. Grown men with careers are mere babies in her hands. This fact surely has one kind of appeal to men, and another kind to women.

Candida is not the first or last play of Shaw’s we will see where the woman is wise and the men are more or less fools.

The dialogue and characterization are first rate, and there is plenty of comedy. It seems to me that the minister’s early uncertainties about his wife, and Candida’s compulsion to choose between the two men, are extreme; but the play as a whole sparkles.

It is, inevitably, one episode in the continuing saga of Shaw’s struggle with religion. Since the play is about idealistic illusions, the minister’s Christianity must be seen to be mistaken, no matter how much the minister claims to believe it (as previously occurred in Major Barbara); even his Socialism is used for laughs.

THE MAN OF DESTINY (1885 / 1897) – Shaw wrote The Man of Destiny with the famed actress Ellen Terry (1847-1928) in mind. “The man of destiny” is Napoleon, and Shaw wrote that role for Henry Irving (1838-1905), the actor-manager of London’s Lyceum Theater, where Terry was its, and Irving’s, leading lady. Irving, infuriated by things Shaw said about him in reviews, pretended for a long time to be interested in the play, strung Shaw along, and never produced it.

The description below of Lady Cicely in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion may be applied to the Lady, the role intended for Ellen Terry in The Man of Destiny, except that the Lady is nowhere near as entertaining as Lady Cicely. Neither is the play, which reads as a not very interesting attempt to write a “vehicle” for two performers, without much else going on in it – and that’s what it is.

YOU NEVER CAN TELL (1895-1896 / 1899) – Shaw was the drama reviewer for The Saturday Review when The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) opened in 1895. Shaw’s review was unenthusiastic about the play, asserting that it was heartless and that he hated being tickled into laughter.

However, it must have made an impression on Shaw, who knew Wilde and frequently promoted his work. You Never Can Tell distinctly shows the influence of Wilde’s play. The tone of the first act, and the rapid delivery necessary to play it, are distinctly Wildean, and the story shares many plot elements with Earnest.

MRS CLANDON [relentlessly] On your honor, Mr Valentine, are you in earnest?

VALENTINE [desperately] On my honor I am in earnest. Only, I have always been in earnest; and yet - ! Well, here I am, you see.

MRS CLANDON That is just what I suspected.

From the second act on, the play is more Shaw than Wilde, but it does not lose the brightness of the first act. The young people who make up the core of the play are irrepressible and outspoken, and William, the waiter, has a knack for being at exactly the right place at the right time with the right thing to say.

I saw this play performed once, years ago, and I remembered it as mostly conversation. I was wrong; there is plenty of plot. Reading the play by myself, I laughed out loud when I saw one particular plot twist coming. In fact I laughed through most of the play from there on. It is a thrill to watch a master craftsman at work.

BOHUN. . . . It’s unwise to be born; it’s unwise to be married; it’s unwise to live; and it’s wise to die.

WAITER. Then, if I may respectfully put a word in, sir, so much the worse for wisdom!

Shaw’s theme of the Life Force working through Woman makes a couple of appearances, and at this point in my reading it is hard to get excited about it, but so what. This wonderful play should be performed regularly for the sheer fun of it. And I second the last words of the play:

Cheer up, sir, cheer up. Every man is frightened of marriage when it comes to the point; but it often turns out very comfortable, very enjoyable and happy indeed, sir – from time to time. I never was master in my own house, sir; my wife was like your young lady: she was of a commanding and masterful disposition, which my son has inherited. But if I had my life to live twice over, I’d do it again: I’d do it again, I assure you. You never can tell, sir: you never can tell.

THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE (1896-1897 / 1897) – in his earlier plays Shaw often borrowed forms of theater popular at the time, and inverted them. Here the popular form is melodrama; Shaw says he used as many elements of it as he could – the black sheep brother, the reading of the will, the downtrodden scullery maid, the threatened hanging, the last minute escape, and so on – in this play set during the American Revolution.

But the core of the play is pure Shaw: at least two people, maybe more, find out in the moment of decision who they really are, and who they are not.

The first I knew of this play was watching the 1959 film version, in which Laurence Olivier plays General Burgoyne with such style and ease that I fell in love with it. Nothing quite matches the high comedy of the Burgoyne scenes that dominate the third act of the play; but the other scenes are highly satisfactory as well.

One sentiment in the play resonates throughout Shaw’s career: “You see, men have these strange notions, Mrs Anderson; and women see the folly of them.”

CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA (1898 / 1901) – Shaw complained that Shakespeare’s Caesar says nothing at all that a great man would say. I think that statement is misleading. Shakespeare’s Caesar just doesn’t say as much as Shaw’s does.

Although Caesar is the title role and although his influence permeates Shakespeare’s play, he is actually in it only briefly. All he needs to do in order to appear “great” is to carry the name of a great person, and not say anything really stupid.

Shaw’s Caesar says:

He who has never hoped can never despair. Caesar, in good or bad fortune, looks his fate in the face.

Shakespeare’s Caesar says:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Shakespeare, it seems to me, wins that contest hands down.

The play, of course, is based on historical events. One element of Shaw’s brilliance is that out of those events he chooses the strongest and most interesting for his play. (One would think that’s de rigueur, but it’s not.)

Alan Jay Lerner borrowed the setup of the first act, where Cleopatra meets Caesar in a lonely place without knowing who he is, for the opening scene of the musical Camelot (1960), and it is the strongest scene of that musical.

Most of Caesar and Cleopatra is as entertaining today as it was over a hundred years ago. The only parts that may have dated are some of the gags – continually mispronouncing the name of Cleopatra’s frightening lady-in-waiting Ftatateeta, and characterizing Caesar’s British slave Britannus as the antecedent of a Whitehall gentleman.

Caesar is an early Shaw portrait of what he will come to call the Superman – the person who has grown past our everyday world and lives above it. Caesar is much more complex than that brief description makes it sound, but he’s a start. Caesar, Shaw says, is “simply doing what he naturally wants to do.”

CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND’S CONVERSION (1899 / 1900) – This delightful play is not often performed, perhaps because the lead role, Lady Cicely Waynflete, requires a particular type of actress to play it. I saw Ingrid Bergman in the part in a short-lived Broadway production in 1972. Ms. Bergman was lovely but entirely wrong for the part. She was all too genuine (and the rest of the production was much too unfocused).

Lady Cicely is one of Shaw’s best representations of a woman who both fascinates and frustrates: she cheerfully agrees with men on everything, while knowing that everything they say is foolishness and acting accordingly. She is maddening; but she is wonderful, and extremely funny.

“The Admirable Bashville, or, Constancy Rewarded” (1901 / 1902) was based on a novel, one of five that Shaw wrote, called Cashel Byron’s Profession, Byron’s profession being boxing. All five novels were financial failures – until Cashel Byron began to sell in the United States, causing Shaw to fear that he would lose his copyright.

He wrote “The Admirable Bashville” in a week to preserve his rights. It has an old-fashioned romantic plot, and no lesson about society’s faults to teach.

And Shaw wrote it in blank verse – because that was easier than prose, he says. As with “Cymbeline Refinished” (part 5 of this series), I don’t feel that the verse has much relation to poetry. But it keeps on coming in waves, and after a while it begins to create a kind of manic charm.

[The next section of “Re-Reading Shaw” covers the plays written between 1901 and 1909.  I hope you’ll come back to ROT in about two weeks to read the second part of Kirk’s series.]