Plays Pleasant Read online

  As Europe discovered to its surprise in August 1914, the Balkans were no laughing matter. Little in English literature had prepared the citizens of London for the Zeppelin raids. No one had imagined the sound in Kent of guns in France. Shaw attends to these matters in perhaps his greatest play, Heartbreak House (first produced in New York in 1920). Saint Joan (1923) delves into the history of Anglo-French relations; it explores the mystery of faith in a new century of barbarous idolatry. But the essentials go back to the 1898 two-volume set and, more particularly, to the pleasant plays.

  That is to speak of Shaw’s success, Shaw’s greatness. We still have to live with the laughter, inquire into its origins and signification. To do so may involve taking the religion of Candida seriously rather than its politics. Dismissive of creeds and particularities, Shaw was not the ecumenical atheist he sometimes played. His religious instincts lay in the deep soil of protestant dissent, the religion of Milton and Blake. Like Joyce, he adopted the Satanic motto, Non Serviam (I will not serve). A certain heartlessness in the adult Shaw is protective and elusive; we can study its twin more readily in young Stephen Dedalus’s refusal to pray for his mother. And the laughter which breaks out in the Shavian Balkans is heard again in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and (more disturbingly still) in Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus (1947).

  To be ready for the new century was one of Shaw’s strengths in the eyes of the late Victorian theatregoer. No more fustian instead of courage, no more limpidity paraded as good manners. As with Freud’s revelations, Shavian form and dialogue were appreciated while also being secretly feared. The stage-set became a consulting room where only the analysts spoke, but only spoke the anxieties of absent patients. If this was a virtue in 1897 it carried its own virus, an affinity with the terrors to come – dictatorship, sadistic cruelty, war, the Balkan atrocities of the 1990s. We revel in the early plays, we admire Major Barbara (1905), we sit in awe of Heartbreak House and Saint Joan, we applaud the award of the Nobel Prize (1925). One reason for our loud commendations lies in the certainty that we must dislike what comes next.

  As for the later Shaw, it is best that we keep thinking. His foresight did not equal the self-questioning which suddenly illuminates the little general at Tavazzano in the pleasant play of 1897 – the year of Dracula and its pre-emptive assault on modernity. The new men of destiny were no longer to be actors, but sorcerers and directors of crowd scenes. Millions died between Fanny’s First Play (1914) and Great Catherine (1919). The rise of Hitler and Stalin posed challenges to wit, which wit could not answer. Nevertheless, unwittingly and modestly Shaw’s fortunes prospered under the Reich, at least to the extent that his Geneva (1938) with its lampoon of Hitler was kept on the German stage at Goebbels’ express desire. Only one play was banned, a pleasant one: Arms and the Man went too far even for an indulgent dictator.

  Shaw died in November 1950, having fallen out of a hedge at the age of ninety-four. The post-war fate of well-made plays was not proving to be happy. It was his fellow-Dubliner, Samuel Beckett, who found the alternative with, first, Waiting for Godot (in French 1952), and more devastatingly, Endgame (1957). The latter succeeded in conveying the impact of comprehensive terror – including the threat of a nuclear holocaust – on western civilization. Shaw’s example, however, was not entirely ignored. In America, Arthur Miller’s courageous exploration of private and public bad faith from All My Sons (1947) to The Crucible (1953) would have been impossible without the precedents of Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. Thus, for a new millennium of comprehensive bad faith in international affairs, Shaw may have lessons to teach, however obliquely. As the old Victorian-Edwardian trouble-spots erupt again and again – Afghanistan, the Balkans, and ‘Mesopotamia’ – we look back in anguish. Shavian laughter demands we keep our wits about us. No less so than Wilde’s, his pleasant drama had been an art of provocation.

  W. J. Mc Cormack

  Tyrone Guthrie Centre

  County Monaghan

  December 2002

  CHRONOLOGY OF THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BERNARD SHAW

  LIFE

  1856 Born in Dublin on 26 July

  1871 After only short periods of schooling, started work as an office boy in a Dublin firm of land agents

  1873 Mother and sisters moved to London

  1876 Joined mother in London; she taught singing and his sister Lucy sang professionally in musical plays

  1879 While working for the Edison Telephone Company began to meet the earliest British socialists, including, in 1880, Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter (later Mrs Webb) who became lifelong friends

  1879–81 Wrote five novels, four published serially in magazines

  1884 Joined the Fabian Society, which advocated gradual progress towards socialism, and began giving lectures both to the Fabians and on their behalf. At about the same time, met the hugely influential theatre critic William Archer who helped Shaw to find work as a critic. First meeting with William Morris whose disciple he became

  1885 Appointed as a book reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and music critic for the new Dramatic Review

  1886–9 Art critic for The World

  1888–90 Music critic for The Star (under the pseudonym ‘Corno di Bassetto’)

  1889 Attended English première of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

  1890–94 Music critic for The World (writing as GBS)

  1891 Published The Quintessence of Ibsenism

  1892 Widowers’ Houses (his first published play) given a private performance by the Independent Theatre in London

  1894 Arms and the Man produced at the Avenue Theatre in London; then by actor–manager Richard Mansfield in New York

  1895–8 Drama critic for The Saturday Review

  1897 Encouraged by the success of The Devil’s Disciple in New York, gave up most of his work as a critic

  1897–1903 Elected borough councillor for the London borough of St Pancras

  1898 Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant published. Married Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Began concentrating on his writing as playwright and essayist

  1899 The newly founded Stage Society produced You Never Can Tell, followed by Candida and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion in 1900

  1904–7 Granville Barker and Vedrenne take over the (Royal) Court Theatre in a challenge to the commercial West End theatre system. Eleven Shaw plays produced at the Court including the newly written Man and Superman, John Bull’s Other Island, Major Barbara and The Doctor’s Dilemma

  1905 Bought a country home at Ayot St Lawrence, approximately 25 miles north of London (retaining an apartment in Adelphi Terrace, off the Strand)

  1910 Misalliance produced at the Duke of York’s Theatre

  1913 Androcles and the Lion at St James’s Theatre. World première of Pygmalion in Vienna (in German), followed by a production in Berlin

  1914 Pygmalion produced by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, at His Majesty’s Theatre. Common Sense about the War published

  1920 Heartbreak House produced at the Royal Court. Completed Back to Methuselah, a five-part cycle of plays, transforming the biblical version of creation and human destiny into post-Darwinian science fiction

  1924 Saint Joan produced at the New Theatre

  1925 Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. First English public performance of Mrs Wanen’s Profession (banned by the censor since 1898)

  1928 Published The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism

  1929 The Apple Cart, produced at the first Malvern Festival, organized by Barry Jackson’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre with Shaw as its figurehead

  1931 Visited Moscow, and met Stanislavski, Gorki and Stalin

  1932 Too True to be Good produced at Malvern. Published fable of The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God following a visit to South Africa

  1933 Travelled to India, Hong Kong, China, Japan and the USA

  1936 Celebrated 80th birthday. Gave up driving

  1938 Awarded Oscar for the best screenplay for Gabriel Pascal’s
film of Pygmalion. Geneva (featuring caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini called before the International Court of Justice at the Hague) transferred from Malvern to Saville Theatre, and then to St James’s Theatre

  1939 Ceremonially presented with the deeds of a site (in South Kensington) for the National Theatre of Great Britain

  1943 Death of Charlotte Shaw

  1944 Published Everybody’s Political What’s What?, an instant bestseller

  1946 On his 90th birthday, honoured with the freedom of both Dublin and the borough of St Pancras

  1950 Died on 2 November

  1955 Alan J. Lerner based the book and lyrics of the musical My Fair Lady closely on Pygmalion

  TIMES

  1856 End of the Crimean War. Sigmund Freud born

  1859 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Spcecies published.

  Construction of the Suez canal started

  1861–5 American Civil War

  1866 The Fenians, Irish Republicans, opposed the English occupation of Ireland

  1867 Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ published

  1870 Education Act made primary schooling compulsory in England and Wales

  1871 Year of political change in Europe: Italy and Germany both unified

  1883 Death of Marx. The left-wing Fabian Society founded

  1886 Home Rule for Ireland first proposed by Gladstone’s Liberal government; the Conservative Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister

  1887 Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee

  1892 Keir Hardie elected as first Independent Socialist Member of Parliament

  1895 Oscar Wilde imprisoned for homosexual offences. Lumière brothers patented cinematograph

  1897 Irish Literary Theatre founded by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn

  1899–1902 Anglo-Boer War in South Africa

  1901 Death of Queen Victoria, accession of Edward VII

  1907 Rudyard Kipling the first British winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

  1911 Members of Parliament paid a salary for the first time.

  Women’s Freedom League founded

  1914–18 First World War

  1916 Easter Rising by Irish Nationalists in Dublin

  1920 League of Nations created. Government of Ireland Act, partitioning Ireland

  1922 Continuing civil war in Ireland

  1924 First Labour government in Britain, under Ramsay Macdonald; replaced by the Conservative Unionists, under Stanley Baldwin. Death of Lenin

  1920 Women over twenty-one in the United Kingdom given the vote.

  1929 New York Stock Exchange crash led to world economic depression. Election of second Labour minority government in Britain (which became a multi-party national government in 1931)

  1933 Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany

  1939–45 Second World War

  1945 Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, won the election, replacing the wartime leader Winston Churchill

  1946 First meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations

  1948 British National Health Service founded

  PREFACE

  (1898)

  READERS of the discourse with which the ‘Unpleasant’ volume commences will remember that I turned my hand to play-writing when a great deal of talk about ‘the New Drama’, followed by the actual establishment of a ‘New Theatre’ (the Independent), threatened to end in the humiliating discovery that the New Drama, in England at least, was a figment of the revolutionary imagination. This was not to be endured. I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse I manufactured the evidence.

  Man is a creature of habit. You cannot write three plays and then stop. Besides, the New movement did not stop. In 1894, Florence Farr, who had already produced Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, was placed in command of the Avenue Theatre in London for a season on the new lines by Miss A. E. F. Horniman, who had family reasons for not yet appearing openly as a pioneer-manageress. There were, as available New Dramatists, myself, discovered by the Independent Theatre (at my own suggestion); Dr John Todhunter, who had been discovered before (his play The Black Cat had been one of the Independent’s successes); and Mr W. B. Yeats, a genuine discovery. Dr Todhunter supplied A Comedy of Sighs: Mr Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire. I, having nothing but unpleasant plays in my desk, hastily completed a first attempt at a pleasant one, and called it Arms and The Man, taking the title from the first line of Dryden’s Virgil. It passed for a success, the applause on the first night being as promising as could be wished; and it ran from the 21st of April to the 7th of July. To witness it the public paid £1777:5:6, an average of £23:2:5 per representation (including nine matinées). A publisher receiving £ 1700 for a book would have made a satisfactory profit: experts in West End theatrical management will contemplate that figure with a grim smile.

  In the autumn of 1894 I spent a few weeks in Florence, where I occupied myself with the religious art of the Middle Ages and its destruction by the Renascence. From a former visit to Italy on the same business I had hurried back to Birmingham to discharge my duties as musical critic at the Festival there. On that occasion a very remarkable collection of the works of our British ‘pre-Raphaelite’ painters was on view. I looked at these, and then went into the Birmingham churches to see the windows of William Morris and Burne-Jones. On the whole, Birmingham was more hopeful than the Italian cities; for the art it had to shew me was the work of living men, whereas modern Italy had, as far as I could see, no more connection with Giotto than Port Said has with Ptolemy. Now I am no believer in the worth of any mere taste for art that cannot produce what it professes to appreciate. When my subsequent visit to Italy found me practising the playwright’s craft, the time was ripe for a modern pre-Raphaelite play. Religion was alive again, coming back upon men, even upon clergymen, with such power that not the Church of England itself could keep it out. Here my activity as a Socialist had placed me on sure and familiar ground. To me the members of the Guild of St Matthew were no more ‘High Church clergymen’, Dr Clifford no more ‘an eminent Nonconformist divine’, than I was to them ‘an infidel’. There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it. We all had the same thing to say; and though some of us cleared our throats to say it by singing revolutionary lyrics and republican hymns, we thought nothing of singing them to the music of Sullivan’s Onward Christian Soldiers or Haydn’s God Preserve the Emperor.

  Now unity, however desirable in political agitations, is fatal to drama; for every drama must present a conflict. The end may be reconciliation or destruction; or, as in life itself, there may be no end; but the conflict is indispensable: no conflict, no drama. Certainly it is easy to dramatize the prosaic conflict of Christian Socialism with vulgar Unsocialism: for instance, in Widowers’ Houses, the clergyman, who does not appear on the stage at all, is the real antagonist of the slum landlord. But the obvious conflicts of unmistakable good with unmistakable evil can only supply the crude drama of villain and hero, in which some absolute point of view is taken, and the dissentients are treated by the dramatist as enemies to be piously glorified or indignantly vilified. In such cheap wares I do not deal. Even in my unpleasant propagandist plays I have allowed every person his or her own point of view, and have, I hope, to the full extent of my understanding of him, been as sympathetic with Sir George Crofts as with any of the more genial and popular characters in the present volume. To distil the quintessential drama from pre-Raphaelitism, medieval or modern, it must be shewn at its best in conflict with the first broken, nervous, stumbling attempts to formulate its own revolt against itself as it develops into something higher. A coherent explanation of any such revolt, addressed intelligibly and prosaically to the intellect, can only come when the work is done, and indeed done with: that is to say, when the development, accomplished, admitted, and assimilated, is a story of yesterday. Long before any such understanding can be reached, the eyes of men begin to turn towards the distant light of the new
age. Discernible at first only by the eyes of the man of genius, it must be focussed by him on the speculum of a work of art, and flashed back from that into the eyes of the common man. Nay, the artist himself has no other way of making himself conscious of the ray: it is by a blind instinct that he keeps on building up his masterpieces until their pinnacles catch the glint of the unrisen sun. Ask him to explain himself prosaically, and you find that he ‘writes like an angel and talks like poor Ροll’, and is himself the first to make that epigram at his own expense. John Ruskin has told us clearly enough what is in the pictures of Carpaccio and Bellini: let him explain, if he can, where we shall be when the sun that is caught by the summits of the work of his favorite Tintoretto, of his aversion Rembrandt, of Mozart, of Beethoven and Wagner, of Blake and of Shelley, shall have reached the valleys. Let Ibsen explain, if he can, why the building of churches and happy homes is not the ultimate destiny of Man, and why, to thrill the unsatisfied younger generations, he must mount beyond it to heights that now seem unspeakably giddy and dreadful to him, and from which the first climbers must fall and dash themselves to pieces. He cannot explain it: he can only shew it to you as a vision in the magic glass of his artwork; so that you may catch his presentiment and make what you can of it. And this is the function that raises dramatic art above imposture and pleasure hunting, and enables the playwright to be something more than a skilled liar and pandar.

  Here, then, was the higher but vaguer and timider vision, the incoherent, mischievous, and even ridiculous unpracticalness, which offered me a dramatic antagonist for the clear, bold, sure, sensible, benevolent, salutarily shortsighted Christian Socialist idealism. I availed myself of it in Candida, the drunken scene in which has been much appreciated, I am told, in Aberdeen. I purposely contrived the play in such a way as to make the expenses of representation insignificant; so that, without pretending that I could appeal to a very wide circle of playgoers, I could reasonably sound a few of our more enlightened managers as to an experiment with half a dozen afternoon performances. They admired the play generously; indeed, I think that if any of them had been young enough to play the poet, my proposal might have been acceded to, in spite of many incidental difficulties. Nay, if only I had made the poet a cripple, or at least blind, so as to combine an easier disguise with a larger claim for sympathy, something might have been done. Richard Mansfield, who had, with apparent ease, made me quite famous in America by his productions of my plays, went so far as to put the play actually into rehearsal before he would confess himself beaten by the physical difficulties of the part. But they did beat him; and Candida did not see the footlights until my old ally the Independent Theatre, making a propagandist tour through the provinces with A Doll’s House, added Candida to its repertory, to the great astonishment of its audiences.