Critical Comment for Oct 05
Do you want to start an argument? Just mention George Bernard Shaw. Nearly 30 years ago, I suggested in the Guardian that we should have a Shaw Festival in Britain like the one in Niagara-on-the-Lake. The result was a correspondence that raged for several weeks. And only the other day I commented on our theatre’s current staggering indifference to Shaw. Again the letters and emails flooded in. Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
What is sadly true is that most theatrical producers – with the honourable exceptions of Peter Hall, Sam Walters and Dominic Dromgoole – would rather commit hara-kiri than put on a play by Bernard Shaw. They consider him dated, sexless, talky: the laureate of logorrhoea. Their case was best put by Peter Nichols’ over-acting captain, Terri Dennis, in Privates on Parade: “Oh that Bernadette Shaw! What a chatterbox! Nags away from asshole to breakfast-time but never sees what’s staring her in the face.”
It wasn’t always thus. I was lucky enough to be an undergraduate when Frank Hauser mounted some stunning Shaw revivals at Oxford Playhouse. (It was Hauser who, when asked by some smart-ass student whether Shaw was coming back, crisply replied “I didn’t know he’d been away”.) The late Peter Bridge also staged a whole series of star-packed Shaw revivals in the West End of the Sixties and Seventies. And Bernard Miles at the Mermaid treated us to a host of minor Shaws including Fanny’s First Play, Village Wooing and O’Flaherty VC in which Ian McKellen dazzled as an Irish soldier who’d unforgivably fought with the English on the Western front.
Now we get next to nothing. Shaw is cold-shouldered by the West End, the National, the RSC, the Royal Court (where, ironically enough, he began) and the bulk of regional companies. But, although even Shaw’s admirers can see the case against him, I think the British theatre has gone collectively mad. As Peter Hall has proved with his summer revivals at the Theatre Royal, Bath, of Man and Superman and You Never Can Tell, Shaw not only has an enduring vitality, he also draws in the customers. It’s not the audiences who have rejected Shaw; it’s the myopic producers who run our key institutions.
What is the case for Shaw? Why should we bother with “the unspeakable Irishman” as Henry James loftily dubbed him? I could offer many reasons, but I’ll narrow it down to three. Firstly, his ability to encompass virtually the whole of modern drama – whatever happened in the 20th century was anticipated by Shaw. He beat Brecht to the line in offering a socialist critique of society (Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession). He was a pioneer of Theatre of the Absurd (Too True to Be Good and Misalliance). He created the elegiac state-of-the-nation drama (Heartbreak House). And, long before McPherson and McDonagh, he satirised Anglo-Irish mutual misunderstanding (John Bull’s Other Island). Maybe he didn’t foresee Theatre of Cruelty, but Shaw was a constant formal experimenter who erected signposts to the future.
Secondly, there is Shaw’s musicality. He was a passionate music-lover and one-time critic who once claimed it was from Mozart’s Don Giovanni that he learned “how to write seriously without being dull.” Auden spotted that this was the key to Shaw’s work; and it is through his musicality that Shaw, contrary to received opinion, works on our emotions. If you doubt me, simply read Peter Keegan’s deeply moving vision of heaven (”In my dreams it is a country where the State is the Church and the Church the people: three in one and one in three”) in the closing moments of John Bull’s Other Island.
But finally I would pick out Shaw’s ability to create living characters. Conventional wisdom says that Shaw’s people are simply mouthpieces for his ideas. But Borges, in a great essay on Shaw, argued that many of his ideas can be found in Schopenhauer or Samuel Butler. Shaw’s real originality, said Borges, lies in his creation of character: “Lavinia, Blanco Posnet, Keegan, Shotover, Richard Dudgeon and, above all, Julius Caesar surpass any character imagined by the art of our time.” That may be an exaggerated claim, but Borges has a point and, when he asserts that Shaw’s work “leaves one with a flavour of liberation”, he speaks the exact truth.
I rest my case. If you think I have a point, why not drop a line to Nicholas Hytner, Nica Burns, Michael Grandage, Bill Kenwright or your local rep supremo? Perhaps they will then concede that the Fabian Figaro – as Auden called him – is still worth reviving and has a vast popular following. He is an artist who can fill theatres thus proving the old adage “there’s no business like Shaw business.”