Critical Comment: Shaw enough
The autumn brochures are tumbling in. And already there is bags to look forward to. O’Neill at the Old Vic with Eve Best and Kevin Spacey. Ben Jonson and Tony Kushner at the National. Mamet and Ibsen at the Donmar. New plays by Terry Johnson and Caryl Churchill at the Royal Court. Spamalot and Cabaret in the West End. Outside London there’s also plenty to whet the appetite. Hare and Brenton’s Pravda in Chichester. Kneehigh and Cardboard Citizens doing Shakespeare in Stratford. Webster in Leeds and Pinter in Sheffield, Nottingham and Bristol.
One name, however, is almost entirely missing from the autumn lists: George Bernard Shaw. Almost alone in the British theatre, Sam Walters at the Orange Tree in Richmond is marking the 150th anniversary of Shaw’s birth by staging Major Barbara and a season of two triple-bills. Elsewhere, however, there is silence, as if Shaw had never been. Even if I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the British theatre seems to me insane in ignoring one of the few geniuses it ever harboured in its midst.
We all know the arguments against Shaw. That his characters are mouthpieces for his ideas. That he is thunderingly didactic. That he is all intellect and no emotion. But these stock responses fall by the wayside when you actually encounter the plays. One recent Sunday I happened to catch an excellent Mrs Warren’s Profession on Radio Three. The final scene, in which the brothel-managing Mrs Warren pleads for her daughter’s love, is as heart-stopping as anything you could wish. And, even if there is something cold-hearted about Vivie’s rejection of her mother, Shaw - who was writing out of bitter personal experience - makes you aware of the sense of loss.
That scene was superbly played on radio. And it suggests another reason why Shaw should be revived: he wrote great parts for actors. Is there a better role for a woman in the 20th century than Saint Joan? Once upon a time every actress of ambition wanted to play it and I count myself lucky to have seen some of its greatest interpreters. There was Siobhan McKenna who brought to it her brave Connemara twang. Joan Plowright who made Joan seem a defiant native of Scunthorpe. And Barbara Jefford who invested the role with a faint West Country burr. But it’s not just the accents I remember. All these performers found in Joan a mixture of the earthy and the visionary that defined their future careers. I feel sorry for today’s young actresses who are denied forever the chance to measure themselves against the maid.
The men too are missing out. Alex Jennings, having played Higgins in My Fair Lady, should at some stage play the same role in Pygmalion; and, if I hear one more person tell me the musical has killed off Shaw’s infinitely more complex play, I’ll scream.
Imagine too the possibilities of Mark Rylance as Dubedat and Simon Russell Beale as Sir Colenso Ridgeon in The Doctor’s Dilemma. Having seen David Warner play Undershaft in Major Barbara in New York, I yearn to see him to do it again here. Warner unforgettably uncovered something crucial: that the key to Undershaft lies not in his justification of munitions but in his love for his daughter.
But perhaps the best reason for doing Shaw is that he embraces all of modern drama. Saint Joan is not just as good as The Life of Galileo - it’s even better in that Shaw, unlike Brecht, gives equal intellectual weight to his protagonist and her persecutors. The Fatal Gazogene, which starts with a clock striking 16 and ends with a character eating a piece of the ceiling, takes us into the realm of Ionesco, Monty Python and the Goons. Irving Wardle hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that Too True to Be Good anticipates Beckett in showing characters “trying to hold the cosmic silence at bay with a compulsive flood of words”.
Given all this, it’s odd that Shaw arouses such animosity. My friend Paul Taylor of the Independent began a recent review by saying that, in sparing us Shaw at the National, Nicholas Hytner showed “not only that he has exquisite taste but that he’s a great and unsung humanitarian”; and I’m sure Paul speaks for a large number. I ask only one question: is our theatre so rich in talent that it can afford to jettison Shaw’s Mozartian word-music, his paradoxical wit and his liberating spirit? And, although it’s currently fashionable to praise Granville Barker at the expense of Shaw, isn’t there something just the tiniest bit dry and desiccated about the former?
At the moment, I know it’s heretical to stand up for the old Dublin chatterbox but I, and the 12 other people in Britain who believe in Shaw, will carry on the fight to the death. After all, as Shaw himself said, “All great truths begin as blasphemies.”
