A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre

by Christopher Innes (ed)

  Sir Edward could not see it. […] Instead, he persuaded us all that he was under no obligation whatever to fight. He persuaded Germany that he had not the slightest serious intention of fighting. Sir Owen Seaman wrote in Punch an amusing and witty No-Intervention poem. Sporting Liberals offered any odds that there would be no war for England. And Germany, confident that with Austria’s help she could break France with one hand and Russia with the other if England held aloof, let Austria throw the match into the magazine.

  […]

  Nobody cared twopence about treaties: indeed, it was not for us, who had seen the treaty of Berlin torn up by the brazen seizure of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria in 1909, and taken that lying down, as Russia did, to talk about the sacredness of treaties, even if the waste-paper baskets of the Foreign Offices were not full of torn up “scraps of paper” […] The man in the street understood little or nothing about Servia or Russia or any of the cards with which the diplomatists were playing their perpetual game of Beggar my Neighbor. We were rasped beyond endurance by Prussian Militarism and its contempt for us and for human happiness and common sense; and we just rose at it and went for it. We have set out to smash the Kaiser exactly as we set out to smash the Mahdi. Mr Wells never mentioned a treaty. He said, in effect “There stands the monster all freedom-loving men hate; and at last we are going to fight it.” And the public, bored by the diplomatists, said: “Now you’re talking!”

  […]

  [L]et us have no more nonsense about the Prussian Wolf and the British Lamb, the Prussian Machiavelli and the English Evangelist. We cannot shout for years that we are boys of the bulldog breed, and then suddenly pose as gazelles. No. When Europe and America come to settle the treaty that will end this business (for America is concerned in it as much as we are) they will not deal with us as the lovable and innocent victims of a treacherous tyrant and a savage soldiery. They will have to consider how these two incorrigibly pugnacious and inveterately snobbish peoples, who have snarled at one another for forty years with bristling hair and grinning fangs, and are now rolling over with their teeth in one another’s throats, are to be tamed into trusty watchdogs of the peace of the world. I am sorry to spoil the saintly image with a halo which the British Jingo journalist sees just now when he looks in the glass; but it must be done if we are to behave reasonably in the imminent day of reckoning.

  6.1.6 Bernard Shaw, Letter to Siegfried Trebitsch

  15 September 1920

  Haus Herzenstock should be Haus Herzzereissen. Heartbreak is a chronic complaint, not a sudden shock. But I doubt whether there exists any German equivalent for heartbreak. A disappointment in love is called a broken heart. Carlyle said that Free Trade was “heartbreaking nonsense”; and there are lots of gradations between these extremes; but usually the word implies deep pathos in the affliction it describes […]

  Concerning my sister … what killed her was the war: her tuberculosis had stopped. But there was an aircraft gun quite close to her house on the southern heights, and during the air raids this gun shook and shattered everything near it. All the other guns were going too, varied by the crash of the bombs. I don’t know whether you had this experience in Vienna; but London had a great deal of it; and it was very unpleasant, and got worse as it went on. At first people were excited and curious; but when that passed, and they saw what the bombs could do to them, there was nothing but sheer funk. I was not a bit frightened at Ypres or Arras; but in London, though I was too lazy to get out of bed and take refuge in an underground shelter, and dropped off to sleep between each burst of firing, my heart tightened in the most disagreeable manner in spite of all arguments as to the uselessness of bothering about it. Well, Lucy had to leave London; but it was too late: she could not eat and died of slow starvation. And – here is a dramatic contrast which I exploited in the funeral oration – whilst the German aces were doing their best to kill her she was kept alive by the devotion of her German nurse.

  2 SHAW’S NATURALISTIC DRAMA

  Shaw’s dramatic output was eclectic from the first. It included a number of plays inverting or parodying theatrical stereotypes – such as military melodrama (Arms and the Man), romantic melodrama (The Devil’s Disciple) and historical romance (Caesar and Cleopatra) – which retained elements of the conventional forms they targeted. A long dream sequence forms the centre of Man and Superman. Even some of his plays reflecting contemporary English life verged on farce, such as The Philanderer; A Topical Comedy of the Early Eighteen-Nineties (1898). But his first play, Widowers’ Houses, was clearly recognized as naturalistic when it was performed in 1892, however idiosyncratic the technique. Shaw would have argued that his attacks on melodrama were also thematically realistic, and that his “Discussion Plays” in the first decade of the twentieth century were following Ibsen’s substitution of discussion for the climax of the Well Made Play.

  Commenting on the action of Widowers’ Houses, one reviewer notes the uniquely Shavian quality of its naturalistic social critique: “Mr. Shaw has pulled out all his stops and shows modern middle-class society working as he conceives it in full blast. Now to reverse the process and to wind up the tune with an ironic note which is all his own …” This early and remarkably sympathetic review of Widowers’ Houses illustrates something of the interest Shaw’s work inspired.

  6.2.1 The Illustrated London News, 17 December 1892

  The production of Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play, “Widowers’ Houses,” is a dramatic event of very considerable significance. The vital quality of the play is its freshness of type. It is neither tragedy nor melodrama, nor comedy nor burlesque. Mr. Shaw chooses to call it a didactic play, and it is this and something more. It is a study of modern life, purely ironical in conception, and almost completely realistic in workmanship. What Mr. Shaw has endeavoured to do has been to set society before us not merely in its surface aspect of love-making, intriguing, dinner-giving and eating, but in what he conceives to be the more vital light of the “cash nexus.” He exhibits the modern lover, the modern father, the modern friend, the modern young lady as he believes them to be conditioned by the way in which they make their money and spend it. He gives us love-making without romance, friendship without sincerity, landlordism without pity, life as it is lived in the upper middle-class without charm. Now, it is quite allowable for his hearers to quarrel with this conception, to say it is unnatural, overstrained, false to the facts. But I cannot conceive how it can be regarded as improper material for a play. All Mr. Shaw is bound to do is to make his characters plausible, to give validity to their motives and consistency to his conception of their mutual relations. In a word, Mr. Shaw has put before us the Socialist criticism of life, and that may be quite as interesting, even supposing it is not quite as true, as the individualist or the merely conventional view. The English stage can be none the worse for a sincere attempt to exhibit life as the dramatist really believes it is being lived in London to-day […]

  This is Mr. Shaw’s play. Its moral is obvious, its didactic purpose is revealed from the raising of the curtain to its fall, its irony is at times a trifle too fine for its purpose and the shafts fly over the heads of the audience. But the reproach of slovenly construction or essentially uninteresting character does not lie against it. It reverses the conventional ending, the conventional set of characters, the conventional stage types; nevertheless it has a convincing method of its own. Its characters are drawn with perfect clearness, and in the case of the girl with specially minute, if a trifle malicious, art. And it gives the experiment of the Independent Theatre a new basis of original effort which one may very well hope to see developed.

  However, like almost all Shaw’s early plays with the exception of Arms and the Man, it had been several years between the writing of Widowers’ Houses and the play’s first public production – at Manchester in 1907. That was a private performance, staged at a theatre club, the Independent Theatre Society, which was exempt from censorship. This was the case for four out of the twelve plays Shaw wr
ote up to 1904. For seven of Shaw’s other early plays there was a single copyright performance – the only method of protecting the authorship of a play – and there was an average of almost six years between the club or copyright performances and the first public productions. Shaw was forced to rely on publication of the script to gain an audience for his plays, the most extreme example being Mrs Warren’s Profession. Written in 1893–4, even its first club performance was delayed by the “immoral” subject matter until 1902; and although it was produced (and banned) at public theatres in America in 1905, it was not until 1925 that it could be staged publicly in England.

  The challenge to accepted conventions and ideals, which initially barred Shaw’s plays from public performance, also affected other naturalistic dramatists. As Shaw pointed out in introducing the translation of Eugène Brieux to English readers, it was partly the rejection of standard theatrical formulas that explains “the refusal of the critics of all nations to accept great original dramatists like Ibsen and Brieux as real dramatists, or their plays as real plays”. Shaw was closer to Brieux’s explicitly didactic work than to Ibsen, whom he claimed as his model. He subtitled Widowers’ Houses a “Didactic Realist Play”, and his preface to Three Plays by Brieux provides essential insights into his own approach:

  6.2.2 Shaw: Three Plays by Brieux, 1911

  The man you see stepping into a chemist’s shop to buy the means of committing murder or suicide, may, for all you know, want nothing but a liver pill or a toothbrush. The statesman who has no other object than to make you vote for his party at the next election, may be starting you on an incline at the foot of which lies war, or revolution, or a smallpox epidemic or five years off your lifetime. The horrible murder of a whole family by the father who finishes by killing himself, or the driving of a young girl on to the streets, may be the result of your discharging an employee in a fit of temper a month before. To attempt to understand life from merely looking on at it as it happens in the streets is as hopeless as trying to understand public questions by studying snapshots of public demonstrations. […] Life as it occurs is senseless: a policeman may watch it and work in it for thirty years in the streets and courts of Paris without learning as much of it or from it as a child or a nun may learn from a single play by Brieux. For it is the business of Brieux to pick out the significant incidents from the chaos of daily happenings, and arrange them so that their relation to one another becomes significant, thus changing us from bewildered spectators of a monstrous confusion to men intelligently conscious of the world and its destinies. […]

  Now if the critics are wrong in supposing that the formula of the well made play is not only an indispensable factor in playwriting, but is actually the essence of the play itself—if their delusion is rebuked and confuted by the practice of every great dramatist, even when he is only amusing himself by story telling, what must happen to their poor formula when it impertinently offers its services to a playwright who has taken on his supreme function as the Interpreter of Life? Not only has he no use for it, but he must attack and destroy it; for one of the very first lessons he has to teach to a play-ridden public is that the romantic conventions on which the formula proceeds are all false, and are doing incalculable harm in these days when everybody reads romances and goes to the theatre. Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audiences until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court. The cure is not a popular one. […] But the hatred provoked by deliberately inflicted pain, the frantic denials as of a prisoner at the bar accused of a disgraceful crime, the clamor for vengeance thinly disguised as artistic justice, the suspicion that the dramatist is using private information and making a personal attack: all these are to be found only when the playwright is no mere marchand de plaisir, but, like Brieux, a ruthless revealer of hidden truth and a mighty destroyer of idols.

  *

  Just after he had completed Mrs Warren’s Profession, when he himself was still active as a drama reviewer, Shaw mounted an attack on dramatic criticism which helps to position his plays in the naturalistic movement. Again – his consistent theme – Shaw distinguishes between life and its theatrical simacrulum; and the article defines Shaw’s view of his dramatic mission at this period in his career. It also emphasizes the orientation to a more hopeful (optimistic) future that underlies even Chekhov’s depictions of a decaying society.

  6.2.3 The New Review, July 1894

  I am, among other things, a dramatist; but I am not an original one, and so have to take all my dramatic material either from real life at first hand, or from authentic documents. The more usual course is to take it out of other dramas, in which case, on tracing it back from one drama to another, you finally come to its origin in the inventive imagination of some original dramatist. Now a fact as invented by a dramatist differs widely from the fact of the same name as it exists or occurs objectively in real life. Not only stage pumps and tubs, but (much more) stage morality and stage human nature differ from the realities of these things. Consequently to a man who derives all his knowledge of life from witnessing plays, nothing appears more unreal than objective life. A dramatic critic is generally such a man; and the more exactly I reproduce objective life for him on the stage, the more certain he is to call my play an extravaganza.

  […]

  We have, then, two sorts of life to deal with: one subjective or stagey, the other objective or real. What are the comparative advantages of the two for the purposes of the dramatist? Stage life is artificially simple and well understood by the masses; but it is very stale; its feeling is conventional; it is totally unsuggestive of thought because all its conclusions are foregone; and it is constantly in conflict with the real knowledge which the separate members of the audience derive from their own daily occupations. For instance, a naval or military melodrama only goes down with civilians. Real life, on the other hand, is so ill understood, even by its clearest observers, that no sort of consistency is discoverable in it; there is no “natural justice” corresponding to that simple and pleasant concept, “poetic justice”; and, as a whole, it is unthinkable. But, on the other hand, it is credible, stimulating, suggestive, various, free from creeds and systems – in short, it is real.

  This rough contrast will suffice to show that the two sorts of life, each presenting dramatic potentialities to the author, will, when reproduced on the stage, affect different men differently. The stage world is for the people who cannot bear to look facts in the face, because they dare not be pessimists, and yet cannot see real life otherwise than as the pessimist sees it. It might be supposed that those who conceive all the operations of our bodies as repulsive, and of our minds as sinful, would take refuge in the sects which abstain from playgoing on principle. But this is by no means what happens. If such a man has an artistic or romantic turn, he takes refuge, not in the conventicle, but in the theatre, where, in the contemplation of the idealised, or stage life, he finds some relief from his haunting conviction of omnipresent foulness and baseness. Confront him with anything like reality, and his chronic pain is aggravated instead of relieved: he raises a terrible outcry against the spectacle of cowardice, selfishness, faithlessness, sensuality – in short, everything that he went to the theatre to escape from. This is not the effect on those pessimists who dare face facts and profess their own faith. They are great admirers of the realist playwright, whom they embarrass greatly by their applause. Their cry is “Quite right: strip off the whitewash from the sepulchre; expose human nature in all its tragi-comic baseness; tear the mask of respectability from the smug bourgeois, and show the liar, the thief, the coward, the libertine beneath.”

  Now to me, as a realist playwright, the applause of the conscious, hardy pessimist is more exasperating
than the abuse of the unconscious, fearful one. I am not a pessimist at all. It does not concern me that, according to certain ethical systems, all human beings fall into classes labelled liar, coward, thief, and so on. […] As a realist dramatist, […] it is my business to get outside these systems.