Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  He then offered up Wells for Fabian entertainment. ‘During his Committee’s deliberations he [Wells] produced a book on America,’ Shaw told his audience. ‘And a very good book too. But whilst I was drafting our reply I produced a play.’ Shaw paused and there was silence. S. G. Hobson in the audience noticed his eyes vacantly glancing round the ceiling. ‘It really seemed that he had lost his train of thought,’ Hobson remembered. ‘When we were all thoroughly uncomfortable, he resumed: “Ladies and gentlemen: I paused there to enable Mr Wells to say: ‘And a very good play too!”’

  Wells had paid the penalty for having attacked the Shavian joke. For it was this joke which seemed to dissolve him into sustained laughter. The chairman took it for granted that the amendment was withdrawn by consent: and Wells made no protest. ‘Keats was snuffed out by an article,’ commented Hobson; ‘Wells was squelched by a joke.’

  ‘No part of my career rankles so acutely in my memory with the conviction of bad judgement, gusty impulse and real inexcusable vanity,’ Wells afterwards admitted. But: ‘I was fundamentally right.’ He had reacted with imaginative enthusiasm to the future; and to the past with splenetic irritation. The present had been turned into theatre, which he had never liked or understood. ‘Now we shall see whether he will forgive G.B.S.,’ commented Beatrice.

  This was not how G.B.S. saw it. He had arranged everything so that Wells could ‘come up smiling’ again among the Fabians. His purpose extended not a frown further. For he recognized that ‘Wells is a great man’. He was a glamorously popular figure, particularly among the women of the new Fabian nursery. ‘Tell the dear man that it is almost impossible to do anything without him,’ Maud Reeves wrote to Wells’s wife. Other Fabians, too, begged him not to desert them. To Shaw it seemed that the worse Wells behaved the more he was indulged.

  No one knew what Wells would do next. The past still rankled: he felt a grievance. It seemed to him that Shaw’s mind had been corrupted by public speaking and destroyed by the committee habit. Nevertheless he told Shaw: ‘you are always sound hearted & I am always, through all our disputes & slanging matches, Yours most affectionately, H.G.’ And Shaw agreed that Wells had played a ‘great game’ with ‘immense vitality and fun’. There was no excuse for quarrelling – yet it seemed inevitable.

  ‘I’m damnably sorry we’re all made so,’ wrote Wells.

  ‘To complain of such things is to complain that the leaves are green and the sky blue,’ wrote Shaw.

  But what good came of it in the end? The issue had been shifted from a comparison of reports and policies to a gladiatorial contest of personalities. To Wells’s frankness, his raging desire to discover the truth, Shaw had opposed something polemically formidable and professionally correct, yet somehow dubious. ‘I incline to the prophecy that five years will see H. G. Wells out of the Society,’ Beatrice Webb wrote. ‘...It will be interesting to watch.’

  3

  A Revolution at the Court

  As a matter of fact, I am overrated as an author: most great men are.

  When the curtain came down on 28 November 1905, it was clear that Major Barbara was to be Shaw’s most controversial success. The critics were impressively divided. Desmond MacCarthy told his readers: ‘Mr Shaw has written the first play with religious passion for its theme and has made it real. That is a triumph no criticisms can lessen.’ But the anonymous critic of the Pall Mall Gazette found that the play betrayed ‘an utter want of the religious sense’ and that its author was ‘destitute of the religious emotion’. In the Sunday Times, while acknowledging G.B.S. to be ‘the most original English dramatist of the day’, J. T. Grein recoiled from Bill Walker’s punching of the down-and-out Rummy Mitchens and his assault on the young Salvation Army lass Jenny Hill; this ‘double act of brutality literally moved the audience to shudders. It was beyond all bounds of realism in art. It was ugly and revolting.’ But Max Beerbohm saw that ‘the actor impersonating the ruffian aimed a noticeably gentle blow in the air, at a noticeably great distance from the face of the actress impersonating the lass’. Critics who professed themselves outraged, Beerbohm concluded, ‘must have been very hard up for a fair means of attack’.

  These critics felt inconvenienced on several counts. The play’s ‘lack of straightforward intelligible purpose’ (Morning Post) made it spectacularly difficult for them to calculate its effect on audiences. Collectively they offered the choice between ‘an audacious propagandist drama’ (Clarion), ‘one of the most remarkable plays put upon the English stage’ (Speaker), a work of ‘deliberate perversity’ (Morning Post) or of the ‘keenest insight and sense of spiritual beauty’ (Saturday Review). There was no consensus as to whether G.B.S. was ‘ephemeral’ (John Galsworthy) or ‘a high genius’ (Oliver Lodge).

  The war that had opened between the two audiences at Henry James’s Guy Domville was now breaking out between critics and the public. Against all odds Shaw had become a fashionable craze. ‘The old order is changing,’ calculated one of the Clarion writers. Shaw’s message to society ‘to cast all its obsolete creeds and moral codes to the scrap heap’ matched the new order.

  Yet Shaw’s career was now being blessed by the guardians of a society he was working to destroy. On the first night of Major Barbara there were almost as many carriages and motor cars outside the Court ‘as there are in the Mall on a Drawing-room day’. Shaw was box office at last. Rupert Brooke, after flying visits to the Court from Rugby and then Cambridge, described John Bull’s Other Island as ‘unspeakably delightful’, Candida ‘the best play in the world’ and Major Barbara ‘highly amusing & interesting, & very brutal’. G.B.S. had been voted ‘one of our leaders in the revolutionary movement of our youth,’ wrote Leonard Woolf. Though Shaw’s dramas did not have the grandeur of Ibsen’s, they were played at the Court Theatre with relentless gusto, like a hurricane sweeping into the alley of Victorian morality and scattering the accumulated litter. Shaw, the champion of free speech and free thought, of paradoxical common sense and the ingenious use of reason, had ‘a message of tremendous importance to us’. Along with Wells and Arnold Bennett, he had become one of the idols of young intellectuals. Many of the young men and women who attended the Court Theatre entered as fin de siècle Bohemians and emerged as twentieth-century radicals. Even A. B. Walkley, the reactionary critic of The Times, was obliged to admit that ‘there is no such all-round acting in London as is nowadays to be seen at the Court theatre’.

  The ensemble playing at the Court handed over the actor-manager’s authority to the dramatist-producer. For over two centuries, from Thomas Betterton to Beerbohm Tree, the history of the British theatre had been the history of great actors. The Court Theatre set up a different standard of merit, bringing the acting and production of plays more in line with that of the contemporary Scandinavian and German stage. It changed the public’s attitude. They went to see the play rather than an actor; and they had confidence in the all-round excellence of the cast.

  Because the actors recognized Barker and Shaw as practical men of the theatre and respected their choice of plays, knowledge of stagecraft and skill at casting, they were willing to work as a team, accepting the smallest parts however successful they had earlier been in major roles. Barker believed that a variety of parts extended an actor’s range, and he believed in repertory as a method of sustaining a school of actors.

  Barker was a more literary and autocratic producer than Shaw. He liked to question his actors over the past history of their characters. ‘You are not, I hope, going to tell me that the fellow drops from the skies, ready-made, at the moment you walk on the stage?’ The biographies he provided became green-room legends. ‘I want when you enter to give the impression of a man who is steeped in the poetry of Tennyson,’ he was reputed to have told Dennis Eadie. For a scene in one of his own plays, he advised an actress that ‘from the moment you come in you must make the audience understand that you live in a small town in the provinces and visit a great deal with the local clergy; you make slippers for the
curate and go to dreary tea-parties.’ Her one line in this scene was: ‘How do you do?’ Though a target for jokes, Barker was introducing a form of Stanislavsky’s method of psychological realism which, he claimed, had been forced on actors by the bare dialogue of Ibsen with so much implicit in it.

  Shaw was more matter-of-fact. If the producer, watching rehearsals, noted ‘Show influence of Kierkegaard on Ibsen in this scene’ or ‘the Oedipus complex must be very apparent here. Discuss with the Queen’, then ‘the sooner he is packed out of the theatre the better’. If he noted ‘Ears too red’, ‘Further up to make room for X’, ‘He, not Ee’, ‘This comes too suddenly’, then, Shaw concluded, ‘the producer knows his job and his place’.

  Shaw would read his plays, first to friends, then to the company. Before the first rehearsal, he worked out on a chessboard with chessmen and a boy’s box of assorted bricks, every entry, movement, rising or sitting, disposal of tambourine and tennis racket. The first rehearsals at the Court were always choreographic, the actors having their books in hand and the producer on the bare stage with them (the exits marked by a couple of chairs) teaching them their movements. Once these had been mastered, the words learned, and the actors made comfortable with what was going on, the books were discarded and the producer would leave the stage to sit front of house with a notebook and torch. ‘From that moment, he should watch the stage as a cat watches a mouse,’ Shaw advised, ‘but never utter a word or interrupt a scene during its repetition no matter how completely the play goes to pieces, as it must at first when the players are trying to remember their parts and cues so desperately that they are incapable of acting.’

  The producer at the Court (whom we would now call director) involved himself in reading plays, choosing casts, inventing the machinery, arranging the lighting, designing scenery and costume, adding incidental music, and co-ordinating everything except finance, which belonged to Vedrenne. Shaw liked to take a week over the stage movements, a fortnight for memorizing, and a final week for the dress rehearsals, when he would come on the stage again, going through passages that needed finishing, and interrupting now whenever he felt like it. Barker liked longer but in the crowded Court schedule this was seldom practicable.

  Shaw had come to the theatre with the twin aspirations of giving the British public a political education and creating verbal opera; Barker’s aim was to discover, through fractured syntax, crafted inarticulateness, oblique dénouement, the naturalistic dialogue to express a new stage situation. From those different aims as composers of plays arose their different styles of conducting the players.

  Barker had never witnessed the heroic acting of old-timers. His taste for low tones, which worked perfectly for his own plays and those of Galsworthy, did not seem to suit Shaw who entreated him to ‘leave me the drunken, stagey, brassbowelled barnstormers my plays are written for’. Barker’s restrained style ‘makes me blush for the comparative blatancy of my own plays,’ Shaw conceded.

  Shaw was patient and persistent, used a good deal of flattery, and took advice from some of the better actors. Barker was more persistent and less patient. Shaw set a limit of three hours (preferably between breakfast and lunch) and ensured that actors with only a few lines to speak were not kept hanging around all day while the principals rehearsed. Barker was a perfectionist and sometimes refused to leave off rehearsing until, according to Shaw, ‘the unfortunate company had lost their last trains and buses and he had tired himself. He also got alarmingly annoyed. ‘His curses are neither loud nor deep: they are atmospheric,’ one actor remembered. ‘It is what he doesn’t say that paralyses one. He looks; and having looked, he turns his back to the stage – and you can still see him looking through the back of his head.’

  But it was exciting to work for Barker. If he did not spare his actors, he did not spare himself. They had the sense of collaborating at the beginning of a revolution in British stage production. The plays Barker presented had the appearance of being more natural, more lifelike, than anything else being performed in London and gave audiences a sensation of participating in the drama, rather than watching it from the auditorium.

  Shaw’s fatherly feelings for Barker spilled over on to the whole company at the Court. They felt part of a family, working to restore the English theatre to its rightful place in national life. A vivid example was the career of Lillah McCarthy. Shaw had seen her first in 1895 as a sixteen-year-old Lady Macbeth, ‘immature, unskilful, and entirely artificial’. Yet she had gone at it bravely, her instinct and courage helping where her skill failed, and produced an effect that was ‘very nearly thrilling’. ‘She can hold an audience whilst she is doing everything wrongly,’ he wrote in the Saturday Review. ‘...I venture on the responsibility of saying that her Lady Macbeth was a highly promising performance, and that some years of hard work would make her a valuable recruit to the London stage.’

  After ten years of hard work she wrote and asked to see Shaw. He was at this time looking for someone to play Ann Whitefield in Man and Superman. When she arrived at Adelphi Terrace (‘a gorgeously good-looking young lady in a green dress and huge picture hat... in which she looked splendid, with the figure and gait of a Diana’), he gave her a broad smile of recognition: ‘Why, here’s Ann Whitefield.’

  As one of the principal players at the Court, Lillah ‘created the first generation of Shavian heroines with dazzling success’. Her technique, which combined the manner of ‘the grand school with a natural impulse to murder the Victorian womanly woman’, fell in perfectly with his stage needs. ‘And with that young lady,’ he wrote a quarter of a century later, ‘I achieved performances of my plays which will probably never be surpassed.’

  Working at the Court was a revelation for Lillah. She seemed hypnotized by G.B.S. ‘With complete unselfconsciousness he would show us how to draw the full value out of a line,’ she wrote. ‘...With his amazing hands he would illustrate the mood of a line. We used to watch his hands in wonder. I learned as much from his hands, almost, as from his little notes of correction.’ During rehearsals they often lunched together at the Queen’s Restaurant in Sloane Square – apples, cheese, macaroni and salads with chilly milk and soda. ‘I ate it because everything he did seemed right to me,’ she remembered.

  Lillah worshipped Shaw: but she did not understand his plays. Mrs Pankhurst was to tell her that Ann Whitefield had ‘strengthened her purpose and fortified her courage’ and many other women told her that Ann had ‘brought them to life and that they remodelled themselves upon Ann’s pattern’. Lillah played Ann Whitefield at the Court in May and June 1905, and again in October and November, and bore witness that ‘she made a new woman of me’. She acted the part of Ann with earnest intensity. Barker, in the role of Tanner, ‘carried the thing through remarkably well’. But it was difficult to keep Lillah’s feet on the ground. ‘Her life was rich in wonderful experiences that had never happened, and in friendships with wonderful people (including myself) who never existed,’ Shaw remarked. She pursued Barker across the Court Theatre: and on 24 April 1906, at the West Strand Registry Office, she caught and married him.

  The marriage had the air of being a brilliant success. ‘She was an admirable hostess; and her enjoyment of the open air and of travelling made her a most healthy companion for him,’ Shaw explained. Marriage suited Barker, who was no Bohemian. ‘The admirations and adorations the pair excited in the cultured sections of London society could be indulged and gratified in country houses where interesting and brilliant young married couples were welcome.’ Why then was Shaw ‘instinctively dismayed’? As his Court ‘children’, their marriage was that of brother and sister. They had no children, and were not well cast for what the other needed: a mother for him, a father for her. ‘There were no two people on earth less suited to one another,’ Shaw wrote. It was the marriage of actors and actresses, a stepping aside from reality, an escapade.

  That summer after their marriage they went to stay with the Webbs. ‘I think what he [Barker] lacks is warmth
of feeling – he is cold, with little active pity or admiration, or faithful devotion,’ Beatrice wrote in her diary. ‘A better acquaintance than a friend, a better friend than a husband...

  ‘She is a strikingly handsome lady, also hard-working and dutiful – a puritan, I think, by temperament... Otherwise, I fear she is... commonplace, and he has all the appearance of being bored by her after two months’ marriage.’

  By the end of October 1906, they were back on stage as Tanner and Ann Whitefield. Next month they stepped into a new Shaw play at the Court: a tragedy in which Barker was an artist dying of consumption, with Lillah his wife – ‘the sort of woman I hate’, Shaw notified her.

  4

  Concerning The Doctor’s Dilemma

  Here am I, for instance, by class a respectable man, by common sense a hater of waste and disorder, by intellectual constitution legally minded to the verge of pedantry, and by temperament apprehensive and economically disposed to the limit of old-maidishness; yet I am, and have always been, and shall now always be, a revolutionary writer.

  Preface to Major Barbara

  Over the early summer of 1906 Shaw wrote prefaces to John Bull’s Other Island and Major Barbara. The first, discursively favourable to Home Rule, ridiculed nationalism and the military and bureaucratic imagination that supported it. The second, in celebration of social equality, included some powerful invective against the malicious injury of judicial punishments and the social damage resulting from an inequitable distribution of money. Both prefaces were assaults on institutions of power. Then over the late summer, he wrote The Doctor’s Dilemma, a play aimed at another powerful institution, the medical profession.