Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  The programme contains subtle ingredients to appeal to each section of English society. Since everyone approves the items which favour his own interests and regards all other items as caprices that will never be implemented, there seems to be some chance that the National Government will be able to introduce this programme by means of parliamentary democracy. But the plan is shipwrecked by the coming together of two political extremes: the bedrock of the far left and the rocklike uncompromising right.

  The symmetry of On the Rocks comes from the attraction of opposites. The Duke is attracted to the factory girl; the Prime Minister’s son is determined to marry a trade unionist and his daughter has sworn to marry a poor man (though she actually becomes engaged to an aristocrat who, as a member of the Labour deputation, dresses and talks as she imagines poor men dress and talk). The Prime Minister himself is married to a shadowy woman who apparently has no enthusiasm either for politics or for her children: her boredom with public life and inability to ‘take an interest in people’ derive from Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw’s indifference to both Sonny and G.B.S. She is a complex woman nevertheless, capable of manipulating the plot and preparing the way for her husband’s political illumination.

  The dramatic opinions that fill the Cabinet Room are the voices that reverberate in Shaw’s mind. The play exhibits Shaw’s ‘anarchic comic gift doing spirited battle with his authoritarian opinions,’ Irving Wardle has observed, ‘and the separate factions are orchestrated with effortless fluency and the ability to spring surprises’. The virtues of law and order match themselves against the vices of a police power state. ‘I wonder should I find any bombs in your house if I searched it,’ the Chief Commissioner of Police asks the elderly East End socialist, Hipney, who knowingly answers: ‘You would if you put them there first, Sir Broadfoot. What good would a police chief be if he couldnt find anything he wanted to find?’ The paradox of power, according to Shaw, is that anciens régimes are defended by oppressed and oppressors alike. ‘Chained dogs are the fiercest guardians of property; and those who attempt to unchain them are the first to get bitten.’

  After its opening in London Shaw reported a ‘unanimously good press (for once)’. The Morning Post praised him for having ‘made politics amusing’; The Times applauded his refusal to be canonized after Saint Joan; and Kingsley Martin in the New Statesman & Nation made the crucial observation that G.B.S. ‘warns rather than advocates. Make up your mind, he says, that Parliament, as you know it, cannot be the instrument of salvation. Devise a constitution which gives scope to personal and national loyalty, but do not imagine that it can succeed without transformation of the social order.’

  The play was to retain and renew its topicality. When it was revived at the Mermaid Theatre in the 1970s, Robert Cushman in the Observer called it ‘quite the most topical play in London’; J. W. Lambert in the Sunday Times wrote of his ‘astonishment at how little things, and people, have changed since 1933’; Irving Wardle in The Times pointed in detail to ‘the numerous parallels between the Depression years and the economic ills of the 1970s’; and the critic J. C. Trewin summed up: ‘What appeals to us now is the prophetic quality. The date is 1933, yet the dramatist could well have been thinking of 1975.’ Again, when it was brought back at Chichester during the Falklands War in the 1980s, critics remarked on the play’s contemporaneity – as if time had stopped and was pointing for ever at ‘the Present’. On the Rocks seemed ‘topical when I read it 10 years ago,’ wrote Robert Cushman in the summer of 1982, ‘prescient when the Mermaid staged it a couple of years after that, and positively uncanny at Chichester now’. But the critic Benedict Nightingale, referring to the ‘peculiarly bloodthirsty’ Preface, described a performance of the play in 1982 as being ‘precisely the sort of thing decent people should not have resurrected at a time like this, when unemployment is once again rife, party alignments confused, and parliamentary democracy itself under attack from both right and left’.

  The writer of the play subverts the writer of the Preface. The artist in Shaw cannot accept the Shavian polemicist. He cannot abandon conscience for efficient action. ‘I’m not the man for the job,’ Chavender admits. ‘...And I shall hate the man who will carry it through for his cruelty and the desolation he will bring on us and our like.’

  But why should such desolation be necessary? Shaw believed that though Britain might be good at finding leaders in wartime when socialism advanced, her politicians were uninspired in peacetime, and the country instinctively felt the need for a peacetime fighter, whatever party he or she might lead. The Cabinet meetings in both The Apple Cart and On the Rocks ‘are something Shaw had to give us some day,’ wrote Eric Bentley, ‘ – a rounded picture of the political madhouse which directs our destinies’. These two plays are less surreal than his other plays of this period. The crash of breaking windows at the end of On the Rocks, like the bomb explosion near the end of Heartbreak House (or the Day of Judgment in The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles and the planetary disaster in the last act of Geneva), are all symbols, as Eric Bentley indicates, of the atomic age and the global threat to our environment, as well as the anticipation of Hitler’s Germany.

  2

  Undergoing a sea Change

  Playwriting is becoming a Platonic exercise with me.

  Shaw to Leonora Ervine (12 May 1934)

  By the mid-1930s Shaw seemed to have become again what he had been in the 1890s: a versatile composer of experimental play-texts. Village Wooing received its world première at the Little Theater in Dallas, Texas, and was first presented in Britain by his fellow-dramatist Christopher Fry at the Pump Room in Tunbridge Wells. On the Rocks waited until the summer of 1938 before reaching New York when it was brought in by the government-sponsored Federal Theater which took over Shaw’s plays from the Theatre Guild. In Britain the play was given its world première at the unfashionable Winter Garden Theatre in London where it was presented by Charles Macdona.

  The Macdona Players, with Esmé Percy as their director, ‘led the forlorn hope of advanced drama in England’ between the wars and toured many of Shaw’s plays through Britain, round the Continent (staging the long-banned Mrs Warren’s Profession in Paris in 1925) and in South Africa, India and the Far East. On the Rocks was the only world première produced by Charles Macdona. Shaw had wanted Esmé Percy to direct the play, ‘but now there is a nice man, a man G.B.S. likes nearly as well,’ Charlotte wrote, ‘& I hope, later, G.B.S. will throw a good deal of work on to him’. This ‘nice man’ was Lewis Casson. He had worked with Shaw when directing the London production of Village Wooing which starred Casson’s wife, Sybil Thorndike, as Z. Shaw enjoyed interfering with his own plays. He ‘had a disgraceful appetite for “getting the laughs”,’ recalled Stephen Murray who played the part of the Prime Minister in the Malvern production of On the Rocks in 1936.

  He also appeared a more dictatorial figure than in the Vedrenne-Barker days, talking more and listening less. He had been ‘all eyes and ears,’ remembered Cedric Hardwicke when rehearsing Back to Methuselah. Now his eyes and ears had dimmed, but not his opinions. According to Edith Evans, he was getting old-fashioned. One of the Macdona Players recalled that he made ‘no attempt to help one to gain an imaginative feeling for the character and situations. Instead he went through the part line by line instructing me how he wanted every sentence emphasized and pronounced in his own, idiosyncratic Anglo-Irish accent.’ He insisted on placing his dominant speaking character well up-stage to get absolute clarity, grouped the other actors decoratively round and gave a highly coloured orchestration to the vocal tempo and pitch. ‘You’ve got to go from line to line, quickly and swiftly, never stop the flow of the lines, never stop,’ he told Ralph Richardson when rehearsing Arms and the Man at the Old Vic. ‘It’s one joke after another, it’s a firecracker. Always reserve the acting for underneath the spoken word. It’s a musical play, a knockabout musical comedy.’ Richardson remembered him as ‘a wonderfully courteous, wonderfully polite man, I think perhaps the
most polite man I’ve met in my life’. And John Gielgud, who played the Emperor in Androcles and the Lion ‘with a red wig, a lecherous red mouth, and a large emerald through which I peered lasciviously’, remembered that the cast was ‘so amused that we forgot to be alarmed’ when G.B.S. turned up to read his play to them. There were still characteristic outbursts of generosity. ‘I dare say your words are as good as mine,’ he told Phyllis Nielson-Terry who kept fluffing her lines during a revival of Candida.

  On the day of the final rehearsal of On the Rocks, Shaw came into his own. After a morning ‘word-rehearsal... which lasted until 3.p.m.,’ wrote Stephen Murray. ‘There was a photo-call at six, which Shaw insisted on attending. Dress-rehearsal at eight, and the curtain went up on it with Shaw on-stage. He never sat down for four hours, turning everything upside down and this way and that. At midnight he gave us vigorous notes for twenty minutes and then walked home. He had his eightieth birthday that week.’

  As the opening night of On the Rocks approached, a current of excitement went through the Winter Garden Theatre. It was like the old days. ‘An extraordinary evening,’ Charlotte wrote. ‘The way that enormous audience took the points and flung themselves into the whole thing was startling. I never met anything like it before.’ Macdona and Shaw had experimented by charging ‘popular prices’ – between one and five shillings a seat, which was half the regular cost. They needed to fill the large out-of-the-way theatre to keep the play profitably running – and after the huge first night success and excellent notices it seemed they might succeed. The fans came over and over again, but the general playgoing public seemed to agree with Shaw’s Prime Minister – ‘This is not the time to talk about economic difficulties: we’re up to the neck in them’ – and stayed away. Beatrice Webb, who went to the theatre a fortnight after the play had opened, reported: ‘the hall cold and cheerless, the cheap stalls not completely occupied, the gallery practically empty, a badly tuned gramophone playing during the one interval, did not constitute an attractive setting.’

  After forty-one performances the shutters went up towards the end of January 1935. ‘My popularity does not increase,’ Shaw wrote to his publisher. But then he had never counted on commercial success. ‘I shall not take any trouble to have them performed,’ he had assured Trebitsch, ‘but publish them in the same volume as Too True.’ Early in 1934, 27,000 copies of this book containing On the Rocks, Village Wooing and Too True to be Good were published in Britain and the United States, and two years later it was joined in the Standard Edition by another volume, The Simpleton, the Six, and the Millionairess, containing the last three plays from his world travels.

  *

  ‘The greatest fact of your lifetime is that nothing has happened in the twentieth century except the impossible,’ Shaw wrote to St John Ervine in 1932. ‘...nothing has succeeded like impossibility.’ The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles is Shaw’s enhancement of ‘impossibility’ far-advanced into some unspecified time he calls ‘Approaching Judgment Day’.

  The Unexpected Isles have recently risen out of the Pacific Ocean (where Shaw completed the play) and been occupied as a Crown Colony of the British Empire. In the three short scenes of the Prologue, past, present and future are brought together. A modern young woman arrives at the emigration office without her papers but with the catch-phrase (which becomes a theme of the play) ‘Let life come to you’. She marches the Emigration Officer out of his office to show her round the island, leaving his clerk alone. This shabby clerk is recognizable partly as Shaw’s father. Life has never come to him. He begins singing ‘Rule Britannia’, blows his brains out and falls dead – the fifth such suicide that month.

  Meanwhile the Young Woman and Emigration Officer have progressed to Scene II – ‘a grassy cliff top overhanging the sea’ reminiscent of the Dover Cliffs in Act IV scene vi of King Lear where Gloucester, Edgar and the King himself meet within a foot of the extreme verge, and trifle with despair. The Emigration Officer too has reached despair: ‘If you hadnt come in this morning I’d have done myself in,’ he tells the Young Woman who is amazed that he should feel so wretched in this ‘earthly paradise’. The explanation is given by a dark native Priest who rises into view up a concealed cliff path. The Emigration Officer, he says, comes from a country whose inhabitants ‘die from their own hands to escape what they call the horrors’ when ‘in the midst of life and loveliness’ they feel that only man is vile. The Emigration Officer, determined to go over the fearful cliffs, continues bending tremendously on the edge – until the Priest shoots out a foot against his posterior and he is sent catapulting into the sea. The Young Woman is appalled, but, as in King Lear, the cliffs are not simply what we have been led to expect; they mark the line of redemption as well as the abyss of death. ‘There are nets below,’ the Priest explains to the Young Woman as they advance into the third scene.

  This is set in a temple made out of a shelf of rock halfway down the cliff, reminiscent of the Skelligs off the south-west coast of Ireland. Upon this cathedral of the sea, and representing the coming together of East and West, Shaw imposed the gigantic images of Oriental deities he had seen on Elephanta Island, off the coast of Bombay. The Priest and Priestess, perfectly attuned to their paradisiacal surroundings, treat visitors from the old country with something of the backward-looking contempt that British imperialists have treated natives of their annexed territories. ‘I find these heathen idolaters very trying,’ sighs the Priestess after encountering an affected English lady tourist, guidebook in hand. This turns out to be Lady Farwaters, the wife of Sir Charles Farwaters, a man of pleasant aristocratic appearance who owes a little to Shaw’s Fabian friend Sydney Olivier.

  What is to be done with such specimens? The Priest and Priestess decide they might be used in a eugenic experiment blending the flesh and spirit of East and West, and they all retire into a magical cavern (like the Abode of Love from Too True to be Good).

  The Emigration Officer rises into view in a spotless white robe looking pale but regenerated. Writing of Shaw in the 1920s T. E. Lawrence had noticed ‘some sea-change [that] has come over G.B.S. in the last ten years’. It is a sea-change, compressed into ten minutes, that Shaw has granted his Emigration Officer. Now ‘the tables are turned’, and just when the Young Woman thinks that life is ‘coming a bit too thick for me’, he rushes her screaming to the edge of the rock shelf and hurls her over. So ends a Prologue remarkable for its surplus of action over talk.

  In a letter to Trebitsch, Shaw called The Simpleton ‘an ultra-fantastic oriental modern (or futurist) play... contents indescribable’. With a peculiar blend of fantasy and satire, the two acts of the play survey the delights and drawbacks of the pantomime Utopia that arise from the Prologue. The first act takes up the story about twenty years later and carries it on through the experiences of an accidental traveller to this Otherworld: a young, highly credulous clergyman who, like the Elderly Gentleman in Back to Methuselah, gives an ironic view of Shaw’s own pilgrim’s progress from the perspective of the future. This simpleton has been kidnapped by pirates at Weston Super Mare and forced to sail round the world, making them ill with laughter by giving Church of England sermons. They are like the ex-criminals of Captain Brassbound’s crew and use the clergyman to make people believe they are respectable. And Shaw uses them, the stock-in-trade crew of island literature, to echo Captain Shotover’s warning in Heartbreak House against capitalism’s ship of fools and to remind us of its stranded destination in On the Rocks.

  Suddenly released and set ashore, the simpleton wanders through the Unexpected Isles and comes to a terraced garden overlooking the port of Good Adventure. He is lost in enchantment. ‘It’s like the Garden of Eden: I should like to stay here forever.’ The garden is given a hieratic aspect by four Oriental shrines at the corners of a raised flowerbed. As he gazes at the two magically beautiful girl-goddesses and two wonderful boy-gods, the simpleton’s heart is filled with longing. ‘How I wish you were alive and I could kiss your living lips
,’ he addresses the fair goddess. But in this wonderland wishes come true. The stage directions tell us what then happens: ‘He does so and finds that she is alive. She smiles as her eyes turn bewitchingly towards him.’ In this variation of the Pygmalion legend, both the two goddesses and the two gods reveal themselves as four children from the Prologue.

  ‘We formed a family of six parents,’ explains Sir Charles Farwaters, who is now Governor of the Isles. His wife has changed from an affected tourist to a matronly silhouette of Charlotte Shaw; while the Emigration Officer is transformed into a ‘very different man, disciplined, responsible and well groomed’ – and married (a distant image of the Webbs’ marriage) to the Young Woman who is ‘still very much her old self’. The other two parents are Pra and Prola, the Priest and Priestess.

  But there is something lacking in the constitution of these four super-children. They are all, like Hitler’s Aryan ideal, physically perfect, but they cannot muster ‘between the whole four of them a scrap of moral conscience’. They are the embodiment of art for art’s sake. From the idea of loving one another the superchildren have advanced to the ideal of being one another.

  Shaw’s Garden of Eden is unclouded by any evil. No serpent slides through the undergrowth, no original sin flowers in the grounds: this is a paradise without demons. We are shown a pure fairy story, like an adolescent’s daydream, that joins Oriental fable to allegorical romance, and reflects Shaw’s view of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetic principle. ‘His kingdom is not of this world,’ he had written of Poe. ‘...Life cannot give you what he gives you except through fine art.’ Shaw’s Unexpected Isles are located near Eureka, the prose poem in which Poe sought to relate poetic intuition to scientific thought. The first act is perhaps the nearest Shaw came to writing what is apparently art for art’s sake in the theatre. The mood is celestially light – until the ominous ending in black darkness.