Masters of the Theatre

by Delphi Classics

  Helmer. What are you saying?

  Nora. I know nothing but what the clergyman said, when I went to be confirmed. He told us that religion was this, and that, and the other. When I am away from all this, and am alone, I will look into that matter too. I will see if what the clergyman said is true, or at all events if it is true for me.

  Helmer. This is unheard of in a girl of your age! But if religion cannot lead you aright, let me try and awaken your conscience. I suppose you have some moral sense? Or — answer me — am I to think you have none?

  Nora. I assure you, Torvald, that is not an easy question to answer. I really don’t know. The thing perplexes me altogether. I only know that you and I look at it in quite a different light. I am learning, too, that the law is quite another thing from what I supposed; but I find it impossible to convince myself that the law is right. According to it a woman has no right to spare her old dying father, or to save her husband’s life. I can’t believe that.

  Helmer. You talk like a child. You don’t understand the conditions of the world in which you live.

  Nora. No, I don’t. But now I am going to try. I am going to see if I can make out who is right, the world or I.

  Helmer. You are ill, Nora; you are delirious; I almost think you are out of your mind.

  Nora. I have never felt my mind so clear and certain as to-night.

  Helmer. And is it with a clear and certain mind that you forsake your husband and your children?

  Nora. Yes, it is.

  Helmer. Then there is only one possible explanation.

  Nora. What is that?

  Helmer. You do not love me any more.

  Nora. No, that is just it.

  Helmer. Nora! — and you can say that?

  Nora. It gives me great pain, Torvald, for you have always been so kind to me, but I cannot help it. I do not love you any more.

  Helmer (regaining his composure). Is that a clear and certain conviction too?

  Nora. Yes, absolutely clear and certain. That is the reason why I will not stay here any longer.

  Helmer. And can you tell me what I have done to forfeit your love?

  Nora. Yes, indeed I can. It was to-night, when the wonderful thing did not happen; then I saw you were not the man I had thought you.

  Helmer. Explain yourself better — I don’t understand you.

  Nora. I have waited so patiently for eight years; for, goodness knows, I knew very well that wonderful things don’t happen every day. Then this horrible misfortune came upon me; and then I felt quite certain that the wonderful thing was going to happen at last. When Krogstad’s letter was lying out there, never for a moment did I imagine that you would consent to accept this man’s conditions. I was so absolutely certain that you would say to him: Publish the thing to the whole world. And when that was done —

  Helmer. Yes, what then? — when I had exposed my wife to shame and disgrace?

  Nora. When that was done, I was so absolutely certain, you would come forward and take everything upon yourself, and say: I am the guilty one.

  Helmer. Nora — !

  Nora. You mean that I would never have accepted such a sacrifice on your part? No, of course not. But what would my assurances have been worth against yours? That was the wonderful thing which I hoped for and feared; and it was to prevent that, that I wanted to kill myself.

  Helmer. I would gladly work night and day for you, Nora — bear sorrow and want for your sake. But no man would sacrifice his honour for the one he loves.

  Nora. It is a thing hundreds of thousands of women have done.

  Helmer. Oh, you think and talk like a heedless child.

  Nora. Maybe. But you neither think nor talk like the man I could bind myself to. As soon as your fear was over — and it was not fear for what threatened me, but for what might happen to you — when the whole thing was past, as far as you were concerned it was exactly as if nothing at all had happened. Exactly as before, I was your little skylark, your doll, which you would in future treat with doubly gentle care, because it was so brittle and fragile. (Getting up.) Torvald — it was then it dawned upon me that for eight years I had been living here with a strange man, and had borne him three children — . Oh! I can’t bear to think of it! I could tear myself into little bits!

  Helmer (sadly). I see, I see. An abyss has opened between us — there is no denying it. But, Nora, would it not be possible to fill it up?

  Nora. As I am now, I am no wife for you.

  Helmer. I have it in me to become a different man.

  Nora. Perhaps — if your doll is taken away from you.

  Helmer. But to part! — to part from you! No, no, Nora, I can’t understand that idea.

  Nora (going out to the right). That makes it all the more certain that it must be done. (She comes back with her cloak and hat and a small bag which she puts on a chair by the table.)

  Helmer. Nora, Nora, not now! Wait till tomorrow.

  Nora (putting on her cloak). I cannot spend the night in a strange man’s room.

  Helmer. But can’t we live here like brother and sister — ?

  Nora (putting on her hat). You know very well that would not last long. (Puts the shawl round her.) Good-bye, Torvald. I won’t see the little ones. I know they are in better hands than mine. As I am now, I can be of no use to them.

  Helmer. But some day, Nora — some day?

  Nora. How can I tell? I have no idea what is going to become of me.

  Helmer. But you are my wife, whatever becomes of you.

  Nora. Listen, Torvald. I have heard that when a wife deserts her husband’s house, as I am doing now, he is legally freed from all obligations towards her. In any case I set you free from all your obligations. You are not to feel yourself bound in the slightest way, any more than I shall. There must be perfect freedom on both sides. See, here is your ring back. Give me mine.

  Helmer. That too?

  Nora. That too.

  Helmer. Here it is.

  Nora. That’s right. Now it is all over. I have put the keys here. The maids know all about everything in the house — better than I do. Tomorrow, after I have left her, Christine will come here and pack up my own things that I brought with me from home. I will have them sent after me.

  Helmer. All over! All over! — Nora, shall you never think of me again?

  Nora. I know I shall often think of you and the children and this house.

  Helmer. May I write to you, Nora?

  Nora. No — never. You must not do that.

  Helmer. But at least let me send you —

  Nora. Nothing — nothing —

  Helmer. Let me help you if you are in want.

  Nora. No. I can receive nothing from a stranger.

  Helmer. Nora — can I never be anything more than a stranger to you?

  Nora (taking her bag). Ah, Torvald, the most wonderful thing of all would have to happen.

  Helmer. Tell me what that would be!

  Nora. Both you and I would have to be so changed that — . Oh, Torvald, I don’t believe any longer in wonderful things happening.

  Helmer. But I will believe in it. Tell me? So changed that — ?

  Nora. That our life together would be a real wedlock. Good-bye. (She goes out through the hall.)

  Helmer (sinks down on a chair at the door and buries his face in his hands). Nora! Nora! (Looks round, and rises.) Empty. She is gone. (A hope flashes across his mind.) The most wonderful thing of all — ?

  (The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.)

  MAN AND SUPERMAN by George Bernard Shaw

  1903

  First published in 1903 by Archibald Constable & Co Ltd, Man and Superman was staged for the first time at The Royal Court Theatre in London on May 23 1905. However, this production did not include the long third act, which has been frequently cut from performances and the play was not staged in its entirety until 1915 at the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. There was a famous television adaptation in 1982 starring the acclaimed actor P
eter O’Toole and in 1996 the renowned theatre director, and founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sir Peter Hall helmed a BBC radio production of the play starring Ralph Fiennes and Judi Dench in the principle roles.

  The genesis of Man and Superman was a correspondence between Shaw and Arthur Bingham Walkley, the drama critic of The Times, in which the latter challenged his friend to write a play based on the Don Juan tale. Shaw criticised the trend of romantic plays, which were centred on sexual attraction but never portrayed any incidents of actual sexual desire or discussed the issue in a real or direct manner. Shaw attempted to show sex as natural and instinctual and the driving force of the action in Man and Superman. Though Shaw denied an explicit link, the title invokes Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘Ubermensch’, a somewhat problematic and controversial term which arose from the philosopher’s declaration that ‘God is dead’ and that a new set of earth-bound values, motivated by a love of the actual, material world should be created; new aspirations for humanity set by supreme achievement.

  The original incarnation of the character Don Juan was a man of unquenchable lust and a murderer, who was dragged to hell for failing to show any remorse. The moral of the tale is that God punishes and no one is beyond His remit or the dispensing of justice. Over the years, the newer depictions of the myth brought humour to the tale and diminished some of the severer aspects of the character to create an attractive figure. Shaw was interested in a hero who not only confronted and defied the commands of a Christian God, but more importantly a rebel that challenged the predominant views of society. In Shaw’s play John/Jack Tanner represents the Don Juan character and Ann Whitefield is a variation of Dona Ana, while Octavius Robinson is a Don Ottavio substitute. One of Shaw’s fundamental beliefs expressed in the drama is woman as the pursuer of man in sexual relationships, knowing instinctually the importance of procreation in advancing humanity. One of the playwright’s key concepts is ‘Life Force’, which makes a ‘continual effort not only to maintain itself, but to achieve higher and higher organization and complete self-consciousness in order for humanity to reach ‘heights now deemed superhuman’.

  Janie Brookshire and Max Gordon Moore in Irish Rep Theatre production

  This play was taken from our Complete Works edition:

  CONTENTS

  EPISTLE DEDICATORY TO ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY

  ACT I

  ACT II

  ACT III

  ACT IV

  EPISTLE DEDICATORY TO ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY

  My dear Walkley:

  You once asked me why I did not write a Don Juan play. The levity with which you assumed this frightful responsibility has probably by this time enabled you to forget it; but the day of reckoning has arrived: here is your play! I say your play, because qui facit per alium facit per se. Its profits, like its labor, belong to me: its morals, its manners, its philosophy, its influence on the young, are for you to justify. You were of mature age when you made the suggestion; and you knew your man. It is hardly fifteen years since, as twin pioneers of the New Journalism of that time, we two, cradled in the same new sheets, made an epoch in the criticism of the theatre and the opera house by making it a pretext for a propaganda of our own views of life. So you cannot plead ignorance of the character of the force you set in motion. You meant me to epater le bourgeois; and if he protests, I hereby refer him to you as the accountable party.

  I warn you that if you attempt to repudiate your responsibility, I shall suspect you of finding the play too decorous for your taste. The fifteen years have made me older and graver. In you I can detect no such becoming change. Your levities and audacities are like the loves and comforts prayed for by Desdemona: they increase, even as your days do grow. No mere pioneering journal dares meddle with them now: the stately Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars that new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum into naughtiness by criticisms which the traditions of the paper do not allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign with the most extravagant flourishes between the lines. I am not sure that this is not a portent of Revolution. In eighteenth century France the end was at hand when men bought the Encyclopedia and found Diderot there. When I buy the Times and find you there, my prophetic ear catches a rattle of twentieth century tumbrils.

  However, that is not my present anxiety. The question is, will you not be disappointed with a Don Juan play in which not one of that hero’s mille e tre adventures is brought upon the stage? To propitiate you, let me explain myself. You will retort that I never do anything else: it is your favorite jibe at me that what I call drama is nothing but explanation. But you must not expect me to adopt your inexplicable, fantastic, petulant, fastidious ways: you must take me as I am, a reasonable, patient, consistent, apologetic, laborious person, with the temperament of a schoolmaster and the pursuits of a vestryman. No doubt that literary knack of mine which happens to amuse the British public distracts attention from my character; but the character is there none the less, solid as bricks. I have a conscience; and conscience is always anxiously explanatory. You, on the contrary, feel that a man who discusses his conscience is much like a woman who discusses her modesty. The only moral force you condescend to parade is the force of your wit: the only demand you make in public is the demand of your artistic temperament for symmetry, elegance, style, grace, refinement, and the cleanliness which comes next to godliness if not before it. But my conscience is the genuine pulpit article: it annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you don’t like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it.

  In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I explained the predicament of our contemporary English drama, forced to deal almost exclusively with cases of sexual attraction, and yet forbidden to exhibit the incidents of that attraction or even to discuss its nature. Your suggestion that I should write a Don Juan play was virtually a challenge to me to treat this subject myself dramatically. The challenge was difficult enough to be worth accepting, because, when you come to think of it, though we have plenty of dramas with heroes and heroines who are in love and must accordingly marry or perish at the end of the play, or about people whose relations with one another have been complicated by the marriage laws, not to mention the looser sort of plays which trade on the tradition that illicit love affairs are at once vicious and delightful, we have no modern English plays in which the natural attraction of the sexes for one another is made the mainspring of the action. That is why we insist on beauty in our performers, differing herein from the countries our friend William Archer holds up as examples of seriousness to our childish theatres. There the Juliets and Isoldes, the Romeos and Tristans, might be our mothers and fathers. Not so the English actress. The heroine she impersonates is not allowed to discuss the elemental relations of men and women: all her romantic twaddle about novelet-made love, all her purely legal dilemmas as to whether she was married or “betrayed,” quite miss our hearts and worry our minds. To console ourselves we must just look at her. We do so; and her beauty feeds our starving emotions. Sometimes we grumble ungallantly at the lady because she does not act as well as she looks. But in a drama which, with all its preoccupation with sex, is really void of sexual interest, good looks are more desired than histrionic skill.

  Let me press this point on you, since you are too clever to raise the fool’s cry of paradox whenever I take hold of a stick by the right instead of the wrong end. Why are our occasional attempts to deal with the sex problem on the stage so repulsive and dreary that even those who are most determined that sex questions shall be held open and their discussion kept free, cannot pretend to relish these joyless attempts at social sanitation? Is it not because at bottom they are utterl
y sexless? What is the usual formula for such plays? A woman has, on some past occasion, been brought into conflict with the law which regulates the relations of the sexes. A man, by falling in love with her, or marrying her, is brought into conflict with the social convention which discountenances the woman. Now the conflicts of individuals with law and convention can be dramatized like all other human conflicts; but they are purely judicial; and the fact that we are much more curious about the suppressed relations between the man and the woman than about the relations between both and our courts of law and private juries of matrons, produces that sensation of evasion, of dissatisfaction, of fundamental irrelevance, of shallowness, of useless disagreeableness, of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented those uncomfortable buildings, and found our popular playwrights in the mind to (as they thought) emulate Ibsen.

  I take it that when you asked me for a Don Juan play you did not want that sort of thing. Nobody does: the successes such plays sometimes obtain are due to the incidental conventional melodrama with which the experienced popular author instinctively saves himself from failure. But what did you want? Owing to your unfortunate habit — you now, I hope, feel its inconvenience — of not explaining yourself, I have had to discover this for myself. First, then, I have had to ask myself, what is a Don Juan? Vulgarly, a libertine. But your dislike of vulgarity is pushed to the length of a defect (universality of character is impossible without a share of vulgarity); and even if you could acquire the taste, you would find yourself overfed from ordinary sources without troubling me. So I took it that you demanded a Don Juan in the philosophic sense.

  Philosophically, Don Juan is a man who, though gifted enough to be exceptionally capable of distinguishing between good and evil, follows his own instincts without regard to the common statute, or canon law; and therefore, whilst gaining the ardent sympathy of our rebellious instincts (which are flattered by the brilliancies with which Don Juan associates them) finds himself in mortal conflict with existing institutions, and defends himself by fraud and farce as unscrupulously as a farmer defends his crops by the same means against vermin. The prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the XVI century by a Spanish monk, was presented, according to the ideas of that time, as the enemy of God, the approach of whose vengeance is felt throughout the drama, growing in menace from minute to minute. No anxiety is caused on Don Juan’s account by any minor antagonist: he easily eludes the police, temporal and spiritual; and when an indignant father seeks private redress with the sword, Don Juan kills him without an effort. Not until the slain father returns from heaven as the agent of God, in the form of his own statue, does he prevail against his slayer and cast him into hell. The moral is a monkish one: repent and reform now; for to-morrow it may be too late. This is really the only point on which Don Juan is sceptical; for he is a devout believer in an ultimate hell, and risks damnation only because, as he is young, it seems so far off that repentance can be postponed until he has amused himself to his heart’s content.