Man and Superman and Three Other Plays (2 page)

THE HIDDEN SHAW

Bernard Shaw's reputation as a writer was controversial in the last decade of the nineteenth century and remains controversial in the first decade of the twenty-first. No writer, however, would want to carry the current state of Shaw's literary reputation. It is, at least for the moment, at as low an ebb as Poins's linen shirts were according to Prince Hal. Shaw's plays were at one time revived regularly in London and New York, but they have now become rarities. Worse, star-actors do not push to play the lead roles. Hollywood types may take a break from receiving multimillion-dollar salaries for playing whatever the public wants to see in order to rededicate themselves to the Art of the Theater by appearing comparatively gratis in an O‘Neill or Chekhov revival, but they seem uninterested in Shaw. Whether their shyness with Shaw proceeds from an inability to speak the sculpted rhetoric of his longer sentences or from discomfort with the politeness of his language, the effect is the same: They do not play him and he does not get played. Even the wonderful Shaw Festival in Canada has cut the number of Shaw plays it produces each season from three or four to two. There has not been a film of a Shaw play since Great
Catherine
in 1970. Nor has American television shown a Shaw play since the Rex Harrison Heartbreak House (1986), preceded by the Peter O' Toole
Pygmalion
(1983).

In academe, the situation is bleaker still. Most of the commonly used anthologies of drama that once automatically included Shaw in the modern canon have dropped him (while retaining Ibsen) in order to include multicultural contemporary plays, or have replaced Shaw with Oscar Wilde, as if the two were interchangeable. Fewer colleges offer seminars in Shaw; indeed, some English departments do not even bother to include his plays in their drama courses—that is, when they deign to teach dramatic literature besides Shakespeare at all. Yet he seems still to be read, if the major bookstore chains are any indication, for on the ever-dwindling number of shelves they devote to plays other than those by Shakespeare, Shaw continues to jostle in among the twenty-or-so other playwrights for a respectable number of inches of shelf space.

The decline in Shaw's literary reputation and theatrical popularity proceeds from varied causes, but there are three major ones. Contemporary audiences and readers are used to explicit treatments of sexuality, so that Shaw's reticence in this regard makes him seem outdated, suitable only for the graying crowd. Not that Shaw's plays do not quake with sexual subtext and symbolism—they do—but nothing is explicit, nothing denoted, and all the sex receives ferocious comic treatment instead of the usual transgressive representation in so much contemporary drama. The worldwide failure of communism in the late 198os, and the revelations of the murderous and massive abuses of human rights it produced, makes Shaw's life-long devotion to socialism—and especially his naive acceptance of the rosy picture of itself the Soviet Union presented to him during his trip to Russia with Lady Astor in 1934—seem somehow corrupt, or at least stupendously idiotic. But Shaw was not the first, nor will he be the last writer with a huge public profile to look at political situations and see more what he wants to see than what is actually there.

The third cause for the decline in Shaw's popularity is the explicitness of his stage directions. In our era, when the director and the production concept—meaning the director's and actors' “creative” reinterpretation of the play's meaning to fit their view of the world, morality, and politics, as opposed to the author's views—have dominion, Shaw's elaborate stage directions are inhibiting. Shaw believed that directors and actors who wanted to convey ideas and views that differed from the author's should feel perfectly welcome to write their own plays, but not to undermine his carefully wrought way of dramatizing his ideas: There is a difference between finding new things in the text and putting them there yourself with your own hands. In truth, though, anyone who has rehearsed and performed Shaw's plays knows well the practical value of his stage directions, based as they usually were on Shaw's own experience of directing the first performances of the plays, working out the stage business, seeing what needed to be made clear to an audience. His stage directions are rather like a film director's use of the camera to tell the story. Shaw uses the stage and everything on it, including the actors' bodies, faces, movements, and clothing, to tell his story. The adverbial indications as to how lines should be delivered
(“aggressively,” “gallantly”)
are not as ubiquitous as they seem; they mainly aid readers who are not actors themselves, but they also rescue actors from the danger of misinterpretation.

Theatrical fashions change; new generations of actors appear; discredited ideas gain currency again—and Shaw too may yet rise from his present supine condition. He certainly should because he is worth reading and seeing and hearing. Arthur Miller, who in his twenties read a lot of Shaw, was once asked what attracted him to the playwright. Miller replied: “Laughs. The irony of his plays. Terrific style and stylishness. And his ability to handle ideas—which I think is unapproachable” (Conversations
with
Arthur Miller, 1987, edited by Matthew C. Roudane, p. 274). One can see why a playwright like Miller, who by his own confession could write pathos easily, would admire precisely these qualities of Shaw's writing for the theater: humor, comic irony, stylishness, and the interplay of ideas.

Along with the best comic playwrights, Shaw has a gift for stage humor. He is a master of the running gag, as in Candida, where Burgess successively finds every other character to be mad. Shaw can turn anything to wit, including gallows humor, as in The Devil's Disciple, in which General Burgoyne presides over Dick Dudgeon's trial for treason and their exchanges turn into a duel as to who can be more wittily urbane and “gentlemanly” about the execution of the latter. The result is one of the most genuinely hilarious discussions of capital punishment.

Above all, Shaw has an uncanny instinct for how much discussion of ideas an audience can take before it needs comic relief. The debate on the purpose of Life in Man and Superman (in the third act, “Don Juan in Hell”) shows that instinct working at its peak. The Commander, in the midst of refuting Don Juan's criticism of the Devil, takes the latter's name in vain, and then suddenly stops with the thought that he may have inadvertently offended the Devil. His sincere concern elicits from the Devil a most deferential exhibition of largesse in allowing the Commander to use his name whenever he needs it. The Devil, man of the world that he is, even turns the Commander's moment of embarrassment into an opportunity to display his devilish good manners by suggesting that he regards the use of his name “to secure additional emphasis” as “a high compliment to me.” When people apply the term “high comedy” to Shaw, this is the sort of thing they mean, and they are quite right. But behind the “high comedy” lies the substantial implication that good manners can be used by the Devil as well as by anyone, perhaps even more cleverly, and for not such innocent ends.

Mrs. Warren's
Profession
was written in 1893, published in 1898, but not performed until 1902, and even then privately. Its first public production in New York in 1905 resulted in the actors' being arrested, for one of the play's two main protagonists was a prostitute and a procuress, and therefore in violation of stage censorship. It was Shaw's third play, his last play written after the pattern of Ibsen's plays, and his first masterpiece. The two plays that preceded it,
Widowers' Houses
(1892) and The Philanderer (1893), paid special homage to Ibsen: the former by imitating Ibsen's dramatic structure (one based on the gradual revelation of a hidden transgression from the past that has been poisoning the characters' present lives), the latter by having as its setting the Ibsen Club, a place where the members, who are advanced thinkers, can express their advanced thoughts and also romance one another.

Shaw was a socialist, and therefore a severe critic of capitalism, from his reading of Karl Marx and other economists of the 1 8 8 os. Widowers' Houses made a socialist point that Mrs. Warren's
Profession
would reiterate—namely, that as we all participate in capitalism, whether we like it or not, none of us can have clean incomes, meaning incomes that do not at some point or in some way derive from the exploitation of other people's labor. As a consequence, it does no good for one participant to point to another and call him villain; Shaw believed it was the capitalist system that needed to be transformed, and by everyone. In keeping with that principle, Shaw does not assign villain status to any of his characters in Mrs. Warren's
Profession,
not even the woman whose past transgression—prostitution—is the Ibsenite secret from the past that comes back to affect the characters' destinies.

Instead Shaw crafts a series of ambushes for the audience, leading us to sympathize with one character in the first act only to reveal something in the second act that discredits that sympathy. One of the great theatrical pleasures of watching Mrs.
Warren's
Profession with an audience is to feel its sympathies seesawing between Mrs. Warren and her emancipated daughter, Vivie, who represents “the New Woman” of her era. As act II begins, Vivie, who has never met her father and has just finished a distinguished academic career at Newnham, the women's college at Cambridge, prepares to challenge her mother's authority over her, particularly her mother's plan to live with her daughter and, in Lear-fashion, set herself on Vivie's “kind nursery.” She bases her challenge on her mother's secretiveness about her past, so her mother reveals the secret, which is that she has been a prostitute and made the money that supported Vivie from that profession of prostitution. Vivie is only cowed, however, when her mother explains the circumstances in which she chose to become a prostitute. Mrs. Warren explains that she saw her half-sister die of lead poisoning after working “in a whitelead factory twelve hours a day for nine shillings a week.” Meanwhile, Mrs. Warren's older sister, Liz, had left home only to return after a time fashionably dressed and with plenty of money. Liz advised her younger sister not to let other capitalists exploit her good looks for their profit, but to become instead a prostitute like her and maintain her self-respect by making her own way, free of exploitation by others. Vivie is impressed by her mother's tale because of the gumption she displayed and particularly by her apparent lack of shame, which seems to Vivie like a kind of integrity. The curtain falls on Vivie's admiring her mother for her strength of character (“you are stronger than all England”) and on the procuress Mrs. Warren's bestowing “a mother's blessing” on her daughter. It is one of the most strikingly odd and ironic curtains in British drama because the audience does not know quite what to think or with whom to side. And because Shaw believed the primary purpose of drama was to stir people out of conventional thinking and automatic assumptions so they would think for themselves, such a state of unease and discomfort suited his purpose perfectly.

The play's ending similarly disallows the audience a complacent position. Vivie renews the struggle with her mother until she learns that her mother has not renounced her “profession” and yet pursues the image of respectability. Not being able to stand her mother's hypocrisy in this regard, which to Vivie signifies a lack of integrity, she breaks with her mother finally and fully in a scene of compelling conflict in which every line between them contains a bullet wrapped in an irony.

The final phase of their confrontation begins with Mrs. Warren appealing to her daughter on the basis of duty and justice, and as she does so Shaw directs that she fall back into her dialect
“recklessly,”
as a way of showing the emotional pitch she has reached, in which she is no longer in control of what she says or feels. But she errs when she invokes Vivie's daughterly duty. Such an appeal, based as it is on convention, will not sway the hardheaded Vivie. Mrs. Warren's other appeal, “Who is to care for me when I'm old?” makes it seem as if she only supported Vivie so she would have a prop for her old age. But when she adds that she kept herself “lonely” for Vivie by letting go all of the girls who had formed an attachment to her, she hits the audience right in the heart, though she touches Vivie not at all. Quite the opposite: Mrs. Warren's regression to her native accent (according to Shaw's stage directions) jars and antagonizes Vivie. Another dramatist might have made Vivie melt a little at her mother's self-denial, but it is precisely Shaw's strength and originality that he does not and instead has Vivie firmly repudiate her mother's assertion of her daughterly duty.

Mrs. Warren then shifts to a more aggressive tactic. And by her economic vocabulary, Shaw shows how capitalism marks every aspect of human relations: She accuses Vivie of “stealing” an education from her mother, and avers that instead of sending Vivie away to school, she should have brought her up in her own house. As if correcting her mother's grammar, Vivie says,
“[quietly]
In one of your own houses,” reminding her with devastating insult that she is a procuress. This is too much for Mrs. Warren, and she begins to separate herself from her daughter by referring to Vivie in the third person: “(screaming). Listen to her! listen to how she spits on her mother's grey hairs! Oh, may you live to have your own daughter tear and trample on you as you have trampled on me. And you will: you will. No woman ever had luck with a mother's curse on her” (p. 102). Here Shaw deliberately invokes King Lear's curse on his daughter, Goneril, for driving him from her house, in which he likewise refers to his daughter in the third person though she is present: “If she must teem, / Create her child of spleen, that it may live / And be a thwart disnatured torment to her... that she may feel / How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is/To have a thankless child” (act 1 , scene 4). Though this allusion is ominous in so far as it predicts Mrs. Warren's being driven away by her daughter, it also begins to betray the presence of comic and ironic elements. For example, Mrs. Warren invites an invisible audience to “listen” to how Vivie “spits on her mother's grey hairs”—a mixing of the aural and the visual, not unlike Bottom's proclamation in A Midsummer Night's Dream that “the ear of man hath not seen... what my dream was” (act 4, scene I). The simultaneity of authentic tragic emotion and the faintly ridiculous is deeply Shavian (even though it derives partly from the Ibsen who wrote The Wild Duck).