Shaw Reinterpreted

Shaw Reinterpreted

In general, one can say that a play that deals with issues of its time has a very short life span. This is one of the greatest problems for a playwright like Bernard Shaw. In two of his most significant plays, Major Barbara (1905) and Pygmalion (1912), the issues examined seem to be essentially Edwardian; what then is there of intrinsic interest for today's audiences? ¹ This essay considers the problem from different points of view and attempts to reinterpret the two plays as if they were written for a future audience, while never losing sight of the biographical Shaw and his characteristic way of examining the world. Such changes in emphases will, perhaps, suggest other kinds of staging that incorporate this new angle of interpretation.

Why Major Barbara and Pygmalion? The two plays have apparently little in common apart from their Edwardian time frame. But taken as projections of future history from Edwardian starting points, they begin to reveal much that would engage a contemporary audience. One can view them as limited to problems of time and location or, more dynamically, as prophetic representations of the continuing evolution of socioeconomic realities. Seen through the latter perspective, the plays become ideal candidates for radical reinterpretation.

An earlier example of Shaw elucidating future trends in society can be found in Mrs Warren's Profession (1902). Taken schematically, this work explores the Marxist theme of the amorality of capitalism by exemplifying the usually small-scale (and brutal) operation of prostitution and transforming it into an international enterprise. Shaw continually reminds his audience of economic realities. Crofts tells Vivie: "Your mother has a genius for managing such things. We've got two [brothels] in Brussels, one in Ostend, one in Vienna, and two in Budapest. Of course there are others besides ourselves in it: but we hold most of the capital." ² Vivie's reaction to learning about the source of the funding for her university education is not melodramatic—as is Pip's to the realization that Magwitch is his patron—though her mother responds in a conventionally histrionic manner. ³ But even so, a twenty-first-century audience, brought up to believe that capitalism has superseded conventional attitudes, might find Vivie's contempt for her mother's unprincipled attitude to money far less easy to identify with. While Vivie's moral indignation reflects a Victorian sensibility still in transformation, an audience in 2006, representative of the more jaded sophistication of our times, might be a great deal more impressed by how social relations and economic forces become entangled in the play.

Nevertheless, a classic critique of the capitalist system would no longer hold a modern audience's attention. The entire history of the defunct Soviet Union has now made a straightforwardly anticapitalist art deeply unfashionable. Yet in Major Barbara and Pygmalion, the crucial issue of the use or misuse of technology might provoke a modern audience's interest and apprehensions. Scientific progress, as it was before the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, provides one of the keys to unveiling other meanings in Major Barbara and Pygmalion, and this essay's burden of proof will be to demonstrate that Shaw was actually creating dramatic situations that depend on the underlying presence of technology. The characters of these two plays, notably the two principals, Barbara Undershaft and Eliza Doolittle, are there for the audience to identify with, albeit objectively; the goal is no narrowly-conceived empathy, for these characters represent the younger generation coming to terms with a new world.

This essay will deploy not only the Marxist approach of earlier generations but also the postmodernist perspectives of semiology, coloniality, and gender studies. There is no need to engage in the kind of "misunderstanding" recommended by Jorge Luis Borges to his readers. ⁴ The kind of subjective reading that Borges implies is not suitable to a reinterpretation of Shaw's drama. The knowledge and preoccupations of the biographical Shaw are...