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SHAW The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 22 (2001) 117-130



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Bernard Shaw's Theory of Political Theater:
Difficulties from the Vantages of Postmodern and Modern Types of the Self

Charles Grimes


"For some time now the idea of 'political theatre' has been in crisis," wrote critic Baz Kershaw in 1997 (255). In 1990 David Ian Rabey noted the failure of his 1986 book, British and Irish Political Drama of the Twentieth Century, which took Shaw as the originator of our century's political theater: "In the early 1980's I wrote a study. . . which intended to pay tribute to an emergent tradition of radical drama and its subversive potential. In the intervening years, history and experience have taught me that this drama was neither radical nor subversive enough" ("Images," 151). While Rabey saw the Shavian tradition as a historical failure, Michael Billington wondered in 1980 (qtd. in Holderness, 1) if political theater was a "dead duck." Similar statements from both the right and left are familiar to scholars of contemporary drama. Eric Bentley wrote in 1947, "Shaw's aim has been to change our minds and save civilization; but we are still in the old ruts and civilization has gone from bad to worse" (Bernard Shaw, 186). Tracy C. Davis concludes not only that Shaw's iconoclastic theater failed (143), but that "it is unlikely that he swayed political opinion. His desire to politicize the theater was real . . . yet ineffective" (142). Shaw himself noted the impotence of his political theater: "I have produced no permanent impression because nobody has ever believed me." Also he claimed, "I have solved practically all the pressing questions of our time, but . . . they keep on being propounded as insoluble just as if I had never existed" (qtd. in Bentley, Bernard Shaw, 186, 189). In 1978 David Hare looked back at British political drama, claiming it had succeeded in its goals but that this success had [End Page 117] achieved nothing: "Consciousness has been raised . . . for a good many years now and we seem further from radical change than at any time. . . . The traditional function of the radical artist . . . has been undermined. We have looked. We have seen. We have known. And we have not changed" (61). Perhaps these writers and artists (among others one could name) are correct about the ineffectiveness of political theater and of Shaw's in particular. But why?

The question of how political art in general has become irrelevant or outdated is often answered by reference to altered paradigms of Western politics, for example, post-Marxism, the end of history, the end of ideology, and so forth. A political climate such as we now inhabit, which celebrates the arrival of Western democratic capitalism as the ultimate political solution, or that decries an inescapable political impasse, will scarcely be receptive to the call of art for political change. Christopher Norris, for example, laments that "'realism' in politics now means considering old progressive ideals as pie in the sky" (9). Geoff Mulgan argues that "the end of a simple struggle between progress and reaction, the future and the past, [has] played havoc with the idea of politics" (9-10), rendering the current moment "antipolitical." Given such perceptions of "political reality," the progressivism of a Shaw or a Brecht may become nothing more than an object for nostalgia. Alternatively, rather than in analyses of history, the difficulties of the Shavian model of political theater and the models it inspired can be located internally, in how Shaw saw his theater as operating upon individual minds and selves. This essay focuses on how Shaw's theory of political theater posits the relationship between a society's ideology (defined as felt beliefs and assumptions) and the actions of that society. Shaw's ideas on this topic, both implicit and explicit in his plays and in his comments about them, contrast to the formulations of many sociologists and theorists of postmodernism. Shaw's theory and theater do not take into account how the modern...

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