Barrie & Synge

ELT 39:4 1996 negotiate a successful contract for an actress that Shaw wanted to play Major Barbara: "You ought to go straight into a penitentiary for six months at least." To Louis Calvert, playing Undershaft, and missing cues and forgetting lines: "we should rend you to pieces and wallow in your blood." To an actress who had refused the role of Hypatia in Misalliance: "You have ruined my play.. .. You have ruined yourself. . . . You have condemned your children to the workhouse. You have broken my heart." I first saw a copy of Bernard Shaw Theatrics on the shelves of the Shaw Festival shop in Niagara-on-the-Lake. It occurs to me that Festival playgoers—from tourists passing through to Shaw scholars—will enjoy reading this interesting, lively collection of letters. It should also be immensely helpful to directors and actors of Shaw plays in its interpretation of characters and directions about stage business. For literary critics and Shaw scholars, the collection offers fresh insight into Shaw's drama and his personality. The Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw series is indeed fortunate to have the distinguished Dan H. Laurence (the editor of the four-volume Collected Letters of Bernard Shaw [1965-1988] and other seminal works on Shaw) as the editor and compiler of this volume. Bernard Shaw Theatrics is a significant addition to the Shaw corpus. Elsie B. Adams San Diego State University Emeritus Barrie & Synge J. M. Barrie: Peter Pan and Other Plays. Peter Hollindale, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. xxxvi + 338 pp. Cloth $59.00 Paper $6.95 J. M. Synge: The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays. Ann Saddlemyer, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. xxvi + 213 pp. Cloth $45.00 Paper $9.95. THESE RECENT additions to Oxford's burgeoning Drama Library series bring together two contrasting dramatists. Barrie had a long and prolific career (writing thirty-eight plays), but is remembered now for only a handful of works, and would rarely, if ever, find himself on undergraduate drama courses. Synge's career was unduly brief but crucially important in the development of the modern Irish theatre, while virtually all his plays are remembered and considered worthy of our continuing attention. 504 BOOK REVIEWS With thirty-eight plays to choose from, Barrie's editor, Peter HoUindale , has a small dilemma in conforming to Oxford's prescription for this series. Four of his five selections are unexceptionable, however: The Admirable Crichton, Peter Pan, What Every Woman Knows, and Mary Rose. Some might argue for the inclusion of, say, Quality Street, Shall We Join the Ladies? or more significantly Dear Brutus, which HoUindale describes as "the only one of Barrie's incontrovertibly major plays to be omitted from this edition." In fact, HoUindale does not provide a rationale for his inclusions and omissions, although his sensitive and acute readings of the plays he selects lead to confidence in his judgment. The only slightly unusual selection is When Wendy Grew Up, the short "afterthought" to Peter Pan, which was performed only once in Barrie's lifetime in 1908. HoUindale has included it because he believes it will be "generally adopted as the play's most satisfying finale" (as proved the case in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production in 1982). Ultimately this selection matters little practically because Wendy's seven pages of text cannot have resulted in another complete play being passed over. In his introduction HoUindale discusses Barrie's methods of composition , particularly his propensity to revise plays as a result of collaborative work with actors in rehearsal and for revivals. Consequently there are numerous variant forms of most plays which create the problem of establishing a play's final form. HoUindale has chosen as his copy-text The Definitive Edition of the Plays ofJ.M. Barrie, edited by A. E. Wilson in 1942, which follows the texts Barrie himself approved for publication. As a result, the texts are highly literary and less theatrical, especially when it comes to Barrie's "interventionist," rather Shavian stage directions. HoUindale discourses on their validity and usefulness, and provides good examples of how they might be incorporated into productions (for example, by having the directions spoken by a narrator figure...