Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion to Many Players by Vincent Wall (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 103 naturalism. He protected himself from significant contact with reality by his exploitation of a crude, simplistic, sentimental conception of theatre - one basicaly at odds with that of the naturalists. Belasco also consistently succumbed to his personal taste for "the second and third rate" in drama, as Alexander Woollcott once observed. It is hard to accept Professor Marker's contention that "for Belasco meticulous outer realism remained throughout his career the key to the inner reality of a play" when so many of the plays in his large repertory were "marshmelodrams" or "unreal, unreasonable things which are not meant to impose on a sane intelligence," to quote some reviews of early productions. To say, as she does, that "his repertory cannot be called remarkable for its purely literary value" goes beyond understatement . "Belasco epitomizes a period in American theatre in which theatrical effectiveness took precedence over all other considerations for a dramatist," Professor Marker observes. Since this was so for Belasco as both playwright and director, one must take with a large grain of salt his many invocations of "nature" and "truth" quoted in the book. What he relished was the "wizardry" and the magic of making stage life seem real. He did not use his extraordinary theatrical means to explore reality. His primary devotion, as Marker herself tells us, was to the practical theatre, and this meant pleasing his public by mirroring the sentimental, optimistic, and often vulgar materialism of the Gilded Age. It was for these same reasons that Belasco's innovations in lighting and staging , however much some of them may have anticipated Craig or Appia or Reinhardt , did not really make him "like them." The anti-naturalists, like the naturalists , looked beyond technique to the theatre's relation to man's life. They celebrated the sensuous, abstract, poetic, pure art of the theatre that they hoped would be created by directors and designers, but they did so in the hope that through new forms theatre would become a "cathedral" for the "spiritual universe of the imagination." They were visionaries who "forced their contemporaries to reconsider the nature of the theatre as an art, its function in society," to quote a recent assessment. Belasco, on the other hand, remained locked into a narrow, native tradition of theatricality isolated from significant artistic, cultural, and social values. In that sense he was much more the heir of Boucicault, Daly, and Bronson Howard than the peer of Antoine and Stanislavsky or the precursor of Craig and Appia. His naturalism was a peculiar American hybrid, and his theatricality lacked aesthetic and spiritual adumbration. Professor Marker does not do full justice to such implications as these, although she is obviously aware of them. Intense concentration on the purely theatrical somewhat limits her otherwise excellent study - just as it limited the important contribution of David Belasco to the American theatre. HELEN KRICH CHINOY Dept. of Theatre and Speech, Smith College BERNARD SHAW: PYGMALION TO MANY PLAYERS, by Vincent Wall. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1973. xii & 171 pp. $8.50. Eric Bentley, who is referred to with high praise on Page 20 of Vincent Wall's 104 BOOK REVIEWS book, is quoted on the dust-wrapper as having found the volume "solid in substance ... light in texture." One concludes that Professor Bentley subscribes to the principle enunciated by Enobarbus: "I will praise any many that will praise me." His comment is difficult to explain on any other ground. For as to its substance, Wall's book is mainly a reworking of material already well-known through the biographical work of Henderson, Ervine, et ai, and the remarkably informative prefaces and notes that Dan Laurence includes in the volumes of Shaw letters. I did not attempt to identify in detail how derivative Wall's book is; I found it sufficiently disconcerting to turn to Henderson (George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century) and find him saying (Page 446): "You Never Can Tell was written, for the most part, during the summer of 1895, and completed by the early autumn of 1896, and adding, after a brief account of Shaw's difficulties with staging the play: "Toward the end of April, Shaw...