Bernard Shaw on the Tightrope

BERNARD SHAW ON THE TIGHTROPE SINCE HIS DEATH, Shaw's reputation for brilliance and eccentricity has· overshadowed his achievement. The iconoclast has himself become a favourite target for critical abuse, often inadequately based. He is still generally accepted as the chief figure in British drama at least since the eighteenth century; yet quite half of his plays are commonly dismissed as untheatrical, badly articulated, or plain silly.l Some few, notably Candida and St. Joan, have been played and praised almost to death, often in the suspect belief that they are not typical of their author. To theatre audiences for the new surrealism they are liable to seem technically as old-fashioned as Robertson's Caste. Yet Shaw, as surely as Pirandello, deserves credit for shattering the old theatre of illusion and the tight structure of the well-made play to let in more life. In the series of plays that begins with Getting Married and continues through Misalliance and Heartbreak House to Too True to be Good and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, Shaw jests among the ruins he has made. But he is a cunning jester, only apparently irresponsible; like Pirandello again, he offers a personal and meaningful dramatic form where convention-dimmed eyes see only chaos. Getting Married is possibly the least stage-worthy of the series, a trial run, in which the dramatist explored the difficulties of his new undertaking . Max Beerbohm's comment on it in The Saturday Review anticipated what many later objectors have said of the whole group: ... the fun does not seem to be integral: it seems to have been foisted in for fear lest we should fidget. By conventional standards, Misalliance is a rag bag of a play, haphazardly developed; the "fun" is even more fantastic than in Getting Married, and the events appear even more sharply divorced from the discussion element. Eric Bentley's remark about the incidents in Pirandellian drama is completely appropriate to the incidents and characters in Misalliance: 1. The charges of untheatricality and poor articulation are constantly mixed with praise in St. John Ervine's Bernard Shaw (London, 1956), which is in tune with the generality of older Shaw criticism; K. H. Gatch, "The Last Plays of Bernard Shaw," English Stage Comedl/, cd. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. (1955), discusses a supposed break-down of form; Edmund Fuller's generally sensible book, George Bernard Shaw (New York, 1950), judges the late plays to be so much rubble; Edmund Wilson, "Bernard Shaw at Eighty," 'the Triple Thinkers (2nd ed., London, 1952)\ makes the odd defensive remark that The Simpleton is "the only play of the author's which nas ever struck me as silly." . 343 344 MODERN DRAMA February They erupt on the instant, arbitrarily, just as his characters do not approach, enter, present themselves, let alone have motivated entrances; they are suddenly there, dropped from the sky.2 An androgynous aviator, who crashes into a vinery and demands a Bible and six oranges, and a would-be assassin, who emerges from a Turkish bath, could be simply the mischievous inventions of an author bored with the task of developing a plot logically and plausibly. The author of Widowers' Houses who, having been supplied by William Archer with a plot for the play, complained that he had used it all up in Act I and asked for more, might well be suspected of improvisation : throwing in unlikely irrelevancies at intervals to galvanise a dragging play into new life. There is more to the design of Misalliance than that. however. A closer look at it establishes a new basis for judging the whole group to which it belongs. The unity and coherence of Misalliance may be shown most clearly, if the play is approached through the theatrical context for which it was written. It was first produced at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1910, as part of the repertory season directed by Granville Barker for Charles Frohman, the American impresario. Shaw had been virtually a partner in Barker's earlier seasons at the Court Theatre, where eleven of his plays had been performed and his theatrical success was first overwhelmingly established; his nearest rival was Euripides...