Stagecraft and Structure in Shaw's Disquisitory Drama

STAGECRAFT AND STRUCTURE IN SHAW'S DISQUISITORY DRAMA I. AT THE VERY END OF Back to Methuselah Lilith, the creator of Adam and Eve, surveys the descendants of her progeny in the year 31,920 A.D. and speaks of their yet uncompleted quest: . . . after passing a million goals. they press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force.! This is the ultimate vision which lies behind the Shavian dramathe desire to be freed from the restrictions of matter so that mind and spirit may soar unimpeded. Though his dramaturgical materials were to a considerable extent those of his theatrical contemporaries (as Martin Meisel has demonstrated extensively in his im~ portant study, Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theater), he endeavored to give these materials free play so that they might form themselves into new patterns thereby expanding the existing limits of the drama. Time and again Shaw ridiculed the plot construction technique of the well-made school of playwrights, contrasting this with his own method which was simply to "let the play write and shape itself, which it always does even when up to the last moment I do not see the way out."2 It is not surprising, therefore, that his plays are so diverse in structure and that the patterns they assumed became increasingly idiosyncratic as his career went on. From the outset his unorthodoxy outraged the theatre critics and it became a commonplace for them to assert that the plays were virtually devoid of the ,rudiments of dramatic structure. According, for example, to William Archer: From Man and Superman onwards ... Mr. Shaw tended more and more to drop all pretence at dramatic structure, to renounce everything resembling story or situation, and to make his plays consist of what might be called emotionalised discussions .... As time went on, in Getting Married, Misalliance and Heartbreak ! Back to Methuselah (London, 1931), p. 253. All quotations from Shaw's plays are taken from the standard edition published by Constable. 2 Back to Methuselah, "Postscript after Twenty-Five Years," p. 257. 276 1971 STAGECRAFT AND STRUCTURE 277 House~ it amused IVIr. Shaw to pour out his discussions in one gush, not only without any structure, but without any breathing space.3 "Emotionalised discussion" is a reasonably apt description of the mature Shavian disquisitory drama, but what Archer (and many other critics of his day) failed to appreciate was that this new type of play required an exceptionally high degree of technical skill to make it theatrically viable. Analysis of the stagecraft and sequential patterning of Getting Married~ Misalliance and Heartbreak House (which Profesor Eric Bentley has pointed out "form a trilogy of which the latest is the crown and culmination"4) demonstrates this and also reveals a progression from analytic to emblematic structure, a progression towards the free play of a passionate intellect responding to the great spiritual crisis of his age. II. Getting Married is the purest example of a discussion play in the Shavian canon (excepting, perhaps, the "Don Juan in Hell" interlude in Man and Superman), being entirely devoted to an examination of the subject summed up in the title. Though it does have a plot (several, in fact) this is of secondary importance for in this play, as Professor Bentley puts it, "the ideas are now becoming more dramatic than the events."5 The patterning of the play therefore is primarily designed to clarify not the plot but the progress of the discussion. Each of the characters represents a clearly-defined attitude to the institution of marriage. Shaw's basic strategy in the first half of the play is simply to feed these characters in progressively one by one until he has represented on stage a whole catalogue of objections to marriage as conceived by the Church of England in 1908. This buildup culminates in a discussion by the whole group aimed at drawing up a civil contract which would overcome their objections, but the attempt ends in stalemate with the group unable to agree on a single article. At this point the deus...