The Art of Shavian Political Drama

THE ART OF SHAVIAN POLITICAL DRAMA England, arise! the long, long night is over . . . THE UNEMPLOYED OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION of the thirties are singing these verses of Edward Carpenter outside number ten Downing Street at the close of B.ernard Shaw's On the Rocks "to a percussion accompaniment of baton thwacks." Straightway, one critic on the Left observed that "the play ends with the marchers outside the window singing 'England Arise!' which I understand is the theme song of Mosley's Black Shirts."l The playwright's conservative biographer, St. John Ervine, propounded an equally ingenious but dissimilar interpretation based on the second line of Carpenter's song, "Faint in the east behold the dawn appear." According to Ervine, "For G. B. S. the east was Russia, and the dawn was a dictator-dominated commune ."2 At the age of seventy-seven the Good Gray Fabian was still provoking gross misinterpretations of the political content of his drama. For a long time he was even unable to get a theatre in London for his 1933 "Political Comedy," as he subtitled On the Rocks. Evidently Ervine was not the only one to believe that this play "marks Shaw's most extreme stand against democracy,"3 despite what should have been plainly observable-that Shaw was probing, as he had done four years earlier in The Apple Cart, for some sort of alternative to the rule of big business as manipulated by venal and inept politicians. He was bent on demonstrating dramatically the warning voiced by Captain Shotover in Act III of Heartbreak House: "One of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks." The Captain meant by "skippers" the political pilots of Englandand by extension, of Western society. In The Apple Cart Shaw portrayed the capitalist quandary of the cabinet skippers getting patched up with a compromise effected by a superior man who happened to be a constitutional monarch. King Magnus just managed to avoid, 1 Robert Forsythe, "The Beauty of Silence," New Masses, 5 July 1938, p. 13. "Wolcott Gibbs in his review of On the Rocks in the New Yorker considers it a Communist play," according to Forsythe, who himself is certain that "without any doubt whatsoever, On the Rocks is a fascist play. In addition it stinks." 2 Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work and Friends (New York: William Morrow, 1956), p.553. 3 Ibid., p. 355. 324 1971 THE ART OF SHAVIAN POLITICAL DRAMA 325 or postpone, an upsetting of the cart. But in On the Rocks the aristocratic man who happens to be the Prime Minister fails to budge the ship of state from its position on the rocks. The change of metaphor in the two titles is ominously significant. Nevertheless, democracy is not the villain of either piece. Two years after writing On the Rocks~ Shaw in the preface to The Millionairess expressed with directness and scorn his opinions about adult suffrage and about the duly elected Labour and National governments . Although he there declared that he would favor "the most complete Communism and Democracy,"4 he recognized that no absolute (such as complete democracy) is possible of realization. What has come to pass in the actual world of the "sham-democracies" of the West, Shaw noted, is that "the financier and the soldier are the cocks of the walk; and democracy means that their parasites and worshippers carryall before them."5 It is, then, not democracy, but shamdemocracy (government that always supports profiteering, as Shaw's Prime Minister describes it) which the playwright exposes in On the Rocks. It was said of Shaw early in his career that he was attacking Shakespeare , despite the civilized understanding that only a boor would attack the Bard. Then it began to be more and more widely perceived that the real target of his missiles was "bardolatry." Shaw scored a point. Furthermore he attracted attention, with his levity and exaggeration , to what he was about. Just so, in his later years, he succeeded in attracting attention to his criticism of democracy-as it is perverted, in Shaw's socialistic view, under capitalist management. Throughout his adult life Bernard Shaw plumped for...