What Makes Johnny Run? Shaw's Man and Superman as a Pre-Freudian Dream Play

"What makes Johnny run?" What makes Johnny run is what makes Man and Superman run. This pre-absurdist play seems deliberately to make no sense. In the first act, what we might now call a Rolls-Royce radical has been named guardian of Ann Whitefield, a young woman who is old enough not to require a guardian and with whom he and his friend, Octavius—also known as "Ricky-Ticky-Tavy"—grew up in a brother-sister relationship, although they are unrelated. Now not only is he emotionally Ann's brother, he has become in effect her father.

On 2 July 1901, Shaw drafted an outline and cast list for "The Superman, or Don Juan's great grandson's grandson." Among the characters who are omitted from the final text of Man and Superman are John Tanner's parents: George Whitefield Tenorio and Mrs. Whitefield Tenorio (Berst 201-2).¹ There is no suggestion in Man and Superman that John Tanner is also a Whitefield and in some way actually related to Ann; yet in those intriguing preliminary notes, there is a hint that Shaw was considering, even if not consciously, the suggestion of an incestuous relationship between Ann Whitefield and John Tanner. When in the second act he realizes it is he, not Octavius, whom Ann is determined to marry, Tanner flees in the first automobile ever to be put on the stage.

The next act opens in the Sierra Nevada. A group of brigands is headed by Mendoza, a lovesick Jewish London waiter whose Louisa has rejected him in anti-Semitic England because she is not good enough for him. His brigands, all but one of whom are also British, include an anarchist and socialists who argue about which type of socialism is more correct and who are dressed more for cold London streets than for Spain. Their political argument is interrupted when they carjack John and his chauffeur, Straker. 'Enry Straker, who has a polytechnic degree and should be an engineer, not a chauffeur, is the brother of Mendoza's Louisa and is more proud of his dropped Haitches than the gentlemen are of their Oxbridge accents.

Night falls and John and Mendoza dream. In the "Don Juan in Hell" dream scene, Mendoza is the Devil, John is Don Juan, Ann Whitefield is Doña Ana, and her other guardian, the elderly Roebuck Ramsden, is her father. The four debate ideas about heaven and hell, happiness and fulfillment, life and death, and with the exception of the last line of the dream—Doña Ana's exclaiming, "A father—a father for the superman"² (689)—there seems so little connection to the frame play that this long scene can be, and has been, played as a separate, complete drama. In drafting the play, Shaw also gave Ann's line to John (Berst, 201), but in the completed play John says, instead, "Is there a father's heart as well as a mother's?" (729). Shaw wrote the Hell scene interlude before he wrote the social comedy that is the frame play (Berst, 202). The frame play can also be played without the Hell scene. When the five-hour drama is played in its entirety, it is often broken for a supper break, as is opera at Glynnebourne.

The third act ends with the arrival of Ann and party, three men and two women, in the company of an armed escort. It is inconceivable that the group of five, in addition to the unmentioned and unseen but inevitable chauffeur, has managed to get there in Hector's American steam car. The travelers' original plan was to head for Nice, northeast of Granada. Hector says, "When we found you were gone, Miss Whitefield bet me a bunch of roses my car would not overtake yours before you reached Monte Carlo." To Tanner's "But this is not the road to Monte Carlo," Hector replies, "No matter. Miss Whitefield tracked you at every stopping place: she is a regular Sherlock Holmes" (692). The utter impossibility of her having...