News for Theatergoers

News for Theatergoers

This collection of essays by the late Ronald Bryden offers a unique record of and perspective on the production of Shaw's plays. Most of the text is given over to the reprinting of Bryden's program notes for stagings of the works of GBS and his contemporary dramatists at Ontario's Shaw Festival. Such notes usually languish in the vast and largely neglected piles of theatrical ephemera—and often deservedly so. The program note is a tricky form: its author must illuminate the play in a very short space, focusing the audience member on the key ideas of the work and on the significance of its origins and historical context. Veteran theatergoers have experienced the badly written note: one whose author tries to cram a scholarly essay into the program or one written by someone with only a superficial understanding of the play, its creator, and its time. Bryden writes a good note: fluid in style, pithy in its reading of the play's ideas, effortless in its presentation of context.

Such qualities obviously benefit theatergoers who, in their seats, read the note before or after the play, or during intermission. What can be gained, therefore, from collecting and printing these items? They do not, after all, function as records of performance as do reviews. What they can bring to the reader is a kind of snapshot of a particular moment or place associated with the creation and meaning of the play—they offer a way into the individual Shavian drama. Take, for example, Bryden's note for the Shaw Festival's 1997 production of Mrs Warren's Profession. He devotes much of it to examining the significance of Shaw's London address at Fitzroy Square (bordered on the north side by Warren Street); he teases out the neighborhood's bohemian associations as "a kind of northern annex to Soho" (5), recalling such scandalous events as the Cleveland Street affair of the late 1880s, with its riveting accusations that upper-class men purchased sex from telegraph boys. Shaw's anti-sensational and domestic drama about prostitution owed a great deal, Bryden asserts, to location: Shaw's "personal slant," he suggests, "came from living at 29 Fitzroy Square" (6). Bryden's reading points us toward the manner in which Shaw's plays always keep one eye on theatrical convention and another on the everyday world. Bryden's obviously extensive knowledge of the theater and, more particularly, of Shaw's life and works allows him to conjure up useful points on each play, especially for those less accessible and more rarely produced (the essays on Captain Brassbound's Conversion and The Millionairess are noteworthy here). His note for The Apple Cart (Shaw Festival 2000) reads the play as the product of a moment when Shaw's politics were undergoing a shift as the influence of the Fabians weakened and Shaw was reading his plays instead to the likes of the Astors and their guests. Shaw's works for Barry Jackson's Malvern Festival, written at a time when he was passing through "the great world of celebrity and international affairs," all display "elements of that archetype of courtly entertainments, the masque" (45). This sharp focus on one moment, one path into the plays, makes the notes eminently useful to the theatergoer, and provocative for the scholar, who may find in them suggestions for further research into the plays.

While the heart of the book is the collection of notes on Shaw, two other sections make this a book-length work: essays on Shaw's contemporaries and a catch-all section entitled "Critic at Large." In his handling of Shaw's peers Bryden exhibits the same affection and deep consideration given to GBS. One finds here both the familiar (The Cherry...