Shaw's Stagecraft

I do not want actors and actresses to understand my plays. That is not necessary. If they will only pronounce the correct sounds I can guarantee the results.

--G. Bernard Shaw

[This article is an introduction to my book-in-progress concerning the stagecraft of Bernard Shaw. It will include interviews with actors and others who worked with the playwright during his early years in the theater.

As an actor-manager in England during the war, I acted, directed, and produced many plays by Bernard Shaw. It was during this time, shortly after I had produced Saint Joan, that I met the playwright. After the war, in 1947, I came to America, staged a production of Heartbreak House at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Walter Kerr, who was then head of the drama department there, encouraged me to write about Shaw's stagecraft, but as I had other professional commitments it took some years before I set out to write about Shaw's art as a playwright. However, I continued to be obsessed with what I had learned from Shaw about the "classic theatre tradition."

Before even attempting to write the book on Shaw's stagecraft, I believed that I should meet with those who had worked with him, to confirm my own ideas about his art as a playwright. In 1959, I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to do research on Shaw's stagecraft. This Fellowship allowed me to travel for some years, meeting and recording interviews with those who had worked closely with Shaw. I interviewed sixty-eight people, including the first Ann (Lillah McCarthy) and the first Octavius (Lewis Casson) in Man and Superman, the first Gloria (Margaret Halstan) in You Never Can Tell, the first Ellie (Ellen O'Malley) in Heartbreak House, and the first actresses to play the heroine in Saint Joan (Sybil Thorndike in England and Winifred Lenihan in the United States at its world premiere). I also interviewed Sir Barry Jackson, producer of many first productions of Shaw's plays, including Back to Methuselah, and Dame Edith Evans, who played the Serpent in that first production of Back to Methuselah as well as the first Hesione in Heartbreak House. I also interviewed Adeline Bourne, who was the first to play Ftatateeta in Caesar and Cleopatra. Added to this list are such names as Wendy Heller, Basil Dean, Christopher Fry, Ernest Thesiger, Marie Lohr, Wilfred Lawson, Miles Malleson, Leon Quartermaine, Iris Tree, Donald Wolfit, and Shaw's secretaries: Blanche Patch, Georgina Musters, and Ann Jackson. Overall, I logged more than a hundred hours of recordings.

There followed many months of residence at the MacDowell Colony in Petersborough, New Hampshire, where I began to transcribe some 400,000 words of interviews. All this material was acquired by The Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas Library in Austin. These tapes are available to scholars at the Center. As of now, I have transcribed forty of these interviews, but since they were first recorded on five-inch reels at low speed, many of them have had to be transferred to CDs for proper transcription. Much work needs to be done before the completion of my book. The following article narrates my own personal involvement in working with Shaw's plays and my understanding of his stagecraft as well as a transcription of my first interview with Sir Lewis Casson and Dame Sybil Thorndike. What they have to say elaborates upon my own views of Shaw's stagecraft.]

Discovering Bernard Shaw

I first saw Bernard Shaw striding down Sheep Street in Stratford-upon-Avon with his wife trotting amiably behind. It was my first season as an actor at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre; the year was 1934. I was an apprentice, one step up from being a spear-carrier. I walked on in half a dozen plays in a multitude of disguises and understudied everything. I was twenty-two, young for my age, and the wonder that is Shakespeare...