Shaw on London Dramaturgy: A Review Essay

Shaw on London Dramaturgy: A Review Essay John A. Bertolini Middlebury College Bernard Shaw: The Drama Observed. 4 volumes Edited with an Introduction. Bernard F. Dukore University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. liv + 1528 pp. $225 ACOLLEAGUE OF MINE, who recently had occasion to research the performance history of Antony and Cleopatra, remarked that reading the reviews of the play written prior to Shaw was pretty heavy going, but that when he came to Shaw, he felt at once in the presence of a critic with an individual voice, a genuine point of view, a bracing style, and with something substantial to say about the play. Certainly, the four volumes of The Drama Observed, a collection of Shaw's drama criticism, well annotated, introduced, selected and edited by Bernard Dukore, confirms all those virtues and makes clearer than ever before how specific Shaw's motives were in writing play reviews. Above all else, Shaw fought to have the drama restored to the position of work of art, of literature. He wanted plays to be taken as seriously as novels and poetry were, and his chief exemplar for serious drama was Ibsen, who is in effect the epic hero of The Drama Observed. As I see it, there are three chief advantages to the publication of these volumes: the first is the sheer pleasure to be found in Shaw's exuberant prose, his sense of humor and personality coming across in technicolor; the second is the valuable portrait it provides mainly of the London theatrical scene in the 1890s; the third, however, is the most valuable, for, thanks to this collection in which Professor Dukore has gathered many previously scattered pieces and added them to Shaw's own collec70 ELT 38 :1 1995 tion, Our Theatre in the Nineties, it is now possible to see clearly the formation of Shaw's ideas about playwrighting. I wUl deal with this value first. Almost uncannily, the collection begins with an 1880 review of The Merchant of Venice at the Lyceum with Henry Irving in the lead. Shaw wrote the review when he was twenty-four years old, yet it contains all the rest of his thinking about theatre (rather the way The Comedy of Errors is the matrix of aU Shakespeare's subsequent plays). The first sentence sounds as U Shaw had taken Henry James as his model, for it is not (yet) the lucid prose style of Shaw's years on the Saturday Review: During a phase of taste to suit which all intelligible fictions are obscured by farfetched interpretations, a theory representing Shakespeare as a morbid creator of sombre and preposterous figures has been offered to the public by Mr Henry Irving. Shaw proceeds from this Jamesian misstep to a sure-footed and total attack on IrVUIg1S interpretation of Shylock's character, using Shakespeare 's text as a stick to beat Irving's Shylock shtick. Two things can be seen from this: Shaw considers Shakespeare his own; and Shaw rushes to defend an author against a director's or actor's interpretation. Shaw would in later IUe carry on this battle over his own plays. He saw no virtue in directors and actors making their own creative contribution to a play against the author's express wishes regarding the interpretation of his characters. The final sentences of the review sum up Shaw's position (and say goodbye to the Jamesian contortions): Even without adaptation, the works of our famous dramatist are not without interest, for he was not ignorant of the mystery of stage effect. Mr Irving calls his arrangement of the Merchant an 'acting version.' What does he call the original? I like that last line particularly because it so neatly punctures Irving's smugness about applying the actor's touch to Shakespeare. Ah, where is a Shaw nowadays to puncture a Peter Sellars for setting Nozze di Figaro in Trump Towers to make it more relevant to today's audiences! AU theatrical performances of classics today should carry the label: 'Warning, this play has been formatted by the director and actors to fit their prejudices." At least that would be more honest than the current practice of patting...