"Shaw Among the Actors: Theatrical Additions to Plays Unpleasant"

(tSHAW AMONG THE ACTORS: THEATRICAL ADDITIONS TO PLAYS UNPLEASANT" ON THE 13th March, 1897, Shaw wrote to Ellen Terry: I am being pressed to publish my plays. I think I will, and give up troubling the theatre. Shaw had indeed been troubling the theatre; or, to be more precise, the theatre had been troubling him. The history of his production failures had been a dismal one: Widowers' Houses had enjoyed only a two night run, and had been hissed and booed; The Philanderer~ rejected first by J. T. Grein, was refused later by Charles Wyndham, and later still, after much letterwriting, by Richard Mansfield. Mrs. Warren's Profession was banned by the censor. Arms and the Man~ on the face of it an astonishing exception, was produced at a net loss of about £4,000. Candida was refused by Mansfield, after an argument which stretched Shaw's geniality almost to the breaking-point, and was later turned down by Wyndham. The Man of Destiny was finally sent back to Shaw by Irving, after another protracted quarrel. And You Never Can Tell, under Cyril Maude's direction, collapsed during rehearsal, and had to be withdrawn. In the summer of 1897, Shaw began extensive revisions to his first three plays. Of these only Widowers' Houses had appeared before in printed form, in 1893; in which year the other two, The Philanderer and Mrs. Warren's Profession had been written, probably remaining in manuscript until Charlotte Payne-Townshend typed them. But although he was now contemplating a reading public for his plays, Shaw was not yet prepared to give up "troubling the theatre" in another sense: for he had spent three of the four years since 1893 as a full-time drama critic on the staff of The Saturday Review; and it is evident that significant revisions to his work were suggested by particularly successful stage scenes witnessed by him during this period . Shaw's debt in respect of staging is primarily observable in the Stage Directions; the most striking addition to the three plays in Plays Unpleasant being the enormous expansion of these, a novelistic treatment which was to become a feature of Shaw's playwriting. He was, after all, interested in a reading public; and he had the example before him of the many stage dramatisations the work of Dickens which were then current: 264 1971 SHAW AMONG THE ACTORS 265 One facility offered to the stage by Dickens is a description of the persons of the drama so vivid and precise that no actor with the faintest sense of character could mistake the sort of figure he has to present, even without the drawings of Browne and Barnard to help him out.! This points to a second, and more pressing, reason for the meticulous care Shaw took with the movements and physical expressions of his characters in 1898: his intense dissatisfaction with the available acting talent at that time, and his frankly expressed intention of making his plays "actorproof." Nobody has better reason than I have to feel the shortcomings of our present supply of actors.2 -he wrote in March 1896. And his increased Stage Directions in the first duet between Trench and Blanche in Widowers' Houses may be taken as typical of Shaw's fear that the parts might be misread or badly acted; as badly acted as those in the Daly version of Schonthau's Countess Gucki: These wretched lovers are supposed to be a dull, timid couple, too shy to come to the point; and as the luckless artists who impersonate them have no comic power, they present the pair with such conscientious seriousness that reality itself could produce nothing more insufferably tiresome.3 Consider the alterations in Shaw's script: 1893 T: One moment. I have something to say that may as well be said now. (Blanche sits) It is a mere folly, but if I leave it unsaid, I shall reproach myself and be miserable afterwards. I have no idea how you will receive thisit must seem horribly abrupt, but the circumstances do not admit of-the fact is, my utter want of experience (He flounders. She waits calmly.) Now, if it were Cokanel...