Too True to Be Good at the 1932 Malvern Festival

The Malvern Festival was established in 1929 by the founder and then director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Sir Barry Jackson. While the Festival began as an event solely dedicated to Shaw, Jackson's guiding philosophy of the Festival soon changed its direction in later seasons as Jackson sought to present a glorified sense of England's past to an audience of international visitors by means of an emphasis on lesser-known classics in English theater. This article explores the reception of Shaw's Too True to Be Good (1932) in this context to argue that Shaw's increasingly dystopian visions of England's future as depicted in his later plays clashed with Jackson's organization of the Festival and that Shaw's inclusion in the repertoire and presence in Malvern largely contributed to the Festival's failure in reconciling its images of the past and present.