My Dear Loraine: Bernard Shaw's Letters to an Actor ed. by L.W. Conolly (review)

The letters included in this collection, meticulously edited by L. W. Conolly, illuminate facets of an important relationship for Shaw which was his friendship with the British actor Robert Loraine (1876-1935). There are twenty-five letters included, fourteen of which have never been previously published, in whole or in part. Winifred Loraine quotes the remaining eleven in her 1938 biography of her husband, Robert Loraine: Soldier, Actor, Airman, although as Connolly states, there are significant omissions and inaccuracies. Relying on this biography, Dan Laurence also included five of these letters in his Collected Letters.: 1911-1925.

Shaw's relationship with Loraine was turbulent and the letters included in this collection clearly reflect this. Loraine's direct participation in the First World War – as a twice-wounded pilot in the Royal Flying Corps – appears to have been a point of contention between the two men. Shaw's compassion for his friend on the one hand, and his vigorous criticism of the politics behind the conflict on the other, exemplify his complicated and tempestuous relationship with the war. Shaw ends one letter insisting that Loraine "[is] going too far with this silly soldiering" (24). In another notable exchange, Shaw maintains his sense of humour to console Loraine after the actor suffered a serious leg injury before proceeding to insist, in strong terms, that walking with a limp should not deter Loraine from pursuing acting opportunities: "there is … no reason why an actor should, like a Roman Catholic priest, be perfect in all his members in order to discharge his function" (31). These remarkable claims alongside Shaw's well-documented views on gender, sexuality and war require some reflection in the continuing debates and controversies around Shaw's involvement with the eugenics movement.

Shaw also offers his friend extensive guidance on writing. The third letter in this collection not only reflects Shaw's fondness for Loraine, but also reveals aspects of Shaw's writing process. Shaw's advice to Loraine supports Fintan O'Toole's assertion made in his 2017 book Judging Shaw: The Radicalism of GBS that Shaw "took an iconoclastic hammer to all the elaborations of nineteenth century prose" (94). Similarly, Shaw advises his friend that all he needs to do when writing his book is "simply to recollect and trust to [his] native faculty for dramatic narrative without (for God's sake) any conscious exploitation of it" (20).

My Dear Loraine begins with a previously unpublished letter that reveals, in similar ways to Shaw's correspondence with Harley Granville Barker, Shaw's pragmatism. According to Shaw, Loraine's fees are too high for any repertory theatre, effectively rendering the actor unemployable. Indeed, as Conolly explains, there are many similarities in Shaw's relationship with Loraine to his friendship with Barker. Letter 12 is another in which Shaw provides scrupulous and detailed directions to a practitioner involved in staging his drama, just as he does in his correspondence with Barker. Other key figures in Shaw's life also appear in these letters including Mrs Patrick Campbell; in a particularly comical passage, Shaw claims that her "sole notion of lighting is a spot lime in the glare of which her face flattens out into a white plate with two plums on it" (61).

This is a lively and engaging read, as is usually the case with Shaw's correspondence. Conolly's notes are extensive and often help to explain and contextualise the letters. Shaw's correspondence with Loraine should provide valuable insights for both Shavian scholars and historians of twentieth-century theatre.