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March
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Transferred to www.oscholars.com with minor revisions January 2009 |
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The Associate Editor of THE OSCHOLARS with responsibility for helping
with this issue of SHAVINGS was Julie
A. Sparks of the Department of English, University of Arkansas-Monticello. |
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Subscribers to this Journal have their names printed in bold, and can
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1.
The Plays
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In this section we shall try to cover productions of Shaw’s pre-1901
plays, and news of productions of these (with offers of review) will be most
welcome. The plays are Arms and the Man (1894), Cæsar and
Cleopatra (1898), Candida (1895), Captain Brassbound’s
Conversion (1899), The Devil’s Disciple (1897), The Man of
Destiny (1895), Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893), The Philanderer
(1893), Widowers’ Houses (1892), You Never Can Tell (1895). (Dates
of composition, not first performance.) Wilde is known to have
attended the first night of Arms and the Man (20th April 1894). |
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There will be a production of Arms and the Man at the Studio
Theatre of the College of New Jersey, Ewing NJ, 20th,
21st, 22nd, 27th, 28th February & 1st & 2nd March.
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Raina |
Elizabeth Livingston |
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Captain Bluntschli |
Kurt Penney |
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Major
Petkoff |
Tom Moffit |
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Sergius |
Saraniss Kyle Tinnes |
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Louka |
Janet Quartarone |
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Nicola |
Dale Simon |
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Soldier |
Anthony Pirrotti |
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The Shaw Season at Niagara-on-the-Lake,
Ontario, has been announced. The plays for 2003 will be Widowers’
Houses (15th May to 4th October) and Misalliance (10th April to 2nd
November) .
You
Never Can Tell opened at the Chemainus
Theatre, Vancouver on the 14th February and runs
to the 5th April.
Starring Bernard Cuffling, John Innes, and John
Krich.
Michael Friend has staged a number of
Shaw’s plays at Shaw’s Corner, Ayot St Lawrence. Full details of all the
productions, cast lists, photographs, and touring plans for 2003, can be found
at Error! Hyperlink reference not valid..
Saint Joan will be produced in July.
2.
Shawlines
In this section we will print all the news
that we find or, better still, are sent. We especially welcome news of
Shaw on curricula.
We also wish to record articles and papers
relating to the earlier Shaw, and news of new editions of Cashel Byron’s
Profession (1886), An Unsocial Socialist (1887), The
Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), Love Among the Artists (1900), as
well as other related material.
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ANNOUNCING THE ‘INTERNATIONAL SHAW
SOCIETY’ Richard Dietrich writes This is to announce the founding of the ‘International
Shaw Society’ (ISS) and to invite your participation. This is the story. On August 24th 2002, 21 people
gathered at a ‘Shaw Summit’ at The Shaw Festival in Niagara–on–the–Lake,
Ontario, and at the conclusion of a three–hour meeting, which I chaired, we
agreed to the formation in principle of the ‘International Shaw Society,’
which will provide a means for those interested in the life, times, and
career of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw to organize their activities
and interests and exchange information. We also agreed to meet again
at the same place about a year hence and to invite anyone else interested to
attend.
Our principal task between now and next August 20th is
to establish a database of addresses. If you are interested in
joining us, please fill out the poll form below, print it out, apply
scissors, and return it to the address below as soon as possible (or just
copy and paste it into a fresh e-mail). You may have to save it to
your hard drive first. For the time being, the ISS will operate as an informal,
voluntary, non–dues–paying organization, but the chief item on the August
20th agenda will be to decide whether the ISS should or should not become a
legally–incorporated, dues–paying, not–for–profit organization. Regardless of whether the ISS is incorporated or
not, at the August 20th meeting we will attempt to arrive at bylaws and
procedures and elect officers and committees. Until then, we will be
guided by two starter committees: our Steering Committee (Alan Andrews,
Leonard Conolly, Bernard Dukore, Anthony Ellis, John Pfeiffer, Gale
Larson, Lagretta Lenker, Michel Pharand, Julie Sparks,
Rodelle Weintraub, Don Wilmeth, and myself, Dick Dietrich) and our
Advisory Board (Sidney Albert, Ronald Bryden, Charles A. Carpenter, T. F.
Evans, Dan H. Laurence, Barry Morse, Rhoda Nathan, and Stan
Weintraub). We hope to see you at the August 20th meeting (details
to be announced in July). In the meantime, please take a look at the
ISS website at http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/
~dietrich/iss.htm and give us feedback on it. Now, please copy, paste, print and fill out the form
below and send it by snail mail to the address below or copy and paste it
into a return e-mail. Thank you. Richard F. Dietrich Chair, ISS Steering Committee
R. F. Dietrich English Department, University of
South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620 PHONE: (813) 974–4025 or 920–2986.
FAX: (813) 926–9814 POLL OF INTEREST IN THE ‘INTERNATIONAL SHAW SOCIETY’ NAME: ADDRESS: PHONE #: E-MAIL ADDRESS: INSTITUTIONAL AFFILIATIONS: Please list other people who might be interested in the
ISS that you think might have been overlooked in our mailing and, if
possible, include their addresses (email preferred). If you know of
anyone interested in Shaw who has not received this announcement, please
pass it on. Will you be attending the August 20th meeting at the
Shaw Festival in Ontario? (Yes No
Maybe) Please feel free to print out and copy this form, and
please post it where it will do the most good and/or distribute it to
whomever you think might be interested (such as graduate students in English
and Theater). Thank you, again. |
The Dublin
Writers Museum will hold an exhibition devoted to Shaw and to Sean O’Casey
throughout March 2004. If any readers have memorabilia that they are
willing to lend, under the usual guarantees of security, insurance and proper
curatorial care, please contact us.
Just published:
Wong, Linda Pui-ling. ‘A New Reading of G. B. Shaw in a
Chinese Context.’ Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities:
Conference Proceedings. CD-ROM. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii-West Oahu, 2003.
ISSN#1541-5899.
3.
REVIEW
Mrs Warren’s Profession. Directed by Sir Peter Hall.
Strand Theatre, London, 18th January 2003 (matinee)
Joseph W. Donohue
This is one of the best
revivals of a Shaw play I have ever seen. It has been intermittently the
critical fashion to denigrate this play for its somewhat clumsy structure, but
Peter Hall has discovered—or newly revealed—the secret of its continued life:
the authenticity of its probing analysis of the ills of a capitalist society,
coupled with the authentic presentation of the deeply passionate feelings of
two women caught in the snares of capitalist exploitation, each of whom must
seek and find her own way to survive it all. There should be a more,
terse, elegant way to express this idea, but that’s the idea, all the same.
Peter Hall’s programme essay, ‘The Plays That Were Never Written’,
comes down hard on the two hundred-plus years of theatrical censorship in
England, during which time the Lord Chamberlain had unimpeachable power over
the fate of all plays submitted for required censorship. Hall blames the
dearth of great plays over this long period on governmental stifling of
dramatic creativity. He doesn’t add that censorship cannot long succeed
unless acquiesced to and endorsed by the society upon which it is
imposed. Managers from Colley Cibber to George Alexander and beyond were
firmly opposed to lifting the iron rule of the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of
Plays, until 1968, when censorship was finally abolished. Hall makes a
great thing of censorship, causing to be projected onto the Strand act curtain
the following legend, visible at the beginning of each of the four scenes of
the play—
Mrs Warren’s Profession
by Bernard Shaw
Written 1893
Banned until 1925
—and beneath it, a series of
quotations from Shaw’s prefaces to the play, shown one by one at the beginning
of each act or scene, of which the following is typical:
All censorships exist to prevent anyone from
challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress
is initiated by challenging current conceptions and executed by supplanting
institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the
removal of censorships. There is the whole case against censorships in a
nutshell.
What Hall proceeds to do, if I read his approach to the play
correctly, is to take it as his job to bring out the real emotional truth, in
all its depth and complexity, of what happens, not just to the creative forces
of the dramatist, but to the lives and fates of women, in this particular
instance, exploited on the one hand and, on the other, condemned never to
speak out against the oppression and suppression under which they live and
suffer. It is not a giant step from this perception to the realization
that censorship is a necessary and true part of the apparatus of a repressive
and exploitative capitalism. One does not usually see Hall extolled as a
champion of political radicalism; and he might reply to this, if asked, that
he is simply staging what lies all too apparent in Shaw’s text. Fair
enough. Structural imperfections aside (an example: the transparent ruse
of there being only six sets of cutlery at Mrs Warren’s cottage; hence, two
persons have to sit out supper until a second sitting, so that those two persons
can have a dramatically relevant conversation), this is a brilliant play for
its pairing of two women, mother and daughter, each of whom has the right to
explain herself to the other, and does—less than half way through the play—a
right denied by conventional society, which will not hear such ‘unpleasant’
things, but a right conferred by the radical dramatist Shaw. Hall makes
it his business, in other words, to show us censorship working simultaneously
both inside the play, as part of the dramatic fiction, and outside it, in the
long, baneful history of dramatic art from 1737 to 1968. This is not the
whole story, of course, but as a means of focusing our attention on the play,
its characters and its insistent theme, it works exceedingly well.
And so all the materials for an absorbing afternoon in the theatre (a
nice petty irony: Mrs Warren’s Profession as a Saturday matinee) are
here. They are fully, even brilliantly realized by six fine actors in
this production, two of whom are making their West End debuts: Rebecca Hall as
Vivie Warren (she is Peter Hall’s daughter) and Laurence Fox as Frank Gardner,
both very well suited to their roles and both, let me venture to say, likely
to launch fine, productive careers with these performances. Peter Blythe
was an expertly fey Praed, a dapper, mannered dandy whom a stiff wind might
blow away; Richard Johnson as Sir George Crofts, the very image of a corrupt,
cynical man of the world; James Saxon, as a blubbery Rev. Samuel Gardner,
whose outsize double chin almost obscures his Roman collar—all do very well in
supporting roles.
Brenda Blethyn is exceptionally fine and resonant as Mrs Warren,
buxom, amply corseted, beautifully coiffed, sumptuously well dressed and
evidently able to afford the most expensive milliner in town; for all that,
she still bears many traces, including linguistic ones, of her origins in a
fish shop near the Mint. She is, as Frank ungenerously observes, a ‘caution’.
She is that, all right, and is nonetheless a commanding presence who manages
any and every man in sight, but is finally no match for her daughter.
Rebecca Hall’s Vivie is a masterly creation by an actress who makes up
in deeply felt truthfulness and genuine emotion what she lacks in
experience. In fact, it’s difficult to tell whether what we see is a
freshness resulting from inexperience or a freshness expertly acted by a
performer already able, competent, and beautifully present and focused.
In fact, Vivie is Shaw’s first really first-rate characterization of a
type quite central to his habitual interests as a dramatist: a character,
vital, intelligent and promising but naive and too trusting of the world, who
is thrust into a situation of a rude awakening, or sometimes of
disillusionment, and who responds by adopting a new view of the world that
accords much better with what she finds is really the case. This is what
happens to Vivie—and to Barbara Undershaft, and Ellie Dunn, and Joan, along
with many others. It is, finally, Shaw’s perennial subject.
This centrality is evident, poignantly and painfully so, in this
play. The pain is quite real. The first stage of Vivie’s awakening
is staged in the late hours of an evening in Mrs Warren’s holiday cottage,
when Mrs Warren’s answer to Vivie’s impertinent question ‘Who are you, anway?’
tells Vivie more, much more, than she might ever want to know. Still
more is to be learned in Act II, scene one, in the Vicarage gartden, where
Croft, stung by Vivie’s curt refusal of his offer of marriage, blurts out the ‘truth’
(we are perhaps a bit incredulous, at this point, sensing Croft’s vindictive
tone) that Vivie and Frank are half-sister and -brother. It is only in
the last scene of the play that Vivie finds the courage to confront the
bitterest of all truths: that she and her mother must part and never meet
again.
Shaw, who loved the theatre in all its flamboyant excess, wrote a
whopper of a final scene for his two lead actresses, and Brenda Blethyn makes
the most of it, realizing despairfully the loss of the daughter on whom she
has counted to make her life worthwhile, fighting the inevitability of the
parting in grim, wailing tones, frightening and appalling in their
intensity. Bernhardt or Duse could have done that scene, and Mrs Patrick
Campbell could have countered either one of them well as Vivie. This is
acting on a grand scale, and Hall encourages his actors pull out all the
stops, notwithstanding the incongruity of the setting in the London City
chambers of Honoria Frasier, actuarial consultant (who is conveniently out of
the office for the day).
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Not, finally, in the same class with Arms and the Man, some of
the Court plays, Misalliance, and the brilliant work of Shaw’s post-war
maturity, Mrs Warren’s Profession has nonetheless had its share of
rewarding productions over the years. Granted, sometimes it appears
trailing the tell-tale residue of the ‘blue book’ dramatic tract, a condition
it perhaps can never shake off altogether. But it deserves much more
than the devoted attempt to make amends for early neglect that sometimes
undermines a well-intentioned revival. Hall will have none of
that. Not in the least apologetic for any supposed deficiencies, this
production had a vibrancy, a tautness, and a combination of seriousness and
brightness that captures an audience’s attention and holds it to the last. |
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Mr Praed: Peter Blythe, Vivie Warren: Rebecca Hall,
Mrs Warren: Brenda Blethyn, Sir George Crofts: Richard Johnson, Frank Gardner:
Laurence Fox, The Rev. Samuel Gardner: James Saxon. Designed by John
Gunter. Lighting by Hartley T. A. Kemp. First performance at this
theatre: 2nd October 2002. |
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4.
A Shaw Anthology
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Echoes of Oscar |
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Cashel Byron’s Profession was written some years before the
greater part of Wilde’s work was undertaken, but it reveals how Shaw was also
dipping into the same pool as Wilde. Here is Lydia Carew on railway
trains: |
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A train is a beautiful thing. Its pure white
fleece of steam harmonises with every variety of landscape. |
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This was said at Clapham Junction, where in November 1895 Wilde had
other things on his mind. |
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Cashel Byron’s Profession also has a prominent character called
Lord Worthington. Had it been written ten years later we would
have seized on this compound of John Worthing and Lord Darlington, while Wilde’s
Lady Roxton and Lady Plymdale seem to combine in Shaw’s Lady Roxdale (Widowers’
Houses) |
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John Cooper draws our attention to the following: |
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In this world there are two
tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The
last is much the worst. |
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There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire.
The other is to gain it. |
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5.
Bibliographies & Links
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GBS
for Wildëans: A Bibliography of 19th century Shaw. |
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This will be a cumulative bibliography as
references come to hand. |
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Beerbohm, Max: Around Theatres. London: Rupert Hart-Davis
1953. |
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This carries reviews of plays published in the Saturday
Review, namely The Devil’s Disciple (‘"G.B.S." at
Kennington’, 7th October 1899, pp.38-41; and the 1907 revival ‘Mr. Vedrenne’,
26th October 1907, pp.481-4); You Never Can Tell (12th May 1900,
pp.78-9); the 1901 reprint of Cashel Byron’s Profession (‘A Cursory
Conspectus of G.B.S.’, 2nd November 1901, pp.171-5); Mrs Warren’s
Profession (‘Mr Shaw’s Tragedy’, 1st February 1902, pp. 191-5); the 1907
revival of The Philanderer (9th February 1907 pp.449-51); and the 1908
revival of Arms and the Man (4th January 1908, pp.491-3). There
is also a review of the published edition of Three Plays for Puritans (The
Devil’s Disciple, Cæsar and Cleopatra and Captain Brassbound’s
Conversion) (‘Mr Shaw Crescent’, 26th January 1901, pp. 118-22). |
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Outside our current range are reviews of The
Doctors’ Dilemma, Getting Married, John Bull’s Other Island, Major Barbara,
Man and Superman, Misalliance, and Pygmalion. |
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Beerbohm, Max: More Theatres. London: Rupert Hart-Davis 1969.
This volume contains Beerbohm’s pieces for the Saturday Review that he
omitted from the first edition of Around Theatres (1924), an omission
followed in the 1953 edition. |
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This volume opens with three squibs against Shaw ‘G.B.S.
Oblige’ (9th April 1898, pp.17-21), ‘Mr Shaw’s Profession’ (14th May 1898,
pp.21-4) and ‘Mr Shaw’s Profession II’ (pp.25-7, 21st May 1898). These
contain allusions to Arms and the Man (p.25), Candida (p.26), Mrs
Warren’s Profession (pp.21-4, 25), Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (p.11),
The Devil’s Disciple (pp.21, 335), The Philanderer (p.21), Widowers’
Houses (21, 25), You Never Can Tell (pp.25, 26). |
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There are further references to Mrs
Warren’s Profession (p70), Arms and the Man (p267), Cæsar &
Cleopatra (p.271). |
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The volume also contains a review of Captain
Brassbound’s Conversion (29th December 1900, pp.335-7). From beyond
our period is The Admirable Bashville (pp.580-2). |
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Borsa, Mario: The English Stage of To-day. Translated from the
original Italian and edited with a prefatory note by Selwyn Brinton M.A.
London: John Lane The Bodley Head 1908. This has one chapter on
Shaw. |
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Chapter IV:
G.B.S. |
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Boyd,
Ernest A.: Appreciations and
Depreciations, Irish Literary Portraits. Dublin: Talbot Press & London: T. Fisher Unwin
1919. This has one chapter on Shaw. |
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Chapter V: An Irish Protestant, Bernard Shaw. |
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Innes, Christopher (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard
Shaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998. This
contains four essays on the younger Shaw: |
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Gordon, David J.: Shavian Comedy and the Shadow
of Wilde; |
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Jackson,
Holbrook: The Eighteen Nineties. 1913. Pelican Books
1939. This contains a chapter devoted to Shaw. |
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Chapter XIV:
Enter G.B.S. |
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Kennedy, J.M. English
Literature 1880-1905. London: Stephen Swift 1912. This
contains one chapter on Shaw. |
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Chapter VI: George Bernard Shaw. |
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Laurence,
Dan H.: Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters
1874-1897. London: Max Reinhardt 1965. |
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Laurence, Dan H.: Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1898-1910.
London: Max Reinhardt 1972. |
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Meisel, Martin: Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theater.
Princeton University Press 1963; new edition New York: Limelight Editions 1984
ISBN 0-87910-017-6. |
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Morgan, A.L.: Tendencies of Modern English Drama. London: Constable
1924. This contains three chapters on Shaw: |
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Chapter VI.
Shaw the Iconoclast–Dramatic Iconoclast |
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– and
covering a later period than the pre-1901 Shaw, the following should be
mentioned: |
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Hyde, Mary (ed.): Bernard Shaw and Alfred Douglas, A Correspondence. London: John Murray 1982. |
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The following bring together
Shaw and Wilde: |
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Bader, Earl Delbert: ‘The
Self-Reflexive Language: uses of Paradox in Wilde, Shaw and Chesterton .’ Ph.
D. dissertation. Indiana University 1962. |
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·
We welcome additions and corrections, and would
much like to hear from any of the writers still living. |
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A list of websites kindly
provided by Richard
Dietrich (University of South
Florida): |
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BERNARD
SHAW SOCIETY WEB SITE (see illustration below): |
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UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA SHAW SERIES
WEB SITE: |
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SHAW BIZNESS WEB SITE: |
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INTERNATIONAL SHAW SOCIETY WEB SITE: |
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THE SHAW FESTIVAL |
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA SHAW
CONFERENCE 2004 AT SARASOTA: |
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BRITISH DRAMA 1890-1950: |
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6.
SHAW ASSOCIATIONS
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The Bernard Shaw Society may be reached at P.O. Box 1159, Madison
Square Station, New York, N.Y. 10159-1159 |
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The Society publishes The Independent Shavian. |
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The Independent Shavian appears
three times a year and is sent to all members of the Bernard Shaw Society at
no charge as part of their membership dues. |
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·
The Irish Shaw Society maintains no
website but may be contacted through the Hon. Secretary, Mrs Breda O’Brien, 59
Ludford Park, Ballinteer, Dublin 16 (no e-mail) |
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7.
TAILPIECE
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‘Most of the distinguished personalities of the Eighteen Nineties
challenged somebody or something. George Bernard Shaw challenged
everybody and everything’ |
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—
Holbrook Jackson: The Eighteen Nineties. |
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To return to our hub
page, click |
