A Bulletin for George Bernard Shaw

BARRY MORSE—ONCE A SHAVIAN, ALWAYS A SHAVIAN

By Anthony Wynn

In his lifetime, actor Barry Morse was destined to play more than 3,000 roles in film, television, radio, and on the stage. Born a Cockney boy in east London, he was a school dropout as a teen, but through a ‘series of flukes and coincidences,’ he discovered acting and at the age of fifteen auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).

Required to select audition pieces, one of the monologues Barry divined would work in his favor was an intense speech from near the end of George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan. He performed the speech by the chaplain who had been partly responsible for Joan being burned at the stake. In the play, the chaplain comes back onto the stage, having witnessed her execution, in a state of almost hysterical distress and remorse:

‘…I meant no harm. I did not know what it would be like… I let them do it. If I had known, I would have torn her from their hands. You don’t know. You madden yourself with words: you damn yourself because it feels grand to throw oil on the flaming hell of your own temper. But when it is brought home to you; when you see the thing you have done; when it is blinding your eyes, stifling your nostrils, tearing your heart, then—then—[Falling on his knees] O God, take away this sight from me! O Christ, deliver me from this fire that is consuming me! She cried to Thee in the midst of it: Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! She is in Thy bosom; and I am in hell for evermore…’

The piece, of course, gave Barry the chance to be intensely dramatic. He won entrance to RADA, winning the Leverhulme scholarship. One of the judges on that occasion was Dame Sybil Thorndyke who described his audition as ‘curiously touching.’ Barry later wondered, too, if it was somehow prophetic that he should have chosen a play by Shaw for his audition.

One of Barry’s first productions at RADA was George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, with Barry was cast in the role of the lion. Bernard Shaw himself was on the governing Council of the institution and would often come to rehearsals and performances by the students. Barry told the story of how Shaw, at an early rehearsal for Androcles, dressed in his exquisitely cut tweed suit, ‘lay on his back on the floor and waved his arms and legs back and forth in the air to show me how I was to behave as the lion, when—as he said—‘he wants his tummy tickled’.’ The young actor was quite impressed at how friendly and encouraging Shaw was to the students at RADA. He said, ‘we didn’t for a moment regard him as one of the most influential and famous people in the world—which he was, of course. We regarded him as this cheerful and extremely polite old chap who was, as it were, on our side.’

Following his graduation from RADA, Barry was hired by actor/manager Arthur Brough to work in repertory theatre in the English provinces. His first job was in Bradford, which was followed by stints in a dozen other repertory companies. This loose network of repertory theatres existed on the basis of being able to mount a new play every week, in most instances, with another play being rehearsed during the daytime. Some of the companies would even present two new plays, one on Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, and a second play Thursday-Friday-Saturday, while yet another play would be rehearsed during the day. Theatres would typically present two performances every evening—usually at 6:30 pm and 9:00 pm. The system was arranged in this way to try and compete with the cinemas, which would screen films in a similar manner. Barry remembers playing in Arms and the Man and Candida in repertory; however, he noted that as a rule Shaw’s plays were not often performed in the twice-nightly theatres. This was because Bernard Shaw consistently refused to allow cuts to be made to his plays, and most of them were longer than the twice-nightly schedule allowed.

After the war, Barry played London’s Q Theatre in Shaw’s ‘wonderfully witty’ short play A Village Wooing, which he said made a marvelous double-bill alongside the rather tragic Terrence Rattigan play The Browning Version. In 1951, the Morse family relocated to Canada where Barry immediately found work on stage and in radio. One of his earliest radio performances was in Candida in 1952. He was on the ground floor of the beginnings of the CBC, Canada’s first television service, and some of the earliest offerings to the public included works of Shakespeare and Shaw, including Macbeth and The Philanderer, both broadcast in 1955.

In 1957, Barry was invited to play the role of John Tanner in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman in Boston, the first of three productions of this play he would headline in Boston. Until that time, Man and Superman had never been done at full length in the USA. The play was one that Barry had always loved, and this production was directed by Jerome Kilty, at that time a well known character actor and director in New York. Kilty later wrote the successful play Dear Liar, based on the letters between Bernard Shaw and the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, which was first performed on television by Barry Morse and Zoe Caldwell, and broadcast in 1964.

As Barry noted, prior to 1957, the Don Juan in Hell sequence of Man and Superman had previously only been played in a kind of concert version, by the famous drama quartet of Charles Laughton, Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke, and Agnes Moorehead. However Barry, with actress Nancy Wickwire in the female lead, performed the entire play, which Barry said ‘was an immense challenge in terms of the length of the piece itself, and the complexity of it.’ It turned out to be great success with sellout crowds filling the outdoor theatre to capacity and beyond every night. Barry returned in 1959 for another production of Man and Superman, with Rosemary Harris as the female lead, and again in 1964 in a theatre constructed on Boston Common, right in the middle of the city. They built bleachers, like at a football game, around an open air stage. For this production, Barry’s leading lady was again the actress with whom he’d first played Man and Superman, Nancy Wickwire. Also in the cast, playing a relatively small part as the chauffeur, was a man who went on to become a sizable movie star—Roy Scheider.

Barry said of this performance, ‘It was a notable opening night, and we received extravagantly good reviews. They spoke warmly about the production as a whole and about me in particular. This was partly because, on our opening night, there was a sudden downpour of rain during the scene in Hell. In this scene, Don Juan in Hell, Don Juan is confronted by the Devil. So we were acting away as best we could, and this downpour of rain occurred. I wanted to protect dear Nancy Wickwire, who was dressed in rather off the shoulder period costume, from getting soaking wet. I happened to be wearing a quite voluminous cloak, which I draped around her, improvising a speech to the Devil saying, ‘Really! As well as everything else about your domain, your weather is quite intolerable!’ Of course that brought a huge round of applause from the audience, and the critics were very generous in applauding my quick wittedness. But it didn’t damage the production at all; the audience didn’t move and the shower of rain didn’t last very long.’

In 1965, Barry was offered, and accepted, an offer to become Artistic Director of The Shaw Festival of Canada for the 1966 season. He plunged into work on the Festival with full energy and enthusiasm, expanding it to nine weeks and three full length plays—Man and Superman, Misalliance and The Apple Cart. Barry again played the lead in the opening production, Man and Superman, for the fourth time in eight years. The season was a huge success, with sellout crowds and great reviews. He only committed for one season as Artistic Director due to his existing commitment to The Fugitive TV series—however, ten years later, following completion of another TV series, Space: 1999, Barry was able to accept an invitation to return for the 1976 season in order to direct a production of The Admirable Crichton by J.M. Barrie. By this time, the scope of plays produced at The Shaw Festival included anything written in Shaw’s own lifetime. In addition to directing one production, Barry played the role of ‘Sir George Crofts’ in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, opposite Kate Reid, in another.

On television, in addition to the 1964 production of Dear Liar, Barry also performed the voice of Shaw for a biographical film about George Bernard Shaw, called George Bernard Shaw: Who The Devil Was He?, in 1965. A few years later (after directing Eli Wallach and Milo O’Shea in the groundbreaking Broadway production of Staircase and appearing on the Great White Way himself in 1969’s Hadrian VII), Barry traveled France to shoot the joint CBC/BBC film of The Wit and World of G. B. Shaw. He described it as ‘a quite remarkable attempt to line up against some of the actual locations what Shaw had written about the horrors of the First World War. We were based in the town of Arras—which was the closest town at various times to the front lines. It is surrounded by thousands and thousands of graves.’ Barry had a moving experience there, when he stood in the trenches, not far from where his father served, and realized just how close together the Allied and German lines were. Barry said, ‘We shot a sequence in which I played the Devil in Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell from Man and Superman. We started on a high crane shot, shooting across acres and acres of these white crosses in the war battlefield graveyards. In this opening shot it looked as if the whole surface of the Earth was covered with nothing but these crosses. As we zoomed in to a particular group of crosses, I popped up from behind one of them in the character of the Devil and said, ‘Have you walked up and down upon the Earth lately? I have; and I have examined Man’s wonderful inventions…’.’ He proceeded to give the speech from Don Juan in Hell which describes the destructiveness of humankind.

Barry once talked about one of the finest productions of Shaw’s Pygmalion that he had seen performed; it was staged at the Nottingham Playhouse in England in the early 1980s. His wife, actress Sydney Sturgess, was playing the role of ‘Mrs. Higgins’, and ‘Professor Higgins’ was played by John Neville. But of ‘Eliza’, Barry said, ‘I’ve never seen an Eliza as good as this one. She was played by the then relatively unknown daughter of Sam Wannamaker, the young Zoë Wannamaker. She made the play wonderfully effective by virtue of taking Shaw’s description of Eliza Doolittle very seriously and literally. Shaw indicates, among other things, that ‘she needs the services of a dentist’ and that she is very, very unappetizing in every conceivable way. So when Professor Higgins takes her on and undertakes to have her be accepted as a so-called lady, he seems to be attempting the utterly impossible. That is, of course, what makes the play! It is hardly ever properly done in this way. The play, like all great plays, is essentially a suspense play. We should be saying to ourselves when Professor Higgins takes on Eliza Doolittle, ‘He’s raving balmy! He’ll never be able to make anything out of her. She smells, she’s filthy, her teeth are rotting, she’s got scabs on her neck; she’s about as unpromising as any human being could possibly be.’ Well, then, now they’ve got somewhere to go with the piece.’

Barry continued, ‘Of course there are all sorts of productions of that play, including a rather unfortunate one I was associated with in New York, where the Eliza was terribly miscast. Then there was poor Audrey Hepburn in the film My Fair Lady, the musical adaptation of Pygmalion. She wasn’t waiting for Professor Higgins to re-make her; she was just waiting for someone to come along with the glamorous clothes! She had a little obligatory smudge on her cheek and a little triangular tear in her apron, but she was thoroughly personable and absolutely delectable and delicious! So where’s the play? Where’s the suspense? Where’s the situation? But the Nottingham Playhouse production of Pygmalion turned out to be very worthwhile and I very much enjoyed seeing it.’

In the final two decades of his life, Barry was in a number of Shaw and Shaw-related productions, including the 1992 London production of The Philanderer at the Hampstead Theatre, where, for the first time, the complete play was performed, including the previously un-produced fourth act, which, Barry noted, ‘makes the play infinitely more satisfying.’ He debuted several new plays based on the life of Bernard Shaw, including Mollykins, which was an examination of the charming, almost romantic, friendship which grew between Shaw and a young American would-be actress called Molly Tompkins, whom he called as a pet name, Mollykins. He also performed in The Private Life of George Bernard Shaw, by Elizabeth Sharland, which examined Shaw’s relationships with many of the ladies in his life. Barry played Shaw at all ages, from 29 to 94, and the women in Shaw’s life were played by eight different actresses. He also performed in Shavian Sextet, a piece about Shaw, his works, and his philosophies.

In 1998 he assumed leadership of the Shaw Society of London, serving as President of the group until his death. Barry had been a member for some 50 years, virtually since the establishment of the organization. In a great Shavian start to the new millennium, Barry was invited in 2000 to play Shaw in the BBC radio production The Playwright and The Prizefighter, based on the correspondence between the heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and George Bernard Shaw. The role of Gene Tunney, interestingly, was portrayed by his youngest son, Jay Tunney.

One of Barry’s final stage performances was in the play Bernard and Bosie: A Most Unlikely Friendship by Anthony Wynn. Barry described it as ‘a marvelously well put-together piece about the quite improbable friendship between George Bernard Shaw and Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, the intimate friend of Oscar Wilde.’ It was performed in London and later in Sarasota, Florida in 2004, for the International Shaw Society. In his memoir, Barry related that it was ‘my dear son Hayward Morse who played opposite me as Bosie Douglas. He is a marvelous actor and was most sensitive and imaginative in the part. The audience reception to the piece in the US of A was quite extraordinary.’

Barry once replied quite rightly, when asked about Shaw, that he had ‘been a dedicated Shavian for as long as I’d been in our profession.’ So it’s wonderfully ironic—perhaps even Shavian—to note that even as Barry began his long and varied career with George Bernard Shaw; his final work, and last public appearance was also related to Shaw. He attended and chaired a meeting of the Shaw Society of London at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, on Friday, January 25, 2008, just days before his passing.

Barry Morse himself best summed up his life’s work, when he said, ‘I like to think of myself, as I always have, as one of the rank and file. I believe the best qualifications for an actor are the perception of a child, the faith of a martyr, and the constitution of an ox. I’ve always tried to be as many-faceted an actor as Edmund Kean, who dominated the stage 120 years ago. In one evening’s performance, Kean began by singing a few comic songs; played all the roles in King Lear; played a short farce; and wound up by doing an acrobatic turn, Jocko, The Chimpanzee. Now, there was a real actor! My ambition has always been to be an actor’s actor. I’m not particularly grand or choosy about whether I play king-size parts, or leading parts.’

BARRY MORSE

June 10, 1918 – February 2, 2008

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Additional memories from Barry Morse of his experiences both with George Bernard Shaw and with Shaw’s plays can be found in his 2007 theatrical memoir, Remember with Advantages (McFarland and Company).

He can also be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tqHl0yfP6Y&feature=related and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFHdzdnvdvQ&feature=related.

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