February
2008
|
THE RAZOR’S EDGE: A PAGE OF
REVIEWS
|
|
The Importance
of Being Wicked: The Devil's Disciple at the Irish Rep |
|
Review by Felicia
Bonaparte |
|
The Devil's Disciple. The Irish Repertory Theater, New York, 9th December 2007 (matinee). First performance 5th December 2007. Directed by Tony Walton and featuring Lorenzo Pisoni, Curzon Dobell, Jenny Fellner, Darcy Pulliam, Sean Gormley, Craig Pattison, Jenny Fellner, Curzon Dobell, Sean Gormley, Robert Sedgwick, Cristin Milioti, Craig Pattison, John Windsor-Cunningham, and Richard B. Watson. Associate Set Designer is Heather Wolensky, co-costume designer is Rebecca Lustig, lighting design is by Brian Nason, sound design by Zach Williamson, wig and hair design by Robert-Charles Vallance, properties by Deirdre Brennan, fight direction Rick Sordelet, dialects Stephen Gabis, casting by Deborah Brown. Christine Lemme Stage Manager, Jonathan Donahue Assistant Stage Manager. Charlotte Moore, Artistic Director, Ciarán O’Reilly, Producing Director, Patrick A. Kelsey, Managing Director. |
|
|
|
It is not always understood in contemporary productions that Shaw is a dramatist of ideas. He himself always suspected that audiences would not grasp his arguments and wrote long and elaborate prefaces—to his plays and to his collections—to make clear what he had in mind. He thought of himself as a philosopher. Never modest, he did not balk at comparing himself to Plato, as when, to Arthur Bingham Walkley, the critic who suggested he try his hand at a play about Don Juan, he wrote that the third act of Man and Superman, in which he had taken him up on his tip, was a ‘Shavio-Socratic dialogue.’ Ideas, however, were for Shaw nothing if not a call to action, so that for him the philosopher was unavoidably a preacher and an actor in the creation of the more perfect world to come. Writing for instance to Henry James (17 January 1909), Shaw explains that, as a Socialist, it was incumbent on him ‘to preach. . . . What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything,’ unless it is with the intention of creating a ‘race of gods?’ |
|
|
|
The title of the collection in which The Devil's Disciple first appeared, Three Plays for Puritans, holds the key to the nature of this play, or it will if we remembered the essay, hardly ever now read, by Charles Kingsley called Plays and Puritans. Shaw was only seventeen when this essay first appeared but Kingsley was an enormously popular writer in Victorian England and the reprinting of this work by Maccmillan in 1890, just before Shaw conceived his play, must have triggered in Shaw's mind the direction he wanted to take. Morally and intellectually, Shaw was one of Kingsley's heirs, for Kingsley had been one of the founders of the Christian Socialists who had inspired the Fabian Society of which Shaw became perhaps the most active and famous member. Kingsley's essay is an attack on the theater of his time. The great period of modern drama was about to be launched with Ibsen, whom Shaw was one of the first to champion (The Quintessence of Ibsenism) but Kingsley could obviously not have known it and the plays produced in his time seemed vapid, vacuous, and vain. The ‘middle classes,’ Kingsley declares, think ‘that Art is very well’ but only if and ‘when it means nothing,’ This was the case, it seemed to him, in mid-seventeenth-century England, a period in which dramatic writers appeared to think only of ‘exciting and amusing’ their audiences. Cromwell was right to close the theaters. Whatever quarrel they had with art, the Puritans demanded substance. This is what he wants himself and the only way to have it is for the spirit of Puritanism to be resuscitated in his time. Shaw makes the identical case in the preface to his collection. For Shaw, the theater is a soapbox, the Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. |
|
|
|
Plays such as these are not easy to stage. It is one thing to read a dialogue in which ideas are bandied about and another to hear them debated for three hours on a stage. The theater smacks too much of the classroom. Shaw himself took pains to make the exchange of ideas amusing, easy enough for his Irish wit, although he never loses a chance to use his wit to shatter the platitudes he thinks the viewers have brought with them. But even this requires ingenuity, an acting style devised to keep the mind of the audience on the words. It may be asked as a genuine question whether Shaw can be acted at all. Brecht, who faced a similar problem, invented both a dramatic form and an acting technique designed to so alienate the audience from feeling sympathy for the characters that they were forced to think instead. This would be quite right for Shaw. But the old morality plays, which by their very nature demands a performance that underscores the moral lesson they hope to teach, might still serve in some way as a model for how Shaw could be performed. |
|
|
|
Yet many productions of Shaw today turn in the opposite direction, looking to find or to tease out the emotional and psychological possibilities of the characters and presenting their interactions in a more naturalistic way. This is the case with the current production at the Irish Repertory Theater. The ideas are still there, but they are sometimes overshadowed by an attempt to make the characters more realistic, more fully rounded. Very little is gained in this process. There is only so much roundness in Shaw’s conception of his characters, only so much interiority. And what is lost leaves empty spaces in the logic of the play. |
|
|
|
Tony Walton, the director whose awards include three Tonys as well as an Oscar and an Emmy, seems aware of some these gaps and takes creative steps to fill them, as in the very first scene of the play. In one of those silent theatrical moments for which he is justifiably famous, the lights come up on Mrs. Dudgeon leaning back in her rocking chair and looking exactly like Whistler's mother, with all the irony of that image. Darcy Pulliam, a seasoned actress whose many roles include most recently Arkadina in Chekhov's Seagull, mimes the Whistler painting beautifully. It is her finest moment, perhaps. Required, in the rest of the drama, to act her part more realistically, she finds herself with little to do, for she has only one function and is given but one motive. Having fallen in love as a girl with a man her religion called wicked, she was convinced to marry his brother whom her heart knew to be dull. The split between her heart and her faith hardened the one and rendered the other a formal, mechanical observance, so that her home, as Dick comes to realize, became a ‘house of children's tears.’ Although he claimed to be an atheist—’like Shelley,’ he told the Shelley Society when he addressed it at its first meeting—’I am a Socialist, an Atheist, and a Vegetarian’—Shaw rejected neither religion nor Christianity, in fact, only such misconceptions of them as Mrs. Dudgeon's empty forms, or the hypocrisy of the Chaplain who comes to ‘comfort’ Dick on the gallows but does not, as Dick reminds him, take the words of the gospel seriously when it says ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ or the perversion to which he gave the name of Crosstianity in St. Joan, the love of suffering for its own sake rather than the love of redemption. |
|
|
|
It is no wonder that Dick Dudgeon, knowing himself to be the antithesis of everything his mother stands for, believes himself the devil's disciple. Making the most of his dashing good looks and an athletic body that allows him to engage in some spirited acrobatics when he takes on the British soldiers, Lorenzo Pisoni is excellent and wholly delightful in the role, adding, which Shaw would have enjoyed since he considered the Renaissance bard his only rival in the theater, a touch of Shakespearean style and glamour from his many Shakespearean parts. Pisoni clearly understands the implications of the title. Dick is a worshipper of the devil, a disciple even as Paul and Peter were disciples of Christ. The devil is for him is a religion. It will not be the final religion, but, when properly understood it will be an essential one, for destruction has a place in the construction of perfection. Shaw is convinced the ideal future depends on letting go of the past. To this extent he is a Futurist, committed to the idea that the past is a shackle on the future, from its institutional structures that rest on ideas now outworn to the dogmas in our minds which we inherit from our ancestors. This is why, when Theodotus asks in Caesar and Celopatra, for his help to put out the fire that is burning to the ground the great library of Alexandria, or else the past will be destroyed, Caesar answers ‘Let it burn’ so we can ‘build a better future.’ |
|
|
|
Shelley insisted that it was Lucifer who was the hero of Paradise Lost. He was fighting for liberty against the tyranny of his Creator. For Shaw, who echoes Shelley's view when Dick Dudgeon says he knew ‘the Devil was his natural master when he realized that the world cringed to his conqueror only through fear,’ liberty is indispensable in the making of the future, and it is always and necessarily at war with the tyranny of the past. This is the logic that brings Shaw to choose America as his setting, which he had never done before and was never to do again, or, more precisely, the colonies at the time of their revolution. The Revolutionary War is the perfect image for him of a struggle that is inevitable if history is to be a progress. As a pacifist, Shaw deplores, and makes a point of it in the play, the killing that is involved in war, but while he is willing as a Fabian to work for a slow and gradual progress, he seems in many of his plays (Man and Superman includes as an appendix a work entitled The Revolutionist's Handbook supposedly written by the protagonist and Heartbreak House seems to suggest that the remedy for our follies is an apocalyptic explosion) to be impatient with evolution and call for revolution instead. Predictably, for an Irishman, the past is embodied in the British. Shaw undoubtedly enjoys the jibes he fires at the British, at their lack of imagination, at their dull, conventional ways, most of all at their inability to adapt to new ideas, all of which is admirably illustrated in the soldiers—in particular Robert Sedgwick in the role of Major Swindon (doublecast as Titus Dudgeobn) and Seán Gormley as the First Guard—who stand stiffly, talk mechanically, and are proper and official and entirely inflexible. The one exception to this blanket denunciation of the British is the artistic, satirical, histrionic, and always suave figure of General Burgoyne. Shaw was a serious student of history and often pored over historical records when he wrote of historical characters such as Caesar and Joan of Arc, and he does the same with Burgoyne, typically adding what he has not found possible to include in the dialogue in stage directions and an appendix. The main reason he interests Shaw, beside the fact that he had a ‘fine spirit’ and a good deal of ‘humanity,’ is that he alone is able to see that the British attempt to stop these colonies from creating a nation is a huge historical farce. His wit, of which historical records give countless and delightful examples Shaw appropriates for the play, makes him for Shaw the natural critic of the nation he represents. This is a demanding role, and while his pace might have been tighter, John Windsor-Cunningham plays the part with great style and understanding, every gesture and intonation highlighting the ironic point of some of the sharpest lines in the play. |
|
|
|
This central theme of liberation is mirrored in many subsidiary struggles suggested or dealt with in the action. Shaw, for example, was a tireless crusader for the rights of women, a subject on which he writes a good deal and to which he often returns in the progress of this play. Lawyer Hawkins—Richard B. Watson, who also doubles as The Sergeant—thus explains to Mrs. Dudgeon that the will her husband wrote in the last hours of his life leaving most of his wealth to Dick will unquestionably be upheld, despite its imperfect legal language, against the one he wrote years before that had made her his sole heir, since there is not a court in the land that will sustain the claims of a woman if a man is available. And in one of his stage directions that typically amounts to an essay, Shaw elaborates on this point by reminding his audience—and he is clearly thinking here not of his viewers but of his readers—that at the time the actiohn takes place, Mary Wollstonecraft was eighteen and her Vindication of the Rights of Women was still fourteen years away. |
|
|
|
These
views, in his time, were avant-garde (as many still remain today), although
another reason Shaw was so great a supporter of women may be less welcome to
feminists, namely that he considered women embodiments of the Life Force, as
he called it in Man and Superman, that Bergsonian élan vital that many thinkers of
the age hoped would replace with a life principle the blind and mechanical
evolution they had been bequeathed by Darwin. It is not that men are barred
from possessing it. All the ‘wicked’ in this play—Peter, the man his mother
had loved, Dick himself, and finally Essie—not only carry this vital spirit
but are able to defy old conventions because of it. But women—it is the old
cliché—since they are the givers of life have a special relationship to it.
That is the reason Mrs. Dudgeon prefers the wicked to the dull brother, that
is why, although she has dutifully married the minister, Judith Anderson is
drawn always to the daring soldier, to Dick Dudgeon when she believes he is
more daring than her husband, but to her husband when she sees him give up
his collar for a rifle. And that is why Essie, Peter's child and carrying his
rebellious genes, takes immediately to Dick. In this production, the vital
spirit is not, however, always visible. Jenny Fowler, for example, in the
role of Judith Anderson does very well in representing the conventional young
woman subdued to the boundaries of her sex as her society has defined
these—as the minister's wife, that is—but appears to have no idea why she is
asked to shift back and forth between the minister and the rake, so that not
only does she lose the chance to express a vital point in the conception of
the play, from the moment she meets Dick, she seems entirely lost in her
role. Cristin Milioti,
who has youth and inexperience to excuse her, fails entirely as well to
convey this vital force, and is similarly left, since this is her only
purpose in the structure of the play, with no notion of what to do or how to
find meaning in her lines. Hers is not an easy task. Still a child, she has
not yet discovered the essence of her own nature. Her position, the
‘irregular’ daughter of a ‘wicked’ man, makes her feel, as Shaw suggests in
stage directions to her lines, timid, shy, unsure, confused.
And she is sometimes listless and miserable when she is scolded by Mrs.
Dudgeon, as she almost always is. But she is scolded precisely because the
Life Force is already at work, she is on the verge
of becoming its agent in the next generation. Her very first moment on the
stage, which finds her asleep despite the fact that her father has just been
hanged—provoking the first of her many scoldings—is
her Vitalist manifesto. It declares that she will
not act as the pieties require, that she will follow
her dominant instinct to do what the life force asks of her, which at this
instant is to sleep so as to be ready for action. However the rest of her
part is played, she must always seem alive and joyous in the life she has.
But this Milioti does not do. Rather, she looks
anxious and frightened and, even worse, invariably sullen. |
|
|
|
When Shaw proclaimed, as he often did, that there was nothing new in his works, it was usually to alert critics not to look for invention in the characters or the action but rather in the ideas of the plays, but he was right to a degree. He knew literature very well and he pilfered from it shamelessly, sometimes pointing out himself what he had stolen from what writers (Chekhov was among his favorites), and sometimes appropriating material he assumed everyone would know. This is the case with Three Plays for Puritans. Having typically confessed in the preface to this collection that every device he used in these plays had been used by many before him, Shaw proceeds in The Devil's Disciple to build his plot on a common pattern in the nineteenth-century novel, namely the exchange of vocations. It is hard for us today to understand the enormous importance of vocation in his time. Not only was the possibility of choosing vocations something new, the result of the class mobility, and even the geographic mobility, that went hand in hand with the social changes of the Industrial Revolution, liberating individuals, in another variation on the central theme of freedom, from the limited occupational opportunities of the past, the idea of vocation, once a call to holy orders, had found a new and crucial function, still a call to do God's work, but in the secular march of progress. This shift in the notion of vocation is the story of Anthony Anderson. Beginning by taking his vocation to be the old call to preach God's word, Anderson realizes God's work may be preached in many ways, not the least of which is fighting in the war for independence. Curzon Dobell is not unfortunately wholly convincing in both vocations. Obviously conscious of how difficult this transformation is for an actor, Shaw suggests an attitude that will serve him in both roles by stressing in the stage direction that precedes Andersons entrance at the very start of the play that he is a ‘genial . . . divine’ but has ‘authority’ in his bearing, and it is of a ‘secular’ kind. The soldier is already there waiting to break free of the minister. But neither as minister nor as soldier does Dobell exude authority. Dobell is fine in tender moments, moments of kindness and forbearance, and these, though few, are important enough to make him worth watching in the role. But it is difficult to see him as a soldier on the field. Lorenzo Pisoni has it easier. The dash required in the devil's disciple is by no means out of place in the role of the Reverend Dudgeon. His ultimate function almost demands it, for he becomes not just a minister but, when he volunteers to be hanged instead of Anderson's, something of a figure of Christ. It is Shaw's form of Christianity, a rendition in which we are ready, as we work for a better world, to serve one another to the death. |
|
|
|
This is why it is a mistake, a great mistake, even to hint at a romantic relationship between Dick and Judith Anderson. Shaw himself detested love stories as the engine of a plot. He makes a particular point of rejecting them in the preface to Plays for Puritans. They are, he writes, the reason drama has collapsed as an art form. Such plays are not only mindless, dull, repetitive, and unrealistic, they endorse the very conventions it is the dramatist's duty to challenge. Yet modern productions of Shaw's plays have often tried to introduce romantic plots where Shaw avoids them. This is the case, of course, with Pygmalion, which ends with Eliza and Higgins parting with little affection on either side but which brings the two together when it is turned into My Fair Lady. It may be that producers are right in thinking audiences will not come to a play unless they see someone falling in love with someone, but Shaw works very hard to show that it is not and cannot be personal motives that make us moral, that we must learn to do what is right not just for family and friends, which in the end is a selfish reason, but, as Dick says when he explains what has inspired him to go to the scaffold instead of Anderson, equally for a total stranger, for the entire human race, for the Utopia we hope to create. When Judith Anderson assumes it is for love of her that Dick offers to sacrifice himself, he tells her flatly she is mistaken, at least he does so in the end, having lied to her politely when she first demanded to know whether it was for her he did so. Artistically, Shaw is using this scene to stake his claim to his new principles, for he echoes here the classic moment in Victorian literature in which Judith would be right and from which she very possibly has derived her mistaken notion, the scene at the end of A Tale of Two Cities in which Carton, in love with Lucy, takes the place on the guillotine of Charles Darnay, the man she loves, saying it is a far, far better thing he does than he has ever done, a far, far better rest he goes to than he has ever known. The scene is moving in its place, but Shaw is determined to shatter that paradigm. The conclusion of the play leaves no doubt how it must end. Judith, finding she loves her husband now that he has been converted into a bold and daring soldier, begs of Dick that he will never tell Anderson of her foolish offer to follow him to the ends of the earth. Dick is happy to make that promise, and, in a very business-like way, the two shakes hands to seal their pact. In this production, hands are not shaken. Dick rather kisses her on the cheek, the kiss neither passionate nor indifferent. As Dick walks off the stage with Judith draped rather closely on one arm and Essie, almost like their child, holding on loosely to the other, the end, which Shaw makes unequivocal, is left open in this production. |
|
|
|
Shaw is not often done today, not only perhaps because he makes difficult demands on actors, but, in an age that tends to look for psychological motivation and emotional relationships, he is difficult to understand. Some might say that as a dramatist writers like Shaw have had their day. But Tony Walton is right to make this effort to bring his work to the stage. He is an exciting thinker and dramatist. And, given the problems entailed in performing him, it is remarkable how well and compellingly he has done it. Despite its shortcomings, New York is lucky to have this production and this company. |
|
|
|
·
Felicia
Bonaparte is a Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature
at the City University of New York Graduate Center. |
|
Feel-good Shaw: Dieter Dorn's Androcles
and the Lion at the Residenztheater in Munich |
|
|
|
Review by Bettina Boecker |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Rather than on the political and religious motives which inform the character's actions, Dorn chooses to focus on the characters themselves. With only a very few exceptions (Arnulf Schumacher's Centurio and Oliver Nägele's Ferrovius), however, these characters are turned into caricatures. Lavinia (Lisa Wagner), whose skimpy mini-toga vaguely evokes Lara Croft, is obviously meant to embody a sort of muscular Christianity avant la lettre, but remains unconvincing – a bit of a bullhead and a bit of a bully, the ‘resoluteness’ which Shaw ascribes to her in the stage directions overshadowing her much-professed piety. Androcles (Michael Tregor) is in many ways her antipole. With his high voice, his effeminate body language and his excessive love for animals Dorn has turned him into a figure of fun, out to get the cheap laughs which the Munich audience willingly provided. |
|
|
|
And
it is not only the good guys that need not be taken seriously. The bad ones
are equally neglectable. Dorn's Caesar is Rudolf Wessely, and he plays the emperor as a figure from the
Viennese Vorstadttheater, a quirky old man whose eccentric but essentially harmless whims happen to
include the slaughter of unruly subjects like the Christians. Nevertheless,
the point a |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
· Bettina Boecker is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Munich. |
Click for the last issue of Shavings; click 
for the Table of Contents of this page; click to
return to the Shavings home page.
Clicking 
will return you to our hub page with links to
all our publications.
Click for the home page of THE
OSCHOLARS