A Bulletin
for George Bernard Shaw
January 2007
With the new series of THE OSCHOLARS which began in October 2006, Shavings (which began as a section within THE OSCHOLARS and then became one of it supplementary pages) further emancipated itself and became one of the Irish Literary Bulletins hosted by www.irishdiaspora.net, the site for Irish and other diaspora studies owned by Patrick O’Sullivan, creator of Irish Diaspora Net. Responsibility for its content, however, remains with the editorial team of THE OSCHOLARS. We cannot yet see how this will develop but the main thrust of Shavings will continue as before to explore the world of Shaw during the lifetime of Wilde, although clearly we will not turn our backs on such later Shaw material as presents itself. Contributions and ideas from readers will be welcome. That said, we are here only to complement the excellent work done on Shaw elsewhere, notably by the Shaw associations and their publications, and these will be given their due measure in our columns.
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'Oh, Shaw! That's the man who smokes Jaeger cigarettes!' – Oscar Wilde, quoted by Richard Le Gallienne: The Romantic Nineties. New edition. London: Putnam & Co. 1951 p.81. |
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Note: Subscribers to THE OSCHOLARS (including Shavings) have their names printed in bold, and can be contacted through us at melmoth@aliceadsl.fr.
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1. The Plays c. Late clippings: Misalliance (review by Tiffany Perala) – My Fair Lady – Pygmalion – Arms and the Man |
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2. Shawlines a. Conferences b. Publications c. The Shrines d. Posters |
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a. The International Shaw Society c. The Bernard Shaw Society & The Independent Shavian |
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6. Tailpiece |
In this section we 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). Apart from those listed at Niagara-on-the-Lake and in Chicago, Shaw’s twentieth century plays are noticed in Late Clippings.
The
2007 Season will see The Philanderer
(1st May to 7th October) and St Joan
(21st April to 27th October). We can
also mention Lady Gregory’s Kiltartan
Comedies (20th June to 6th October), The Cassilis Engagement by St John Hankin, and Feydeau’s Hotel Peccadillo.
The 2006 season included Arms and the Man and Too True to be Good.
Information
from the Shaw Chicago Theatre Company at http://www.shawchicago.org/
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Performance |
Show Dates
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Location |
Show Times |
Information |
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Village Wooing* |
February
4, 2007 |
2:00pm |
Open
to the Public |
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Love Scenes |
February
6, 2007 |
7:00pm |
Open
to the Public |
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Shaw vs. Shakespeare: |
February
10, 2007 |
3:30pm |
Open
to the Public |
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Love Scenes* |
February
11, 2007 |
2:00pm |
Open
to the Public |
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Love Scenes* |
February
11, 2007 |
2:00pm |
Open
to the Public |
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Love Scenes* |
February
14, 2007 |
7:00pm |
Open
to the Public |
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Village Wooing* |
February
15, 2007 |
7:00pm |
Open
to the Public |
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Village Wooing* |
February
18, 2007 |
2:00pm |
Open
to the Public |
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Love Scenes |
February
26, 2007 |
1:00pm |
Private
Event |
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Love Scenes* |
February
28, 2007 |
7:00pm |
Open
to the Public |
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Shaw vs. Shakespeare: |
March
13, 2007 |
7:00pm |
Open
to the Public |
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Women of Shaw: Strong, Smart, and Unsatisfied!* |
April
19, 2007 |
7:00pm |
Open
to the Public |
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Caesar & Cleopatra |
April
14-May 7, 2007 |
various |
Ticket
Information |
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Shaw vs. Shakespeare: |
May
24, 2007 |
6:00pm |
Open
to the Public |
* Performances are no charge
For information on all performances,
please call 312-587-7390
c. Late clippings:
Misalliance
Directed by Chris Coleman, this is playing at Portland Center Stage (Gerding Theater), 128 NW Eleventh Avenue, Portland, Oregon 9th January - 4th February 2007.
We here publish a review by our Associate Editor for American Theatre, Tiffany Perala.
Nobel laureate and Academy Award recipient George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) wrote Misalliance in 1909. The contemporary relevance of his enduring wit and the critical and popular reception of his social problem play is evidenced in its production nearly a century hence. In his seminal review The Eighteen Nineties literary critic Holbrook Jackson explains: ‘Most of the distinguished personalities of the eighteen nineties challenged somebody or something. George Bernard Shaw challenged everybody and everything.’ Chris Coleman’s clever adaptation of Misalliance proves Shaw’s lasting importance as a playwright who challenges social conventions and the status quo.
The staging of Misalliance at the newly renovated Gerding Theatre, formerly the Historic Portland Armory, in Portland Oregon’s cultured Pearl District further emphasises its enduring popular appeal and ability to fill the house. Misalliance is third up on the season’s playbill following West Side Story and This Wonderful Life. For those unfamiliar with Portland’s art scene, it has earned its reputation as second in significance only to San Francisco on the west coast for its dedication to the Arts.
The setting, keeping with the original, is a Saturday in spring at the country home of Mr. John Tarleton in Surrey, England, 1909. The wicker chairs, antique tables, telescope, Turkish bath, stacks of books, and Greek busts reinforce the Tarleton’s bourgeoisie lifestyle gained through the capital success of Tarleton’s Underwear. Act I opens with Johnny, the physically endowed son of Mr. Tarleton, and Bentley, the foppish son of Lord Summerhays. The pronounced dichotomy of the character types alerts the audience that this is not merely a polite society comedy, but a post-Darwinian commentary on sexualities, social stratification, and, I would argue, the dandy as representative of a literary movement Shaw opposed: Decadence.
Bentley, a born aristocrat, is ‘over-bred,’ explains Mrs. Tarleton, and easily threatened by Johnny’s physical presence whereas Johnny is threatened by Bentley’s superior intellect. Inevitably, the two engage in a conversation that leads to Johnny’s real physical threat and Bentley’s tearful outburst, which in effect proves to be cathartic. The underlying satirisation of Decadence and the dandy’s (Bentley’s) sensibility in contrast to that of his masculine counterpart (Johnny) drives the first half of the comedy. Ultimately, the effeminate Bentley is rendered physically innocuous, though intellectually stimulating, to his extroverted fiancé Hypatia. For the same reasons he is an interesting and non-threatening ‘boy’ to Lina, the androgynous Polish girl who literally drops out of the sky when Joey Percival’s plane, piloted by her after he lost control, safely crashes into the Tarleton’s greenhouse.
Lina’s (Christine Calfas) foreign nature lends intrigue to her already dominant spirit. She is the extreme New Woman and her presence draws the attention of every male in the household. In effect, Lina is the reversal of Bentley and the ambiguity of sex is conveyed in dress: ‘When the dress is the same the distinction vanishes,’ posits Tarleton, and whereas her über-abundant strength, beauty, and independence attract male attention, Bentley’s degenerate physical and emotional features repel Hypatia and detract from his intellectual superiority. The real threat to nineteenth century sexuality, it would seem, was the New Woman, not the erudite dandy, aging aristocrat, entrepreneurial bourgeois or physical man. There is an exception to these types in the character of Percival though, who seems the embodiment intellect, strength, and social standing. He, we are led to believe, is the New Man and Hypatia directly pursues him, despite his strenuous efforts to abide by the familiar roles of propriety for propriety’s sake.
Unlike Percival, the Oxford schooled heir of an Italian princess, Lina comes from a family of acrobats whose profession relies on taking risks and controlling every aspect of their physical and emotional presence. The idea of hybrid social and sexual types challenges our conception of conventions rather effectively and even takes precedence over the economic dictates that would otherwise frame the play. Ultimately, the recognition of alternative social and sexual types equalise the sexes. The women, in turn, undermine the conventional notion that men are the sexual aggressors, and the men, rather than be repelled, are curiously attracted to the New Women.
The father figures, Mr. Tarleton and Lord Summerhays are traditional by all appearances, but underneath the bourgeois and aristocratic conventions they assert, they are as moved by non-traditional love alliances as their children. Lord Summerhays has even secretly proposed to widow Hypatia, in a conditional love-for-money exchange. Hypatia however, chooses not to relinquish physical desire and independence in lieu of nursing an older man for money. Summerhays (Aled Davies) was superb in his candid confession to Mr. Tarleton and the earnestness of his proposal, and the fact that Hypatia toyed with his offer until something more suitable ‘dropped out of the sky’ in the form of Percival, made it all the more human and laudable. As far as Bentley’s role in the father-son-fiancé triangle, it seemed apparent that Summerhays perceived that his son’s proposal was one that could never materialise given the young couple’s incompatibility.
At the end of the play, Lina takes Bentley up in the air after rejecting Johnny’s marriage proposal, signifying the balance of power requisite to stabilise an alliance, given Bentley’s submissive and Lina’s dominant nature. Indirectly, homosexuality is implied throughout the play by drawing attention to Bentley’s effeminate dress, affectations, and sexual appeal (lack thereof) to Hypatia. As for Lina, Hypatia addresses the ambiguity of her sex by calling her that ‘man-woman or woman-man.’ True to Shaw’s original staging of Lina as a ‘remarkably good-looking woman,’ Christine Calfas, as Lina, was remarkable in looks and stage presence.
However, the overarching subject of Misalliance is marriage and Coleman directs his concern with the tensions apparent in Shaw’s script and conveys the economic motives behind the 19th century English marriage market as well as the progressive motives of the New Woman with critical depth and humour. Going in, I was curious as to how the multiple literary allusions would come across, but they were not lost on Portland’s audience. For example, the idea of the Decadent as a degenerate is alluded to by means of his opposite; that is, the ‘good’ man does not decay, ‘he clears out.’ Mr. Tarleton’s (Kenneth Albers) seasoned advice always concludes with a literary referent, such as, ‘read Ibsen,’ or when his daughter Hypatia (Amanda Soden) asserts dominance, ‘I shall read King Lear.’ Hypatia does get the reluctant Percival (Spencer Conway) to engage her after aggressively pursuing him into an off scene game of chase in the bracken, demonstrating that his conventional regard is superficial and easily swayed by sex and Mr. Tarleton’s financial surety.
Overall, the hypocrisy of manners and display of conventional types, sexual and social, were revealed in a way that left the audience thinking. After the final curtain, I overheard two patrons discussing their disappointment of Gunner’s (Darius Pierce) effect. Gunner, the dishevelled, very clearly working-class illegitimate son of Mr. Tarleton through a former, and well-forgotten, dalliance appears on stage with a gun in an attempt to vindicate his mother’s honour. In the their defence, he was at best two-dimensional in comparison to the other characters, but this was no fault of Gunner’s (Pierce), as the point of the play was to show that the real threat to contemporary society was not the crime-related blackmail that often accompanied sexual indiscretions, the aristocracy’s indifference, or the bourgeoisie’s exploitation of the working-class and buying power, but the idea and act of social and sexual transgression. Read Shaw.
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Steven Cole Hughes |
Johnny Tarleton |
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Bentley Summerhays |
Ben Steinfeld |
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Hypatia Tarleton |
Amanda Soden |
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Mrs. Tarleton |
Linda Ryan |
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Lord Summerhays |
Aled Davies |
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Mr. John Tarleton |