Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  But was the world of facts real? Shaw’s insistence that it was is continually interrupted by his subversive humour and a pessimism that undermines much of what he dedicated his career to establishing. ‘Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time,’ says Keegan who explains to Nora that ‘my way of joking is to tell the truth’. It is Keegan who sees reality in dreams and strikes an apocalyptic note over Shaw’s own Fabian territory of statistics: ‘For four wicked centuries the world has dreamed this foolish dream of efficiency; and the end is not yet. But the end will come.’

  *

  The play was ‘a wonderful piece of work’ and ‘full of good things,’ William Fay, the Abbey Theatre manager, reported to Yeats. Synge, too, believed it would ‘hold a Dublin audience, and at times move them if even tolerably played’. And Yeats wrote to Shaw: ‘I thought in reading the first act that you had forgotten Ireland, but I found in the other acts that it is the only subject on which you are entirely serious...

  ‘You have said things in this play which are entirely true about Ireland, things which nobody has ever said before... It astonishes me that you should have been so long in London and yet have remembered so much. To some extent this play is unlike anything you have done before. Hitherto you have taken your situations from melodrama, and called up logic to make them ridiculous. Your process here seems to be quite different, you are taking your situations more from life, you are for the first time trying to get the atmosphere of a place... a geographical conscience... You have laughed at the things that are ripe for laughter, and not where the ear is still green... we can play it, and survive to play something else.’

  Yet there were difficulties. The company met to discuss these difficulties in the second week of October 1904: the difficulty of length; the difficulty of getting a cast; the difficulty of handling modern appliances such as grasshoppers and hydraulic bridges. These difficulties accumulated as they argued, silencing a more fundamental difficulty: that (to use Shaw’s words in the Preface to the 1906 edition) ‘it was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland’. Yeats was to concede when he saw it performed in London that ‘it acts very much better than one could have foreseen’. Like Max Beerbohm, he had underrated Shaw’s instinct for the theatre partly because ‘I don’t really like it,’ he wrote. ‘It is fundamentally ugly and shapeless.’

  The shape of the play, loosely constructed round a string of character-turns with the emphasis directed away from the action and focused on a parallel series of discussions that occur at rather unremarkable moments (the after-breakfast pause, the after-tea stroll) makes use of the conventional props of Irish Romance to explode the Irish romantic ideal. Yeats instinctively felt opposed to such extravaganza. Yeats’s writing was oblique and Shaw’s assertive; and Yeats wrote poetry where Shaw laughed. All they shared were the same enemies. ‘If I had gone to the hills nearby to look upon Dublin and to ponder upon myself, I too might have become a poet like Yeats, Synge and the rest of them,’ Shaw stated. ‘But I prided myself on thinking clearly, and therefore could not stay. Whenever I took a problem or a state of life of which my Irish contemporaries sang sad songs, I always pushed it to its logical conclusions, and then inevitably it resolved itself into comedy.’

  Such a passage helps to explain Yeats’s description of Shaw as a ‘barbarian of the barricades’. When Shaw made Larry Doyle deride Keegan as sentimental, chastise the eternal dreaming in himself, and question the holy ground on which they both stood, he uprooted the Irish legends from which sprang Lady Gregory’s and Yeats’s plays. His ‘queer elephant’ of a play seemed antagonistic to everything the Abbey Theatre was to achieve. ‘We all admire it,’ Yeats wrote: and between them all a polite understanding was kept up that it had merely been too large and difficult a work for the Abbey to handle.

  Yeats could recognize the wonderful power of Shaw’s pen – its logic, justice, audacity, conviction. But Shaw represented ‘the spirit of the press, of hurry, of immediate interests’ over what Yeats felt was the slow-burning spirit of literature. He was consuming his own talent with superficial theatricality, the unnerving tic of his wit, rambling vulgarity – anything that seemed to stiffen the purpose of the moment.

  6

  Granville Barker Comes to Court

  We shall have to play off the piece as a very advanced and earnest card in the noble game of elevating the British theatre.

  Shaw to Granville Barker (24 August 1904)

  Looking around for an actor suitable to play Marchbanks for a Sunday performance of Candida at the Strand Theatre in the summer of 1900, Charrington had proposed the name of Harley Granville Barker. At the sixth ‘meeting’ of the Stage Society, Barker played Marchbanks and was ‘the success of the piece’, Shaw told Archer. This performance of Candida completed the Stage Society’s first season. The Society was now the principal rallying point for things modern in the theatre. On 16 July 1900 the maximum membership was increased from three to five hundred (each paying a yearly subscription of two guineas) and a decision was taken to add to the private Sunday evening presentation a weekday matinée to which the press (though required to pay) would be admitted. Performances were still described as ‘meetings’; no scenery was employed and no salary offered to the actors who all received the same nominal sum – one guinea – for expenses. These rules enabled the Society legally to present new British plays as well as classical and contemporary foreign dramas (for some of which the Censor had refused a licence).

  The Stage Society’s Sunday evening and Monday afternoon performances gave Barker some experience as a director as well as actor, particularly in the presentation of his own four-act comedy, The Marrying of Ann Leete. ‘Do you realise that he is a great poet and dramatist,’ Shaw asked Henry Arthur Jones. ‘...His The Marrying of Ann Leete is really an exquisite play. I truckle to G.B. in order to conciliate him when he is forty.’ Behind this half-frivolous tone was the feeling that he was no longer alone: at last he had a successor in the theatre, someone to share, inherit and modify the Shavian stage experiment. Before Ann Leete, Barker had written other plays. Like Shaw’s, they had seemed unplayable. But Shaw ‘found them fascinating’. At first he had doubted whether Barker’s ‘delicacy of style’ would travel across the footlights. But on seeing Ann Leete performed under Barker’s own stage management, ‘I had to confess that he had succeeded,’ Shaw wrote.

  ‘There is a sort of dainty strangeness about it that fits its eighteenth century period and costumes; and the curious way in which it begins in a garden at midnight takes it so effectually out of the Philistine key that its quaint fantastic conversation, consisting mostly of hints and innuendoes, seems to belong to it naturally.’

  Here lay the theatre of the future. Shaw felt a special tenderness towards the young man, as if his own blatant qualities, obliterating much that was sensitive in himself, had served to protect him. After all, it had been to bulldoze Irving’s execrable Lyceum mutilations off the stage that the phenomenon of G.B.S. had been partly manufactured. That Barker could afford to take no notice of Irving was partly due to G.B.S.; and partly, of course, a matter of age.

  Shaw was twenty-one years older than Barker, ‘old enough’, he wrote, ‘to be his father’. This was indeed the peculiar kinship he felt for him. He had grown up in an atmosphere of good speech and drama and with a thorough knowledge of Dickens and Shakespeare. He scored his first stage success in 1899 playing Richard II for William Poel, but was to be no happier as a successful actor than Shaw was as a successful platform speaker. Beatrice Webb observed him to be ‘a most attractive person... good looking in a charming refined fashion – with a subtle intellectual expression – faculties more analytic than artistic?

  ‘...with varied interests, good memory, a sharp observer of human nature and above all a delicate appreciation of music, poetry and art – a medley
of talents of which I do not yet see a very definite whole. He has not yet emancipated himself from G.B.S.’s influence or found his own soul.’

  Barker’s incompleteness fascinated people. What Beatrice thought of as the influence of G.B.S. was probably a similarity of temperament. ‘I am an intellectual, but by no means a dramatic disciple of G.B.S.,’ Barker declared. ‘We have quite different ideas... ’ G.B.S. agreed. ‘We were as different as Verdi from Debussy.’ Yet there was a natural intimacy between them. They talked much in quotations from Dickens and Shakespeare, using them as a private code. But they seldom discussed their own plays. ‘We took them as they came, like facts of nature.’ Shaw was able to watch and direct Barker in a number of his roles during the early stages of their friendship: he was Marchbanks, the poet Shaw had repressed in himself; he was Father Keegan, the best self Shaw had sealed up in the Round Tower; he played Jack Tanner made up with a beard to look like a younger G.B.S.; and in Shaw’s next play Major Barbara, he was to play Adolphus Cusins, the foundling academic who is adopted as his heir by the Shavian father figure of Undershaft, also a foundling. From this succession of sympathetic roles a whisper arose that Barker was Shaw’s natural son. The notion appealed to Shaw who observed that most people rejected the hypothesis ‘on the ground that I am physically incapable of parentage’.

  Barker fulfilled the imaginative role of son to Shaw’s father and Charlotte’s mother, replacing the natural child they never had. He seemed all things to all people – whatever they wanted most. Charlotte was one of several childless women in whom he prompted a maternal instinct. For G.B.S., Barker became someone to scold and schoolmaster, encourage and idealize; he was the juvenile lead with whom G.B.S. shared the family companionship of work.

  In the summer of 1901 Barker and Shaw had joined the management committee of the Stage Society which had decided to put on Mrs Warren’s Profession towards the end of that year. Because the play had not been granted a licence, however, thirteen theatres, three hotels, two music halls and the Royal Society of British Artists refused to lend their premises. From these difficulties and delays Shaw and Barker drew differing lessons. Shaw felt that the Stage Society was capable of putting on a ‘tomfoolery’ such as The Admirable Bashville; but a performance even of the first act of Caesar and Cleopatra was too large an enterprise: the Society could not scrape together ‘the price of a sphinx & an old pantomime wardrobe for the Egyptian & Roman soldiers’. It was for this reason that he had turned to the Abbey Theatre.

  For Barker, the cap-in-hand, door-to-door experiences over Mrs Warren’s Profession had emphasized the need for a permanent theatre. His chance came early in 1904 when he was invited to produce Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Court Theatre in Sloane Square. The lease of this theatre had recently been bought by J. H. Leigh, a wealthy businessman and amateur actor, to stage a series of ‘Shakespearean Representations’ featuring his wife Thyrza Norman. The first two productions had been unsatisfactory and Leigh, coming to William Archer for help, was advised to employ Granville Barker for his next play. Leigh struck up an arrangement with Barker that allowed him to give six matinées of Candida at the Court. The play was well-received by the critics and actually made a profit.

  Three weeks later Barker was producing Gilbert Murray’s rhyming translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus at the Lyric Theatre. ‘J. H. Leigh has expressed himself bitten with the idea of doing Greek plays,’ Barker confided to Murray. ‘Not a word – but let us talk anon.’ This talk between Barker, Leigh and the Court Theatre’s manager J. E. Vedrenne ‘led to the most important development in Barker’s career’. He suggested giving regular matinées at the Court on those afternoons when the London West End theatres were closed. The management would then be able to engage first-class professional actors who would not be playing at those hours and, because they were interested in this new work, would be prepared to act for a nominal salary. Vedrenne took charge of the management and, with the backing of small sums of money from friends, they agreed to begin the experiment that autumn.

  As the opening performance at the Court Theatre, he repeated the Murray-Euripides Hippolytus. The second Court play, after a good deal of negotiation, was John Bull’s Other Island.

  Nominally it was Barker who produced John Bull’s Other Island; in fact it was Shaw. ‘You can imagine the state I am in with rehearsing,’ he wrote to the actress Ada Rehan. ‘It is great fun; and I have got them all to the point of believing that this is the turning point of their careers, and that something immense is happening.’ He had got himself to believe this too.

  Shaw had strong opinions as to how all the parts should be played. But these opinions were for the actors to interpret and adapt: ‘Dont worry yourself by trying to carry out my suggestions exactly or hampering yourself in any way with them,’ he advised J. L. Shine, who was playing Larry Doyle. ‘Very likely when you study them over you will be able to improve on them.

  ‘That’s all they’re for. I think I am probably nearly right as to the best changes and stopping places on the journey; but as to the way of making them, follow your own feeling and make the most of your own skill: turn the whole thing inside out if you like... dont hesitate on my account to make the part entirely your own.’

  He was full of advice, but also ready to learn; and his tirades, being comic performances themselves, did not shrivel the actors’ self-confidence. ‘I know very well that it is often the artists who give the author least trouble who get the least acknowledgement and have their virtues taken as a matter of course,’ he wrote to Ellen O’Malley, who took the part of Nora. ‘This is not so, I hope, with me: I am very sensible of how good you have been in every way, though I have had no opportunity of saying so.’

  The reviews, though sometimes niggardly, were good, and the best critics wrote most enthusiastically. Max Beerbohm’s notice in the Saturday Review was headed ‘Mr Shaw at his Best’. Desmond MacCarthy declared the play to be ‘an absolute success’; and William Archer in The World wrote that Shaw ‘has done nothing more original’.

  To the fifth matinée, on 10 November, Beatrice Webb brought the Conservative Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour. To her surprise he liked the play so much that he eventually saw it five times, bringing with him two leaders of the Liberal Opposition, Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith. Most people in London saw it as a largely affectionate satire on the Liberal Party’s attitude towards Ireland, and Balfour himself praised it for clearing away humbug. His interest led to a special evening performance being given, on 11 March 1905, for King Edward VII. The King laughed so belligerently that he broke the special chair Vedrenne had hired for the evening and, in falling, flung Shaw’s dramatic reputation high into the air. Here, a few months short of his fiftieth year, was success. Yet he felt uneasy. What was it worth? What had been the cost? The Prime Minister had told the King, and the King had told his countrymen, and now they were all telling the world that G.B.S. was the funniest of Irishmen. He began to react against the play, and gave his answer to his King’s heehawing by adding to the programme of a later production a ‘personal appeal’ to the audience not to demoralize the actors with shouts of laughter and noisy applause.

  ‘Would you dream of stopping the performance of a piece of music to applaud every bar that happened to please you? and do you not know that an act of a play is intended, just like a piece of music, to be heard without interruption from beginning to end?... Have you noticed that people look very nice when they smile or look pleased, but look shockingly ugly when they roar with laughter or shout excitedly or sob loudly? Smiles make no noise.’

  Eleven days after the royal command performance of John Bull’s Other Island, he began a new play. In this, the last of his ‘big three’, he would challenge his own popularity and present himself as a moral revolutionist. ‘The play is wildly impossible,’ he told the actress Eleanor Robson. ‘...It would run for a week. But what a week that would be!’

  7

  Curtain Up on Major Barbara

  I
t seems to me that what Barbara finds out is that the ancient Greek (whoever he was) who said ‘First make sure of an income and then practise virtue’ was rightly preaching natural morality.

  Shaw to Gilbert Murray (5 September 1941)

  Father Keegan had been a saint, ‘and now I want to see whether I can make a woman a saint too,’ Shaw wrote to Eleanor Robson. ‘The heroine is so like you that I see nobody in the wide world who can play her except you.’

  Charlotte was not happy with the way her husband corresponded with actresses. But he believed that Eleanor Robson would be striking in the piquant role of his Salvation Army officer. She was little more perhaps than a professional model for the part: the biographical model was Beatrice Webb. Like Barbara, Beatrice was a rich man’s daughter and had gone East Ending with the gospel of social salvation. Her violent reaction to the play (‘a dance of devils... hell tossed on the stage, with no hope of heaven... the triumph of the unmoral purpose’) registered her involvement in the ruin of Barbara’s salvationism.

  Barbara, as a prototype of St Joan, is a woman apparently converted from religion to a creed of action. But hers is not really a conversion: it is a growing-up. She is a chip off the old block, her father Undershaft having a genius for action that Barbara inherits. The man who stands between Barbara and Undershaft, Adolphus Cusins, is the real convert. Modelled on the classicist Gilbert Murray, Cusins represents Shaw’s own position: that of the fastidious scholar trying to find his place in the political world. He is attracted to Undershaft as the only man who can make him effective through marrying his intellect to power.