Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Jackson realized that this venture needed a dramatic patron and he dedicated the festival to Shaw. ‘We gather here, among the hills, to perform an act of homage to our greatest living dramatist,’ Jackson wrote, ‘to be amused and quickened by his humour and wisdom.’ Six thousand people were to visit the Bernard Shaw Exhibition over the fortnight, and the cycle of plays included Back to Methuselah, Caesar and Cleopatra and Heartbreak House, as well as what Shaw called, in his flyleaf dedication to Jackson, ‘the play which owes its existence entirely to you’.

  Having laid the foundation stone of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford the previous month, Shaw arrived in Malvern on 18 August 1929. No other dramatist could have shifted the attention of the newspapers to a small town in the west of England on a sweltering Sunday afternoon in August. It was not even a world première (that had taken place, using Floryan Sobieniowski’s translation, two months previously, at Warsaw’s Teatr Polski). Nevertheless the first British production was treated as an international event. A special Sunday train was hired to carry down from London more than sixty drama critics who were delivered to the theatre doors in plain vans. Cedric Hardwicke was starring as a future King of England with Edith Evans as his mistress, and G.B.S. was able to assure everyone that, like the exciting new films beginning to fill the cinemas, his play was ‘One hundred percent talking’.

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  The two acts of The Apple Cart are introduced by an overture and interrupted by an interlude. It is a burlesque of parliamentary government in the form of opéra bouffe. ‘This music is a music of ideas... in which moralities are used as the motifs,’ wrote Edmund Wilson. The chief role, taken by the King of England, is played against a children’s chorus of uniformed Cabinet Ministers led by the head boy or Prime Minister. Initially there are two secretaries, or walking gentlemen, who begin a Mozartian overture which, Shaw told the playwright Alfred Sutro, had been part of a false start. ‘I began with a notion of two great parties: the Ritualists and the Quakers, with the King balancing them one against the other and finally defeating a combination of them. But I discarded this, as there wasn’t room for it.’ What he retained was a duet that presents a mocking celebration of the ritualism that cherishes the philistine status quo, and this prepares us for an investigation into the appearance and reality of democratic power.

  The Interlude, which precedes the second act and takes place in Orinthia’s boudoir, is another exploration of power based on appearance. Shaw himself described this scene as ‘a brief but intense sex interlude’ and certainly it was intended to offer the audience an erotic interest absent elsewhere in the play. ‘Orinthia, the proud, the aristocratic, the goddesslike, the woman of lofty enchantments and “strangely innocent relations”’ had been modelled on Stella Campbell: ‘the magnificence of the picture is due to you,’ he was to tell her. But Stella in her middle sixties no longer felt magnificent.

  Nothing seemed to have gone right since her beloved son’s death in the war; her marriage to George Cornwallis-West had come unstuck, the roles she could take in the theatre were diminishing and, having paid her son’s and her husband’s debts, money was running out. But she refused to part with Shaw’s ‘lovely letters’ (those letters over the publication of which she had behaved so badly), despite his advice to put them on the market before their price tumbled. A better solution, it seemed to her, would be to play a role in his new play.

  ‘I wonder if you will come and read the new play to me,’ she invited him on 12 February 1929, ‘as you half promised you would.’

  ‘I can’t read plays to a starving woman,’ he prevaricated – and offered instead to pay her telephone and electrical bills.

  ‘Come and read your play to me,’ she ordered him. ‘...You cannot dare to make my poverty an excuse!’

  But he had another excuse. ‘I have just been smitten with a frightful and probably infectious cold... and I will not risk giving it to you this week, nor next.’

  ‘I wonder if you are ever coming to read your play to me,’ she tried again on 26 March.

  This time he confessed to being ‘too shy to read you the only scene in that play that would interest you. Its scandalous climax is a reminiscence of Kensington Square.’

  ‘I know why you feel shy,’ she responded. Her friend Edith Lyttelton had by now told her something about the scene and how Shaw had explained that Stella could not play Orinthia because ‘no one could play themselves’. It was obvious to her that ‘the scene isn’t true, though it may amuse you to fancy it so’. He readily agreed with her: it was fiction, not fact – in short, a play. Still she pressed him and still he resisted.

  Eventually Stella happened to encounter Edith Evans who ‘gazed eagerly at me saying she was playing me in The Apple Cart at Malvern and in Birmingham and London’. ‘You should have sent me your play to read,’ she wrote to Shaw on 8 July. ‘You are out of tune with friendship and simple courtesy.’

  He had put off this dreadful confrontation for five months – too long, he now realized. On 11 July he went to her flat in Pont Street. Though they had kept in correspondence they had not met for the best part of fifteen years. He was conscious of no longer being her ‘brilliant adorable Irish lad’ but a white-haired pink-cheeked skeletal figure on the eve of his seventy-third birthday. She had expanded from his ‘blessedest darling’ gypsy child into a woman of ‘magnificent bulk... the chins luxuriant too... [and] noxious little dogs yapping at her heels’.

  They still had their famous voices – hers more throaty than ever, his lilting Irish tones like the shivering of a wind across a lake – and with these voices they set out to repeat their Pygmalion duet in Edith Lyttelton’s drawing-room before the war. He began the Interlude, and she listened until he came to the passage where Orinthia offers to give King Magnus ‘beautiful, wonderful children’ in order to win him from his wife and make herself Queen, and adds: ‘have you ever seen a lovelier boy than my Basil?’ Shaw then delivered the King’s reply: ‘Basil is a very good-looking young man, but he has the morals of a tramp.’ This was too much for Stella. It was true that her pampered son had dissipated his life in gambling and affairs, but she loved him and felt she would never forgive Shaw. He registered the depth of Stella’s mortification and conceded: ‘I will let him go as a beautiful child... as he suffered for other people’s sins, the balance of justice is struck.’

  Stella also felt sensitive over references to her marriages. ‘Not another word on the subject shall ever fall from my lips,’ Shaw lied. The struggle between them went on into August. ‘How troublesome you are!’ he complained. His piecemeal revisions were no cure for the soreness in Stella’s heart. ‘Tear it up,’ she commanded him. ‘...Please do as I say – you will feel strangely relieved.’ But he would not.

  Shaw knew that her real objection sprang from the corrupted picture of their romance. ‘My love for you was the love of a child who feels safe,’ she wrote to him. Shaw echoes this sentiment when he makes King Magnus tell Orinthia that they were ‘two children at play’. But there is nothing childlike in Orinthia and nothing ‘innocent’ about her relations with Magnus. She is a tyrant of the emotions who exploits the King’s susceptibility to her beauty. ‘Heaven is offering you a rose; and you cling to a cabbage,’ she tells him. The cabbage is Magnus’s wife, Queen Jemima.

  The previous year Granville-Barker had published His Majesty, a play in which the Queen, who is a snob and a political idiot, irresponsibly precipitates a crisis which can only be resolved by the abdication of the King. Shaw reverses the situation. Though described as ‘romantically beautiful, and beautifully dressed’, Orinthia is without charm, except perhaps the charm of a precocious child. Stella Campbell did not know how unhappily his recollections of her had been disturbed by Molly Tompkins, who also, like Orinthia, had used her sexual powers to keep him from returning to Charlotte. King Magnus, who stands for ‘conscience and virtue’ in his dealings with the Cabinet, admits to Orinthia that with her he has no conscience – which is, i
n effect, what Shaw said to Stella about his writing of The Apple Cart: ‘I am an artist and as such utterly unscrupulous when I find my model – or rather when she finds me.’ This is the attitude of Louis Dubedat in The Doctor’s Dilemma.

  Stella’s complaint was that conscienceless art led to falsification. It took away her talent and occupation, and robbed her of wit and sensitivity. By casting Orinthia as the King’s platonic mistress, Shaw also negated her sexuality. ‘I ran away from you at Sandwich because I wanted to remain Queen of the Kingdom of my Heart,’ Stella explained, ‘ – but I suppose you mustn’t humble the King in your play like that.’ ‘Yes: you were right, Sandwich and all,’ Shaw confirmed. In the fantasy of the play, it is the King who struggles free of Orinthia. ‘You are so abominably strong that I cannot break loose without hurting you,’ he says.

  Orinthia’s bedroom is no fairyland. It is a battlefield for sexual politics. And it is this theme, ending with its skirmish on the floor and reaching back beyond Stella to Shaw’s memories of Jenny Patterson, that connects the structurally intrusive Interlude to the rest of the play.

  Orinthia is one of three queens in The Apple Cart. ‘Everyone knows that I am the real queen,’ she announces. ‘...I am one of Nature’s queens.’ By Nature’s queens she means those who are naturally endowed with physical superiority, and by real she means the reality of appearance. What she offers the King is a pop-star dictatorship of the masses by beautiful people. But Shaw turns aside this temptation: ‘you must be content to be my queen in fairyland,’ he has King Magnus reply.

  Magnus’s conventional Queen is Jemima who rules over a domestic kingdom. She is what Orinthia calls a ‘common housekeeper wife’ who brings up ‘common healthy jolly lumps of children’. She treats her husband as ‘a good little boy’ and imposes her own household priorities. ‘You do not always know what is good for you,’ she tells him.

  The third Queen of the play is Amanda, ‘a merry lady in uniform like the men’ and Postmistress-General in the Cabinet. She can mimic people and sing funny songs, ‘and that – with all respect, sir – makes me the real queen of England,’ she tells the King. Amanda is a performer from the music-hall stage whose songs and mimicry cover all their targets with ridicule: even Breakages Ltd, the capitalist conglomerate that governs the country, is powerless against her. She is truly a democratic Queen in the sense that she answers the public’s demand to have everything trivialized and turned into a sport – ‘And thats how England is governed by yours truly,’ she concludes.

  But there are limits to Amanda’s queenly power: she can stop anything; she can start nothing. If the country were governed responsibly, then its Queen would be Lysistrata, the Powermistress-General. She is a thinker – ‘a grave lady in academic clothes’ – who combines Beatrice Webb’s devotion to public service with Lady Astor’s assertive patriotism. Lysistrata is the ‘studious’ King’s one supporter in the Cabinet, his intellectual equal who in their first-act duet responds to his long oratorio on the condition of England by letting herself go with an impassioned denunciation of capitalism.

  The England to which Shaw points his audiences is one that manufactures chocolate creams, Christmas crackers and tourist trophies, and that exports golf-clubs and polo ponies. Hardship and poverty have largely been abolished by sending capital abroad to places where they still exist so that Englishmen can live in comfort on the imported profits of their investments in cheap labour. The country is little more than a staging post for the movement of foreign capital: the heart has gone out of politics and into money-making. Less than seven per cent of the electoral register bother to vote. In such a country politics has deteriorated to Shaw’s kindergarten Cabinet of squabbling nonentities. Presiding over this nursery school is Proteus, Shaw’s cartoon version of Ramsay MacDonald. The job has brought him ‘to the verge of a nervous breakdown’. At one moment he dashes from the room in a fit of contrived rage, knowing that the King will follow him and that they can settle their business in private. These were the exaggerated manoeuvres of Ramsay MacDonald who, according to Sidney Webb, ‘always had neuritis’ when things got difficult.

  Shaw denied having ‘packed the cards by making the King a wise man and the minister a fool’. Both, he wrote in his Preface, ‘play with equal skill; and the King wins, not by greater astuteness, but because he has the ace of trumps in his hand and knows when to play it’. But it is G.B.S. who has slipped him this winning card.

  For Proteus the fight is between royalty and democracy, and his aim is to come out on top. For Magnus the enemy is plutocracy. ‘I stand for the great abstractions,’ he declares: ‘for conscience and virtue; for the eternal against the expedient; for the evolutionary appetite against the dog’s gluttony; for intellectual integrity, for humanity, for the rescue of industry from commercialism and of science from professionalism.’ This is the voice of the Shavian realist raised against the arch-idealist Proteus.

  Some people assumed that King Magnus was a veiled portrait of King George V. ‘I have a lot in common with the present monarch,’ Shaw conceded, ‘we are both human beings and we were both christened George, and I dare say he dislikes the name as much as I do.’ Shaw’s King is very like Granville-Barker’s King in His Majesty; both are parts for an actor-manager. Shaw pointed to several historical precedents, but when cross-examined by his biographer Hesketh Pearson, he admitted, ‘The real King Magnus is sitting within a few feet of you.’ King Magnus belongs to the Shavian family tree of strong beneficent rulers. He is Caesar transported through history from Caesar and Cleopatra; he is Napoleon from The Man of Destiny. He combines the heroism of William Morris with the calculation of Sidney Webb: he is Shaw’s fantasy of himself.

  There are no Hitlers, Mussolinis, Stalins or Mosleys in The Apple Cart, for this is a play about the dangers of powerlessness. We are shown the conditions that favour the popular promotion of dictators. For the time being, power rests with Breakages Ltd which distributes accumulating wealth with capitalism’s whimsical injustice. In Shaw’s analysis, such inequality leads to a moral degeneration that can be cleared away only by revolution. ‘I dread revolution,’ says Magnus. All the Cabinet, except the women, laugh at him, but it is this dread that brings the extravaganza to a halt. ‘I look on myself as a man with a political future,’ Magnus informs Proteus as he contemplates forming a government in the House of Commons. But the King remains in his melancholy predicament as Shaw’s fantasy peters out. ‘This is a farce that younger men must finish,’ Magnus tells Lysistrata. And the implication is that these younger men may have to finish it with violence.

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  ‘I imagine that Shaw has made the sensation of his life,’ W. B. Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory. The Conservative press enthusiastically hailed The Apple Cart. ‘The wonder is that GBS and Charlotte have not been invited to Sandringham,’ Beatrice Webb drily observed. It appeared to some as if he had executed a political volte-face. ‘All the tyrants in Europe will delight in the play,’ warned H. W. Nevinson.

  For the first time in his theatrical career Shaw had refused to give an even distribution of argument to both sides of a conflict. His Cabinet of clowns ‘stand up like ninepins for his dialectical bowling,’ complained Ivor Brown in the Manchester Guardian in 1929. ‘...to idealize your unelected monarch is a pitiful approach to political philosophy.’ The same objections were to be made fifty years later in the Guardian by the theatre critic Michael Billington, who found the play indefensible in theory – ‘a snobbish endorsement of the inherent good breeding of royalty as against the bad manners of democracy’ – and aggravating in performance – there was ‘something dramatically unsatisfying about a play in which a clever king is allowed to run intellectual rings round... a collection of harebrained boobies’.

  Though G.B.S. was a great figure in the eyes of the general public, he no longer excited young intellectuals, who were turning to the new work of Eliot and Joyce, Pound and Proust, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. Like Magnus, G.B.S. was ‘old fashioned
’. The modern literary periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s – T. S. Eliot’s Criterion and F. R. Leavis’s Scrutiny – had little interest in him. Yet it was by literary critics, rather than critics of the theatre, that The Apple Cart was later to be re-evaluated. In the judgement of Edmund Wilson, ‘the fact that Shaw is here working exclusively with economic and political materials has caused its art to be insufficiently appreciated.’ The contemporary view that Shaw was ‘contemptuous as ever of shape and form’ has given way to an understanding of what Margery Morgan calls the play’s ‘deliberately dislocated structure’ and ‘meticulous patterning of detail’ influenced by cinematic technique.

  The Apple Cart was to be the last of Shaw’s plays to win a regular place in the standard repertory. Desmond MacCarthy ascribed the immediate success to its topicality in the late 1920s: it was about things that people happened then to be discussing. But over twenty years later Thomas Mann was to describe it as a ‘stunningly clairvoyant political satire’. ‘It is perhaps unfortunate that circumstances have not made the play date more,’ complained a Times reviewer in 1965. For sixty years it retained an acute contemporaneity. ‘The Apple Cart delivers an exasperated uppercut to the trade unions and forecasts the economic rebellion of the Third World,’ commented Irving Wardle in The Times after a revival in 1977. ‘...The crisis he is writing about is still our crisis.’ Revivals of the play were to come round each decade and ‘each time it is rediscovered as a play for today,’ added Irving Wardle in 1986.

  Beatrice Webb, who had dismissed The Apple Cart in 1929 as frivolous and annoying, was to write in her diary on 6 September 1940: ‘GBS’s brilliant satirical play, The Apple Cart, his last popular success, seems today an amusing forecast.’

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  The success of The Apple Cart was a good omen for the Malvern Festival. On reaching London the play ran for 258 performances which exceeded the first London productions of Saint Joan and Pygmalion and everything else of Shaw’s except Fanny’s First Play.