Bernard Shaw on Theater

George Bernard Shaw, D.A. Hadfield, D.A. Hadfield

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780795346880
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

A collection of critical writings on theater from the Nobel Prize–winning playwright behind Man and Superman and Pygmalion.

The Critical Shaw: On Theater is a comprehensive selection of essays and addresses about drama and theater by renowned Irish playwright and Nobel Laureate Bernard Shaw. An outspoken critic of the melodramas and formulaic farces that comprised most of the popular theater in the late nineteenth century, Shaw relentlessly campaigned for audiences, actors, theater managers, and even government officials to take theater more seriously, to use the stage as a forum for representing complex real issues such as poverty, marriage and divorce laws, sexual attraction, gender equality, and political power, so that through seeing them acted out, audiences could better understand and address them when they left the theater. Shaw's commitment to social reform through theater was matched by his expertise in the artistic and practical aspects of drama: whether he was reviewing productions, lecturing about acting, or schooling agents on royalties and copyright law, Shaw set a standard for intelligent professionalism that our own theaters might still aspire to and be measured against.

The Critical Shaw series brings together, in five volumes and from a wide range of sources, selections from Bernard Shaw's voluminous writings on topics that exercised him for the whole of his professional career: Literature, Music, Politics, Religion, and Theater. The volumes are edited by leading Shaw scholars, and all include an introduction, a chronology of Shaw's life and works, annotated texts, and a bibliography. The series editor is L.W. Conolly, literary adviser to the Shaw Estate and former president of the International Shaw Society.

Part I: Professional Critic

Shaw is still studied as one of the most significant dramatic critics in the history of Western theatre; one of the most valuable features of his dramatic criticism stems from his refusal to confine his columns solely to the reviewing of specific plays and productions. Shaw had a very clear sense of what a theatre critic should be, even though it was a profession without formal training or credentials. As he explained in his “Author’s Apology” for one of the collections of his dramatic criticism (see Part 1: 7. The Author’s Apology), Shaw saw the column as his opportunity to advance his own agenda about what purpose theatre should serve, and to advocate in support of the innovative new types of social problem plays that would eventually replace the contrived and unrealistic melodramas and well-made plays that made up the repertoire of most actor-managers. And when he turned his attention to specific productions, Shaw’s astonishing recall for details helped demonstrate how much he understood and respected the complexities of production and even the abilities and contributions of individual actors. He also had an uncanny eye for exceptional talent, as his notices of actors like Lillah McCarthy (see Part 1: 1. A New Lady Macbeth) and Robert Loraine (see Part 1: 5. The Theatres) indicate.

1. A New Lady Macbeth and a New Mrs Ebbsmith, 25 May 1895. [Our Theatres in the Nineties, vol. 1, pp. 126–33]

[The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith was playwright Arthur Wing Pinero’s (1855–1934) attempt to follow up his very successful play The Second Mrs Tanqueray. The role of Mrs Ebbsmith had been originally played by Mrs Patrick Campbell (1865–1940), who had made her name by playing Paula Tanqueray in Pinero’s earlier play. Shaw criticized both plays for their essentially conventional resolutions that required the “fallen women” to die or reform themselves. Here Shaw shows his ability to distinguish the actor from the role in his close analysis of a performance. He also shows his astute judge of talent in recognizing Lillah McCarthy, who would indeed become “a valuable recruit to the London stage,” creating the role of Ann Whitefield in Man and Superman and becoming a well-known suffrage-era actress.]

Last Saturday evening found me lurking, an uninvited guest, in an obscure corner of the Garrick Theatre, giving Mrs Ebbsmith another trial in the person of Miss Olga Nethersole [1867–1951]. This time I carefully regulated the dose, coming late for the preliminary explanations, and hurrying home at the end of the second act, when Mrs Ebbsmith had put her fine dress on, and was beginning to work up towards the stove. I cannot say I enjoyed myself very much; for the play bored me more than ever; but I perceived better than I did before that the fault was not altogether Mr Pinero’s. The interest of the first act depends on Mrs Thorpe really affecting and interesting her audience in her scene with Agnes. Miss Ellice Jeffries [actress, dates unknown] fails to do this. I do not blame her, just as I should not blame Mr Charles Hawtrey [1858–1923, well-known farce and comedy actor] if he were cast for the ghost in Hamlet and played it somewhat disappointingly. On the contrary, I congratulate her on her hopeless incapacity to persuade us that she is the victim of an unhappy marriage, or that she lives in a dreary country rectory where she walks like a ghost about her dead child’s room in the intervals of housekeeping for her parson brother. She has obviously not a scrap of anything of the kind in her whole disposition; and that Mr Pinero should have cast her for such business in a part on which his whole first act and a good deal of the rest of the play depends, suggests that his experience of the impossibility of getting all his characters fitted in a metropolis which has more theatres than companies is making him reckless. The impression left is that the scene between Agnes and Mrs Thorpe is tedious and colorless, and that between Agnes and the Duke biting and full of character. But really one scene is as good as the other; only Mr [John] Hare’s [born Fairs, 1844–1921] Duke of St Olpherts is a consummate piece of acting, whilst Miss Jeffries’ Mrs Thorpe is at best a graceful evasion of an impossible task. This was less noticeable before, because Mrs Patrick Campbell counted for so much in both scenes that the second factor in them mattered less. With Miss Nethersole, who failed to touch the character of Agnes at any point as far as I witnessed her performance, it mattered a great deal. I have no doubt that Miss Nethersole pulled the bible out of the stove, and played all the “emotional” scenes as well as Mrs Campbell or any one else could play them; but certainly in the first two acts, where Mrs Ebbsmith, not yet reduced to a mere phase of hysteria, is a self-possessed individual character, Miss Nethersole gave us nothing but the stage fashion of the day in a very accentuated and conscious manner. Mrs Campbell’s extraordinary power of doing anything surely and swiftly with her hands whilst she is acting, preoccupation seeming an embarrassment unknown to her, is a personal peculiarity which cannot reasonably be demanded from her competitors. But Miss Nethersole seems to set a positive value on such preoccupation. When she pretends to darn a stocking she brings it down to the footlights, and poses in profile with the stockinged hand raised above the level of her head. She touches nothing without first poising her hand above it like a bird about to alight, or a pianist’s fingers descending on a chord. She cannot even take up the box containing the rich dress to bundle it off into the next room, without disposing her hands round it with an unmistakeable reference to the conventional laws of grace. The effect in these first two acts, throughout which Mrs Ebbsmith is supposed to be setting Lucas Cleeve’s teeth on edge at every turn by her businesslike ways, plain dress, and impatience of the effects that charm the voluptuary, may be imagined. The change of dress, with which Mrs Campbell achieved such a very startling effect, produced hardly any with Miss Nethersole, and would have produced none but for the dialogue; for Mrs Ebbsmith had been so obviously concerned all through with the effect of her attitudes, that one quite expected that she would not neglect herself when it came to dressing for dinner. The “Trafalgar Squaring” [being lectured at about social or political reform] of the Duke, a complete success on Mr Hare’s part, was a complete failure on Miss Nethersole’s. Mrs Campbell caught the right platform tone of political invective and contemptuous social criticism to perfection: Miss Nethersole made the speech an emotional outburst, flying out at the Duke exactly as, in a melodrama, she would have flown out at the villain who had betrayed her. My inference is that Miss Nethersole has force and emotion without sense of character. With force and emotion, and an interesting and plastic person, one can play “the heroine” under a hundred different names with entire success. But the individualized heroine is another matter; and that is where Mrs Patrick Campbell comes in.

It is usual to describe Mr Hare as an actor who does not do himself justice on first nights because he is nervous. His Duke of St Olpherts is certainly not an instance of this. It is still capital; but compared to his superb performance on the first night, it is minced in diction and almost off-hand in deportment. I have come to the conclusion that Mr [later Sir Johnston] Forbes Robertson [1853–1937, considered the greatest Hamlet of the nineteenth century] is only less out of place as Lucas Cleeve than Miss Jeffries as Mrs Thorpe. In contrast to the cool intensity of Mrs Campbell, his strong, resolute manner, slackened as much as he could slacken it, barely passed muster on the first night as the manner of the weak neurotic creature described by the Duke. But with Miss Nethersole, whose Mrs Ebbsmith is really not Mrs Ebbsmith at all, but a female Lucas Cleeve, even that faint scrap of illusion vanishes, and is replaced by a contrast of personal style in flat contradiction to the character relationship which is the subject of the drama. I still do not think The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith could be made a good play by anything short of treating Agnes’s sudden resolution to make Lucas fall in love with her as a comedy motive (as it essentially is), and getting rid of the claptrap about the bible, finishing the play with Lucas’s discovery that his wife is quite as good a woman as he could stand life with, and possibly—though on this I do not insist—with Agnes’s return to the political platform as the Radical Duchess of St Olpherts. But I am at least quite convinced now that the play as it stands would be much more interesting if the other characters were only half as appropriately impersonated as the Duke of St Olpherts is by Mr Hare, or as Mrs Ebbsmith was by Mrs Campbell….

Readers who have noticed the heading of this article may possibly want to know what Lady Macbeth has to do with it. Well, I have discovered a new Lady Macbeth. It is one of my eccentricities to be old-fashioned in my artistic tastes. For instance, I am fond—unaffectedly fond—of Shakespear’s plays. I do not mean actor-managers’ editions and revivals; I mean the plays as Shakespear wrote them, played straight through line by line and scene by scene as nearly as possible under the conditions of representation for which they were designed. I have seen the suburban amateurs of the Shakespear Reading Society, seated like Christy minstrels [popular blackface minstrel group] on the platform of the lecture hall at the London Institution, produce, at a moderate computation, about sixty-six times as much effect by reading straight through Much Ado About Nothing as Mr Irving with his expensively mounted and superlatively dull Lyceum version. When these same amateurs invited me to a regular stage performance of Macbeth in aid of the Siddons Memorial Fund, I went, not for the sake of Sarah the Respectable, whose great memory can take care of itself (how much fresher it is, by the way, than those of many writers and painters of her day, though no actor ever makes a speech without complaining that he is cheated out of the immortality every other sort of artist enjoys!), but simply because I wanted to see Macbeth. Mind, I am no admirer of the Elizabethan school. When Mr Henry Arthur Jones [1851–1929], whose collected essays on the English drama I am now engaged in reading, says: “Surely the crowning glory of our nation is our Shakespear; and remember he was one of a great school,” I almost burst with the intensity of my repudiation of the second clause in that utterance. What Shakespear got from his “school” was the insane and hideous rhetoric which is all that he has in common with [Ben] Jonson [1572–1637], [John] Webster [c.1579–1630s], and the whole crew of insufferable bunglers and dullards whose work stands out as vile even at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when every art was corrupted to the marrow by the orgie called the Renaissance, which was nothing but the vulgar exploitation in the artistic professions of the territory won by the Protestant movement. The leaders of that great self-assertion of the growing spirit of man were dead long before the Elizabethan literary rabble became conscious that “ideas” were in fashion, and that any author who could gather a cheap stock of them from murder, lust, and obscenity, and formulate them in rhetorical blank verse, might make the stage pestiferous with plays that have no ray of noble feeling, no touch of faith, beauty, or even common kindness in them from beginning to end. I really cannot keep my temper over the Elizabethan dramatists and the Renaissance; nor would I if I could….

As to this performance of Macbeth at St George’s Hall, of course it was, from the ordinary professional standpoint, a very bad one. I say this because I well know what happens to a critic when he incautiously praises an amateur. He gets by the next post a letter in the following terms: “Dear Sir,—I am perhaps transgressing the bounds of etiquette in writing privately to you; but I thought you might like to know that your kind notice of my performance as Guildenstern has encouraged me to take a step which I have long been meditating. I have resigned my position as Governor of the Bank of England with a view to adopting the stage as a profession, and trust that the result may justify your too favorable opinion of my humble powers.” Therefore I desire it to be distinctly understood that I do not recommend any members of the Macbeth cast to go on the stage. The three witches… were as good as any three witches I ever saw; but the impersonation of witches, as a profession, is almost as precarious as the provision of smoked glasses for looking at eclipses through. Macduff was bad: I am not sure that with his natural advantages he could very easily have been worse; but still, if he feels himself driven to some artistic career by a radical aversion to earning an honest livelihood, and is prepared for a hard apprenticeship of twenty years in mastering the art of the stage—for that period still holds as good as when [François Joseph] Talma [1763–1826, famous French actor] prescribed it—he can become an actor if he likes. As to Lady Macbeth, she, too, was bad; but it is clear to me that unless she at once resolutely marries some rich gentleman who disapproves of the theatre on principle, she will not be able to keep herself off the stage. She is as handsome as Miss [Julia] Neilson [1868–1957, notable stage beauty]; and she can hold an audience whilst she is doing everything wrongly. The murder scene was not very good, because Macbeth belonged to the school of the Irish fiddler who, when Ole Bull asked him whether he played by ear or from notes, replied that he played “by main strength”; and you cannot get the brooding horror of the dagger scene by that method. Besides, Miss Lillah McCarthy—that is the lady’s name as given in my program—is happily too young to conceive ambition and murder; or the temptation of a husband with a sickly conscience, as realities: they are to her delicious excitements of the imagination: with a beautiful, splendid terror about them, to be conveyed by strenuous pose, and flashing eye, and indomitable bearing. She went at them bravely in this spirit; and they came off more or less happily as her instinct and courage helped her, or her skill failed her. The banquet scene and the sleep-walking scene, which are the easiest passages in the part technically to a lady with the requisite pluck and personal fascination, were quite successful; and if the earlier scenes were immature, unskilful, and entirely artificial and rhetorical in their conception, still, they were very nearly thrilling. In short, I should like to see Miss Lillah McCarthy play again. I venture on the responsibility of saying that her Lady Macbeth was a highly promising performance, and that some years of hard work would make her a valuable recruit to the London stage. And with that very rash remark I will leave Macbeth, with a fervent wish that Mr Pinero, Mr [Sydney] Grundy [1848–1914, known for his adaptations of Scribe’s plays], and Monsieur [Victorien] Sardou [1831–1908, writer of “well-made plays”], could be persuaded to learn from it how to write a play without wasting the first hour of the performance in tediously explaining its “construction.” They really are mistaken in supposing that [Eugène] Scribe [1791–1861, credited with perfecting the “well-made play”] was cleverer than Shakespear.

2. The Case for the Critic-Dramatist, 16 November 1895. [Our Theatres in the Nineties, vol. 1, pp. 245–51]

[The largely forgettable productions that Shaw was ostensibly reviewing in this column occupied only the final two, brief paragraphs. The rest of the column was given to his argument that a critic who was also a dramatist was actually better qualified to judge plays than a critic who was not. While Shaw was not the only dramatic critic who also wrote plays, he was certainly the most notorious by reputation both as a critic and playwright, and his relentless crusade for theatrical reform in both his plays and his columns easily opened him to personal criticism from other theatre personalities.]

A discussion has arisen recently as to whether a dramatic critic can also be a dramatic author without injury to his integrity and impartiality. The feebleness with which the point has been debated may be guessed from the fact that the favorite opinion seems to be that a critic is either an honest man or he is not. If honest, then dramatic authorship can make no difference to him. If not, he will be dishonest whether he writes plays or not. This childish evasion cannot, for the honor of the craft, be allowed to stand. If I wanted to ascertain the melting-point of a certain metal, and how far it would be altered by an alloy of some other metal, and an expert were to tell me that a metal is either fusible or it is not—that if not, no temperature will melt it; and if so, it will melt anyhow—I am afraid I should ask that expert whether he was a fool himself or took me for one. Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as absolute temperature or absolute value. A dramatic critic who would die rather than read an American pirated edition of a copyright English book might be considered an absolutely honest man for all practical purposes on that particular subject—I say on that one, because very few men have more than one point of honor; but as far as I am aware, no such dramatic critic exists. If he did, I should regard him as a highly dangerous monomaniac. That honesty varies inversely with temptation is proved by the fact that every additional penny on the income-tax yields a less return than the penny before it, shewing that men state their incomes less honestly for the purposes of taxation at sevenpence in the pound than sixpence. The matter may be tested by a simple experiment. Go to one of the gentlemen whose theory is that a man is either honest or he is not, and obtain from him the loan of half a crown on some plausible pretext of a lost purse or some such petty emergency. He will not ask you for a written acknowledgment of the debt. Return next day and ask for a loan of £500 without a promissory note on the ground that you are either honest or not honest, and that a man who will pay back half a crown without compulsion will also pay back £500. You will find that the theory of absolute honesty will collapse at once.

Are we then to believe that the critic-dramatist who stands to make anything from five hundred to ten thousand pounds by persuading a manager to produce his plays, will be prevented by his honesty from writing about that manager otherwise than he would if he had never written a play and were quite certain that he never should write one? I can only say that people who believe such a thing would believe anything. I am myself a particularly flagrant example of the critic-dramatist. It is not with me a mere case of an adaptation or two raked up against me as incidents in my past. I have written half a dozen “original” plays, four of which have never been performed; and I shall presently write half a dozen more. The production of one of them, even if it attained the merest success of esteem, would be more remunerative to me than a couple of years of criticism. Clearly, since I am no honester than other people, I should be the most corrupt flatterer in London if there were nothing but honesty to restrain me. How is it, then, that the most severe criticisms of managers come from me and from my fellow critic-dramatists, and that the most servile puffery comes from writers whose every sentence proves that they have nothing to hope or fear from any manager? There are a good many answers to this question, one of the most obvious being that as the respect inspired by a good criticism is permanent, whilst the irritation it causes is temporary, and as, on the other hand, the pleasure given by a venal criticism is temporary and the contempt it inspires permanent, no man really secures his advancement as a dramatist by making himself despised as a critic. The thing has been tried extensively during the last twenty years; and it has failed. For example, the late Frank [Francis] Marshall [1840–89], a dramatist and an extravagantly enthusiastic admirer of Sir Henry Irving’s [1838–1905, Lyceum Theatre manager and revered Shakespearean actor] genius, followed a fashion which at one time made the Lyceum Theatre a sort of court formed by a retinue of literary gentlemen. I need not question either their sincerity or the superiority of Canute [Shaw is comparing Irving to a powerful tenth-century Anglo-Danish king] to t...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• General Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• Bernard Shaw and His Times: A Chronology
• A Note on the Text
• Part I: Professional Critic
• Part II: Advice on Seeing and Producing Shaw’s Plays
• Part III: Theatre and Social Reform
• Part IV: Censorship
• Part V: The Business of Theatre
• Sources and Further Reading
• The Critical Shaw