From British and Irish Drama
1890-1950: A Critical History
by Richard Farr
Dietrich -- USF
Link to Title
Page & Table of Contents of Entire Book
1930-1950: WAITING FOR BECKETT
|
MURPHY’S ASHES; POETS IN THE
THEATER |
In Samuel Beckett’s early novel Murphy (1938), the hero in his
will asks of his heirs that his ashes be taken to the toilet of the Abbey
Theatre, Dublin, and flushed, “if possible during the performance of a piece.”1 With typical disdain, Beckett pronounces
judgment on the commonplace, superficial, literal-minded mimetic realism that
characterized not only much of the Abbey’s repertoire after O’Casey’s initial
break with it but much of the popular modern stage in general. As led by Beckett in the fifties and sixties,
the absurdist theater’s total onslaught against what Beckett called “the
grotesque fallacy of a realistic art” would be far more drastic than realism’s
revolution had been in the eighties and nineties.2 This chapter,
however, is concerned with what led up to that revolt—the milder and more
traditionalist revolt against realism that typified the poetic-drama movement
of the thirties and forties, a movement that could variously be understood as
an accomplishment in its own right, as something of a false start toward a
dramaturgy that transcends mimetic realism, or as a roundabout path to that
transcendent drama. The poetic-drama
movement had two facets—the verse play revival, and the attempt to create some
of the same theater values as the verse play through the use of poetic prose,
symbolic action, evocative stage imagery, and other nonrealistic means.
The long attempt to restore verse drama to its
former Greek and Elizabethan magnificence didn’t miss a beat in the modern era,
with Tennyson’s efforts of the seventies and eighties followed closely in the
period from 1900 to 1930 by the
verse drama of John Masefield, Stephen Phillips, Lascelles
Abercrombie, John Drinkwater, Gilbert Murray (in Euripidean
translations), and a host of others.3 Kept up in
the teeth of realism’s growing triumph, these early twentieth-century verse
plays, often as imitative of Elizabethan models as nineteenth-century efforts
had been, did little to justify the use of verse in a modern prose age; and
though they had their enthusiastic supporters, and occasionally produced a
sensation, generally they did poorly at the box office, seeming to the general
theatergoer merely to manifest a cranky, stubborn refusal to admit that verse
drama was strictly a thing of the past.
Yeats heroically fought that judgment, and almost alone at this time
produced verse drama of much value, significantly by avoiding the strict
imitation of Elizabethan models and by creating a more modern look and sound. Yet
Yeats compromised his own modernism by tying himself to decadent aristocratic
traditions. Ultimately, too, his
language was less modern than that of the age’s, and so his drama often fell
short of the feel of relevance verse drama needs in order to connect with a
modern audience. But as Yeats was running out of time, hope for a great verse
drama revived in the thirties with the advent of, among others, T. S. Eliot, W.
H. Auden, and Christopher Fry, poets who managed a modernization of verse drama
that gave it greater credibility and a potential for development. Unfortunately, with but few exceptions, the
bright promise of this period for a great verse drama has not as yet fulfilled
itself.
Rather, from today’s perspective, the chief
hope for the revival of a poetic drama in the modern period lay, not with verse
dramatists, but with prose dramatists, such as Synge and O’Casey, who took the
path of matching a heightened, lyrical prose to a symbolic action and an
evocatively imagistic staging. In a time
when the greatest drama was being produced in Europe and America, a desire for
something different in dramaturgy was only half-satisfied in Britain with
backward-looking experimentation—Shaw with the nineteenth-century extravaganza,
Eliot and the other poets with a traditional verse drama, however modernized,
and still others fiddling with realism.
And so in Britain it was the poetic prose tradition, largely Irish (with
its bums, tramps, and assorted proletarians in fundamentally metaphysical
dilemmas), that contributed most to the revolution of the Beckettian
and Pinteresque drama of the fifties and sixties,
though it was largely stripped of its colorful rhetoric in a process of minimalization. The
extreme nature of the fifties revolution made everything leading up to it seem
tentative by contrast, as though the times simply waited for Beckett. No doubt the social disruptions of The
Depression, the rise of fascism, and World War II contributed to the need to
mark time—things had to wait for the century’s second Armageddon to exhaust
itself. Beckett himself, for instance,
was too busy dodging Nazis in the France of the early forties to think much
about playwriting. On the other hand,
the absurdity of World War II was perhaps a necessary stimulus to the
revolutionizing of art forms.
Symptomatic of the decline of realism at
this time and the accompanying urge for a more poetic, or at least
transcendent, theater were, among others, the plays of Priestly, Carroll, Bridie, and Robinson, minor playwrights whose contributions
to mimetic realism were sometimes tempered by a subversive experimentation or
flirting with other modes.
Lennox Robinson (1886-1958), in addition to two stints as manager of the Abbey and a long term on its board of directors, wrote about thirty plays for it, beginning in 1908. Most were more or less realistic comedies and naturalistic “dramas,” but some were of an experimental nature, characterized by an occasional reaching for the poetic prose of Synge and O’Casey. His charming portrayal of the Irish, particularly in the comedies, won him considerable popularity. The White-headed Boy (1916) and The Far-Off Hills (1928) were among his biggest successes, but he kept up a steady production of plays in the thirties and forties as well.
The Irishman Paul Vincent Carroll (1900-1968) began as an Abbey playwright in 1930, achieving his greatest successes with
Shadow and Substance in
1937 and The White Steed in 1939. Mostly realistic treatments of
small-town life among schoolmasters, clergymen, and the like, his plays,
imitative of O’Casey but without his strength and linguistic flair, offer
social criticisms against the intolerant stultifiers
of life and champion the crusading liberal intellectuals. In 1943 Carroll
joined James Bridie and others in founding the
Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, for which he became a director and wrote plays.
James Bridie (1888-1951) was a Scottish playwright who
wrote in both realistic and nonrealistic veins, on subjects ranging from the
domestic to the theological, often with a strong moral or ethical bent, his
favorite recurring character being the devil. His first play appeared in 1928,
his first success—The Switchback—in
1929, and perhaps his best
known—The Anatomist—in
1930. A steady production
through the thirties and forties totaled about forty-two plays. In addition to
his role in founding the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, Bridie
founded in 1950 a College of
Drama in Scotland.
The Englishman J. B. Priestly (1894-1984) was better known as a novelist and
essayist, and as a public and media personality, but he wrote over thirty plays
as well. The majority were largely realistic but the
realism was often undermined by trick endings or by a philosophical- didactic
strain that told against the realism.
His best-known plays, Time
and the Conways and I Have Been Here
Before (both 1937), played
with concepts of time and space in a manner subversive of realism, and later he
attempted an overtly expressionistic style.
But still there were
playwrights who seemed perfectly content with the realistic tradition, such as
the Englishman Terence Rattigan (1911-77), who even attempted to revive the
well-made play. Rattigan began a career in the mid-thirties with popular light
comedies, but in the forties he attempted solider dramas such as The Winslow Boy (1946) and The Browning Version (1948). Most of his plays and TV and film work date
from after 1950 and seem old-fashioned amidst the radical experimentation of
the
time.
The work of all of these playwrights, along
with the contemporary drama of Coward and Maugham (not to mention R. C. Sherriff, Emlyn
Williams, and a host of other minor playwrights), illustrates the taming or
watering down of realism, weakened partly by an ambivalent desire for things
beyond the ken of realism. But none of them were capable of the radical break
with realism the times yearned for. And so, unknowingly, they waited for
Beckett, the heroic spirit who would have the heart to do what Ezra Pound had
commanded the modernist artist to do—”make things new.”
Among the poets who did their damnedest to
“make things new” in drama, the most significant achievement was by T. S. Eliot,
and will be dealt with later, with minor accomplishments by W. H. Auden (mostly
in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood), Christopher Fry, Louis MacNeice,
and Charles Williams.
Auden (1907-1973) and Isherwood (1904-1986) were like perennial “preppies” in their dramatic collaboration, more often having fun with private jargon and jokes than attempting a serious effort to communicate a coherent vision. Though their plays had scant success (i. e., beyond a coterie success), their radical dramaturgy, full of Auden’s cryptic poetry and nonrealistic, sometimes surrealistic, staging, strengthened the hand of those wishing to break with popular realism. For example, they provided the Group Theatre, an experimental group under the directorship of Rupert Doone (disciple of Tyrone Guthrie), material to conduct a revival of “total theatre”—a synthesis of dance, mime, and speech. One famous double bill, in 1935 at the Mercury Theatre, comprised Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes and Auden’s The Dance of Death, plays joined by a spirit of revolt.
Auden had experimented in playwriting with Paid on Both Sides (1933), an
obscure verse drama in charade style; its particular subject was feuding, but
its more general subject was the spiritual and moral collapse of Western
civilization (his recurrent theme); and The Dance of Death (1933), a verse ballet satirically depicting
the death wish of the middle class in allegorical style, making use of all the
forms of “low” theater—music hall, pantomime, revue, cabaret, and jazz band—to coney its anti-fascist theme. At this time, the novelist Christopher
Isherwood, who had known Auden since prep school days and had kept up a
friendship in their common pursuit of boys, fled from his beloved Berlin when
the Nazi takeover made living there too dangerous for homosexuals and
left-wingers. Soon the idea of
collaboration grew on them, leading to three semi-Brechtian
plays—The Dog Beneath the Skin
(1935), a quest play built
rather like an undergraduate revue, The
Ascent of F6 (1936), another
quest play but using mountaineering as its metaphor, and On the Frontier (1938), an
expressionistic allegory of the developing conflict between opposing
ideologies. All were mixtures of verse and prose, the last being more prose
than verse in an unsuccessful effort to attract West End theaters. Their general worldview was that “there is
only one sin: disobedience to the inner law of our own nature.”4 This psychology of overcoming
repression, a modification of Freud along liberal lines, supported a left-wing
critique of the day’s rising fascism.
Though their plays seemed to endorse a “liberation” psychology, they
grew less naive about “self-expression” (which could be complicated by
neuroses), and they interjected some questioning of what was supposed to be
their own ideology. They were desperate searchers among ideologies in the
thirties, and the difficulty they had settling on endings for their plays was
symptomatic of this lack of grounding. When they moved to America in 1939,
Auden and Isherwood ceased their dramatic collaboration, though they afterward
made some independent efforts in film writing and stage adaptation.
Of greater significance
would seem to be the plays of Christopher Fry (1907-), though
his detractors believe that it was impeccable timing that made them significant
at all. He arrived in the postwar West
End with sprightly, vigorous, gorgeously poetic comedies just when bombed-out
London needed something to boost its spirit and lift its eyes out of the
rubble. But the skeptics wondered about the quality of a verse drama that could
succeed in such a cultural
wasteland.
Fry was unique among the verse dramatists
of his time in that his training came from practical stage experience rather
than from the library or the study. He
acted and directed with the Tunbridge Wells Repertory
Players from 1934 to 1936, and he became director at the Oxford Playhouse in
1939, shortly before he was
called up as a conscientious objector to serve in a non-combatant arm of the
armed forces. He returned to the Oxford Playhouse in 1944, soon after which he became resident
playwright at the Arts Theatre Club in London.
Over the years he’s been a sort of theatrical jack-of-all-trades,
writing music for the stage and children’s plays for the BBC, entertaining in
cabarets, writing films, and translating the plays of Giraudoux and
Anouilh. Fry published ten plays, three
written for religious festivals—The
Boy with a Cart (1929), Thor,
with Angels (1950), and
A Sleep of Prisoners (1951); five “comedies” (tragicomedies,
really)—A Phoenix Too Frequent
(1946), The Lady’s Not for
Burning (1949), Venus Observed (1950), The Dark Is Light Enough (1954)
and A Yard of Sun (1970);
a tragedy—The Firstborn (1946); and a history play—Curtmantle (1961); with five or six other
plays preceding his initial pubhcation.5 His major
commercial successes occurred in the late forties and early fifties.
Although his recurrent theme of man’s
estrangement makes him akin to the French existentialists, Fry eschewed their
pessimism. While his plays are fully cognizant of the dark side of the human
condition, even suggesting that the Christian idea of Original Sin is a
metaphorical approximation of what ails us as a species, nevertheless Fry
encourages a belief in some ultimate rightness or unity in human endeavor,
however briefly and uncertainly we can envision it. He joined the Christian
belief of his childhood with the Shavian-Bergsonian
theory of Creative Evolution to form a precariously-held faith in Life; and in
an age when positivism presented a dreary picture of life as mechanical and
determined, Fry dramatized his intuitions of a mystery at the heart of
existence, one both mystifying and mystical, imbuing flesh with spirit, the
mundane with the divine, and chaos with unity.
A wry acceptance of Life is Fry’s norm, reached after much searching and
doubting, typically after an act of sacrificial love on the part of one
character atones for the character who makes the affirmation. This act typically
occurs in a rather fairy-tale world, usually set in the past, where freedom
from realistic conventions allowed Fry whatever improbabilities of plot and
character were necessary to the realization of his themes, his themes being
ones of faith rather than logical deduction.
With such faith, Fry’s plays imply, one may be perpetually amazed at how
much marvel lies in the most humdrum of experiences.
Such themes found expression in a somewhat
irregular blank verse and a Shakespearean tone of romantic exuberance,
revitalized by strikingly fresh imagery and figurative language. Fry flaunted his style. Using such verbal bravura, in the Elizabethan
manner, as wit-combat, bombast, exuberant invective, and punning, Fry
audaciously proclaimed that modern verse, contrary to Eliot’s theory, could imitate Shakespeare and
still be modern. Fry had noticed that
contrary to Eliot’s theory, modern audiences reveled in Shakespeare precisely
for his utter abandon in plot and character and his outlandish word music; Shakespeare
was admired, not because his blank verse was connected with living Elizabethan
speech, but because his verse had so little connection with modern speech, thus
intimating a world beyond the horrible realities of realism and naturalism. Fry
fed the postwar hunger for a reaffirmation of such worlds with an appropriate
flamboyance and extravagance that compounded theme by tone, but with such
tragicomic finesse and acknowledgment of a problematic universe that he could
not be called unrealistic in his attitudes.
Fry’s detractors, accusing him of
constructing a mere “theatre of words” in which “pretty words” take the place
of viable dramatic action and character differentiation, found such verse
“distractingly autonomous” and “self-consciously literary,” full of “spurious
joviality” and “preciosity.”6
In a violation of dramatic decorum,
they said, all his characters sound the same—”even flat, stock types use an
extraordinarily rich, metaphorical language”7—and though four of his comedies were meant to represent
the four seasons, “April sounds
just like November.”8 Even worse was the accusation that Fry
“applied a grand style to trivial themes, ‘what one might expect of Paradise Lost if it were rewritten
by Ogden Nash.’”9
But surely a modern Paradise Lost (Waiting for Godot?)
would be legitimately quite different from the original. Further, Fry’s questioning of modern identity
and of the possibility of meaningful action in an ethical vacuum does not seem
trivial, nor does the overstated poetry and hearty manner in which he chooses
to ask it seem false to its context; in fact, that the manner lends itself to
its subject in its time is one of the defenses of Fry’s apologists. His
defenders reply variously that his detractors have missed Fry’s self-mocking ironies
and his prose counter-voice, that his language is an extension of his theme,
and that his “weaknesses” are really his strengths, for the autonomous language
carries a dramatic vibrancy that more than compensates for the lack of
conventional dramatic decorum. Critical
consensus may not be possible with Fry, but at the least the historian must
acknowledge that in Fry a very remarkable meteor shot through the postwar skies
and considerably brightened a darkened and despairing world. If nothing else, he reinstated the comic
spirit in a gloomy age.
Also worthy of note as verse
dramatists were Louis
MacNeice (1907-1964) and Charles
Williams (1886-1945), MacNiece
succeeding not so much with stage plays (Out of the Picture, 1937, being his only one) as with a series of radio plays written in
the forties and fifties, starting with The Dark Tower in 1946;
and Williams following Eliot’s lead in the writing of religious
plays—historical dramas for festival performance, such as Thomas Cramner of
Canterbury (1936) and
Judgment at Chelmsford (1939), and shorter plays on religious
themes, such as The House by the
Stable (1938) and Seed of Adam (1939), both
Nativity plays. Dylan Thomas’s verse
drama falls outside our period, else much would be made of the great loss to
the genre’s development incurred by his early death.10
However influential such minor verse dramatists were at the time, the verse plays of the most lasting value seem to belong to T. S. Eliot. Even so, though Eliot was undoubtedly a major poet and a major critic, it is going too far to call him a major dramatist. The major dramatist of the period was, surprisingly, still George Bernard Shaw, several of whose plays of his dotage were as good as anything being penned.
In 1930 George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, believing that drama should again become an
ally of the Church, appointed E. Martin Browne as director of religious drama
for his diocese, and it was Browne who gave T. S. Eliot the opportunity and the
sort of production expertise the poet needed in order to find his way as a
religious dramatist.
There
had been a considerable dramatic quality in the poetry that made Eliot famous,
such as in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
(1915) and The Waste Land (1922). In addition, throughout the twenties Eliot
had written critical pieces on the theory of drama that suggested a desire to
try out his theory. Finally, the two
fragments that make up Sweeney Agonistes (1926-27) received a brief production
as a play in 1933. But this inclination toward the
dramatic received its chief practical encouragement from Browne’s commission to
Eliot in 1933 to write a pageant
play for a London church-building campaign. The result was The Rock (1934), which launched Eliot into the
playwriting that was to be the chief creative occupation of his final phase,
though the damper on the theaters brought on by World War II made him pause for
a decade, during which, among other things, he finished Four Quartets. But this brings us in rather late on the
Eliot story.
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born
in St. Louis, the seventh and youngest child of Henry Ware Eliot, president of
the Hydraulic-Press Bricks Company, and Charlotte Chauncy
Stearns, poetess and author of a life of Savonarola. Of pioneer stock, Eliot was descended from
Isaac Stearn, of the Mayflower, and from Andrew
Eliot, a judge in the Salem witch trails, and he was the grandson of the
Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, a prominent, philanthropic Unitarian who had
moved from Boston in 1834 to save the soul of French Catholic St. Louis. In the stern pursuit of civic virtues, Rev.
Eliot established the family emphasis on doing good works, against which Eliot
would later rebel in putting “faith” above “works,” though he never rebelled
against the family legacy without inner struggle and a residue of guilt. Young
Eliot spent his winters in St. Louis and his summers on the Massachusetts
coast, where there were still family connections.
Excluding a year of study at the Sorbonne
in Paris (1910-11), where his
studies in Sanskrit and Eastern religion made him consider becoming a Buddhist,
Eliot attended Harvard from 1906 to 1914, deliberately falling just short of a Ph.D. in philosophy so he
could avoid becoming an academic. At Harvard he became noted for his poetry,
some bawdy stuff about King Bolo, but also the originals of his more serious
early work. At Harvard too he met Emily Hale, the woman he perhaps should have
married, who kept up a long correspondence and
friendship with him. She missed her opportunity when Eliot left for Germany in
1914 on a Harvard Traveling Fellowship. Not long in Germany, he was driven back
to England by the outbreak of war.
After briefly attending Oxford, Eliot
settled for good in London, marrying a woman from a distinguished old family,
Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a vivacious, multitalented lady
who hoped to “bring out” her reserved spouse.
The truth about this marriage of incompatibles is hard to come by,
Eliot’s friends taking the partisan view that Vivienne was an advanced neurotic
who may have served him as his muse but otherwise drove him to distraction,
justifying his abandoning her in 1932, officially
separating from her in 1933, and
having her committed to a mental hospital in 1935 when she refused to abandon
him. But Eliot’s deliberate suppression
of the facts suggested to others that her occasionally bizarre behavior,
apparently caused largely by improper medication for real illnesses, was
exacerbated by his sometimes frigid, puritanical temperament, to which he
retreated in moments of stress, and that his putting away a perfectly sane
woman was an act of mental instability on his part.11 Whatever the truth, Eliot’s work does seem haunted at
times by the torment of some guilt, sometimes explicitly connected to
mistreatment of a woman. And many of his
plays focus on a person’s discovering a “call” to abandon all family and
worldly life for the service of God, the sort of call a man burdened with a
very unhappy marriage might very well hear.
It is certain too that the burden of having to deal with his wife’s
illness, combined with overwork in literary endeavors and the bank job her
family had gotten him in 1917, contributed
to the breakdown that The Waste Land
implies.
Eventually an editorship of the influential
magazine the Criterion,
in 1922, and an appointment
as director at the publishing firm of Faber and Faber in 1927 got him out of the bank job and into
more congenial work. In 1927 he received baptism in the Church of
England and became a British citizen, afterward declaring himself a classicist
in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion,
presenting the paradox of one of the most radical of the age in his literary
forms becoming one of the most conservative and reactionary in his social
forms.
For many years Eliot lived with or near
Father Cheetham, rector of St. Stephen’s in
Kensington, and then in Chelsea with the paraplegic John Hayward. Vivienne died in the mental hospital in 1947. The next year Eliot received the Nobel
Prize. Not long after, in 1949, Valerie Fletcher became his
secretary; it would take eight years for them to discover they were both
interested in marriage, which they entered into in 1957. As they traveled about warmer
climes to seek relief from the emphysema that would eventually kill him, she
apparently made his last years the happiest of his life, and she remains a sort
of dragon guarding the Eliot reputation, though his stipulation that no
biographies be written has not prevented them despite her lack of
cooperation. Eliot’s desire to separate
“the man who suffers from the mind that creates,”12 while a laudable attempt to emphasize the work over the
author in an age when that was not common, seems nevertheless, in the context
of Eliot’s life, an expression of a “dissociated sensibility,” a condition he
himself diagnosed as a modern malady.
That Eliot should have been driven toward
the drama was perhaps inevitable, given his theories about poetry. He wanted poetry to be “an escape from
emotion”13 and the
life of an artist “a continual extinction of personality,”14 but this appears to be more a
rationalization of his own needs than an objective account of things, for his
own poetry is dominated by a subterranean romanticism that contradicts his
theory. Perhaps bothered by this contradiction and seeking better means of
escaping himself, he naturally gravitated toward the more objective form of the
drama.
In the drama, he also seemed better able to
realize his own ideal, as stated in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” of
becoming the means to express a tradition, however much his individual talent
might alter the tradition. The tradition
he had in mind was part literary, that of verse drama, but more religious, that
of Christian salvationism. The result was that Eliot’s drama has much
less of the striking personal image that characterized his poetry and much more
of the objectivity and impersonality he desired, to the extent that his plays
at times seem to illustrate the triumph of abstract theology and dramatic
technique over feeling, as sometimes the characters are less thinking and
feeling beings than enactors of a patterned, predetermined thought. Curiously, we find in Eliot’s plays the old Scribean dominance of pattern over idea and character
returning to haunt the stage, as Eliot tries, perhaps too hard, to become the
stage craftsman.
Eliot’s formal achievements in reviving and
modernizing verse drama offset to some extent his limitations as a dramatist.
This traditionalist was one of the most extreme of his age in altering the
tradition to accommodate his individual talent.
For example, while standing firmly behind the tradition that verse drama
is a superior mode, Eliot understood that the dominance of Shakespeare (Shaw’s
“bardolatry”) prevented the genre’s revival. The tradition, if it was to live, must
accommodate the present. And so Eliot’s
first experiment, in the unfinished Sweeney
Agonistes, was in the direction of
eschewing Shakespearean blank verse and inventing a verse rhythm and diction
appropriate for the modern context.
As David Jones points out, blank verse may
originally have had a living relationship to Elizabethan spoken language, but
soon it became divorced from it as the living language, constantly changing, moved on while the form of blank verse stood
still. Thus the
increasing air of unreality about verse drama from the late seventeenth century
on. “The vital tension of poetic rhythm,” says Jones, “arises out of the
subtle interaction of ordinary speech rhythms with the basic metric pattern,”
and that tension is lost when the two are too widely separated. “Eliot saw
quite early ... that the only solution to the problem was to
go back beyond Shakespeare to earlier forms of dramatic verse and indeed to the
root principles of English prosody—organization by stress rather than numerical
division into syllabic units.”15 The greater
flexibility of a stress measure would allow poetry to more accurately capture
modern speech rhythms. In Sweeney Agonistes,
which satirizes the modern wasteland through the evoking of a heroic past,
the speech of lower-class individuals is caught in stresses that recreate while
parodying such disparate language as is found in popular jazz songs, telephone
conversations, music-hall routines, and banal, vacuous party chatter.
Eliot’s title is of course evocative of Samson Agonistes,
but in Sweeney we have no Miltonic wrestling with fate, only a dim and
rather inarticulate perception of the horror of modern secularized life, from
Eliot’s view drained of meaning and significance by its abandonment of a
spiritual dimension (fortune-telling being its debased idea of religion). The second fragment shows Apeneck
Sweeney, type of the modern sensual man, responding to this horror with an
expression of desire to escape from civilization, not to a higher, but to a
lower, more primitive, sphere. Since
Doris, the lady under seduction, prefers an urban life to Sweeney’s horrifying primitivist vision, Sweeney resigns himself to his
inability to communicate, and to a morose and drunken acceptance of things as
they are. Eliot’s general pattern in his other plays was to force an
exceptional person into a conflict that exposed the spiritual desert and led
the protagonist to spiritual growth and to an essentially Christian
understanding of things. Perhaps he
dropped Sweeney because he could not see him taking that path—Sweeney would if
anything regress.
But it’s unfortunate that Eliot dropped as well the experiment with this
sort of colloquial, idiomatic, even vulgar language and strong jazz rhythms,
not to mention the parodistic style of this “Aristophanic melodrama” (as he called Sweeney), for had he
continued in this vein the age might not have waited so long for the Beckett revolution. Eliot seemed to recognize a lost opportunity
when, much later, in deprecating his other plays, he spoke of Sweeney as his most promising
effort in drama.16
The element in Sweeney that led him in a different direction was his use of
minor characters as a chorus, expressive of communal feeling, for it was his
talent in writing choral verse that was particularly called upon and developed
in the commission from Martin Browne to contribute to the pageant play
eventually called The Rock. Browne had written a scenario to order,
based on a C. B. Cochran revue, and while Eliot apparently made small
contributions to the story line (he claimed that only one scene was all his),
he made major contributions to what was really the most dominant character—the
chorus, half-masked to emphasize its impersonality. Written in aid of a church-building fund, The Rock made the building of a
church in London its central action, relating that contemporary event to the
long history of the Church’s struggle in England and to current events that
threatened it (especially the challenge of the rival but godless creeds of
fascism, communism, and capitalism), emphasizing that such building is
essentially a spiritual enterprise that encounters constant testing of the
faith. “The Rock” itself, first Christ and then Peter, reappears throughout to
bolster the faith. The pageant play is a wide-ranging, all-encompassing form,
appropriate for the occasion, but in its straying in time and space it
sacrifices dramatic unity and intensity, and thus did not answer Eliot’s desire
to achieve a truly dramatic voice.
Concerned to provide links between episodes through choral commentary,
for the most part he either provided fairly pedestrian descriptive-explanatory
verse or verse that spoke of the evils of the day in
the editorial, haranguing voice of the preacher. Despite his success with a
more colloquial diction matched to a free verse organized by stresses rather
than syllables, Eliot was not satisfied. On the other hand, the experience had
introduced him to the practical life of the theater, to its craft, and had made
him known as one who could do good choral work.
No doubt the commission that came next, to write a play for the
Canterbury Festival, was based partly on that.
Experimentation over, Eliot in 1935 became
a full-fledged dramatist with the writing of Murder in the Cathedral. Canterbury
Cathedral being the site of the twelfth-century murder of St. Thomas à
Becket by men aligned with Henry II in the king’s struggle to assert the
primacy of state over church, Becket was a natural subject for Eliot’s
Canterbury commission. Further, Tom
Eliot identified with Tom Becket in that Becket’s drastic midlife change upon
becoming archbishop of Canterbury was similar to Eliot’s experience. There is some doubt about the actual
saintliness of the historical Becket, but Eliot, who was accused of viewing
history through a stained-glass window, chose to ignore the complexity of
literal history for the sake of dramatizing the single imaginative truth he saw
as central to this conflict between secular and spiritual power. Becket ultimately triumphed by being sainted
for his martyrdom, the king having to do public penance at his tomb, and this
for Eliot revealed that operating behind the scenes was a divine plan for the
spiritual elect. The elect are made to suffer greatly for their insistence on
the primacy of spiritual values, but in their martyrdom—a mere temporary
defeat—they ultimately triumph over their persecutors by their death’s
reaffirmation, among the people, of the redeeming nature of Christ’s original
sacrifice, their unfair deaths being necessary to shock the people into an
awareness of backsliding. Shaw’s Saint
Joan had asked, “How long, 0 Lord, how long?” and Eliot’s answer to her plea to
end the sacrifice of saints is that there can be no end, for the common people
will always need the spiritual elect to show the way through martyrdom. (The
saint’s triumph in defeat, incidentally, calls into question whether there can be
such a thing as "Christian tragedy.")17
Employing allegorical figures and obviously
poetic rhetoric and versification in the manner of Everyman, Eliot combined medieval dramatic techniques with
a full-throated Greek chorus to dramatize both the importance of spiritual
community and its periodic renewal, through martyrdom, after its
disintegration. In part 1, after the threat of martyrdom to
Becket is made known, Four Tempters appear as allegorical
representatives of inner temptations, offering pleasures and worldly success
and power. For the heroic Becket, it is the Fourth Tempter who presents the
greatest challenge, for he strikes at Becket’s blind spot, his love of heroic
action for the pridefulness of it; Becket’s severest
test is in accepting martyrdom, not for the personal glory that comes with
sainthood, but for the sake of fulfilling God’s divine plan. In an interlude
between parts 1 and 2, Beckett
addresses his congregation on Christmas Day, presenting his belief that he has
made perfect his will by acceding to the will of God. In part 2, after the Four Knights murder
Becket ritualistically, the audience and the chorus are forced to deal with the
aftermath of the murder as the knights offer them a
temptation to excuse the crime on perfectly reasonable, modern grounds. Eliot’s point is that for martyrdom to be
efficacious, not only must the martyr accept his martyrdom in the right spirit,
but the mass of men who may be redeemed by it must also accept the act in the
right spirit, as part of God’s design for the world. In having the knights address the audience
directly, in their own terms, the audience is forced to realize that modern
assumptions about the primacy of state over church automatically exonerate
Becket’s killers, and thus the audience sharing those assumptions is implicated
in that murder. Redemption for the
audience-congregation begins with the admission of guilt. That was a very effective
bit of dramaturgy by an author who was rapidly learning his craft.
In Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot “has shown how drama can
still be an instrument of community in the two senses corresponding to its
original function as an extension of the liturgy and as an interpretation of
God’s word in terms of flesh and blood.”18 But Eliot would emphasize, contrary to Shavian
practice, that while drama of this sort can be a supplement to worship, it is
not worship itself. Eliot sought, not to
replace the Church, as Shaw did, but to bolster it by bringing the Church and
its values to the secular West End.
While Shaw and Eliot would have largely agreed on their diagnosis of the
spiritual wasteland of modern life, they would have disagreed on the cure—for
Eliot Christianity was the solution; for Shaw institutional Christianity was
part of the pollution.
In 1936, seeking to break openly with the
naturalistic stage, Eliot spoke of “the necessity for poetic drama at the
present time to emphasize, not to minimize, the fact that it is written in
verse,” and so in Murder in the
Cathedral “we introduce rhyme, even doggerel, as a constant reminder
that it is verse and not
a compromise with prose.”19 But as Eliot became more
interested in evangelically invading the West End, to close the gap between
secular and religious drama as a means of cultural reintegration, he reversed
his strategy, creating a verse drama that would be unobtrusively poetic and
apparently naturalistic.
Eliot’s final four plays, all placed in
contemporary settings naturalistically rendered, are dramaturgically and
thematically similar; he increasingly thinned out the poetry to make it less
obtrusive and employed popular literary and theatrical conventions for the sake
of spreading the gospel. It has been
argued that Eliot’s attempt to claim the West End for Christian drama ended in
the West End’s claiming Eliot (just as it has been argued that the conversion
of pagans to Christianity is usually more the conversion of Christianity to
paganism). His use of the mythic method in basing his plays on Greek models
added to this ambiguity, though his intention was to show how Greek plays could
be understood as intuitions of the more fully realized Christian scheme of
things.
Eliot’s first starting venture in the West
End occurred in 1939 with performances of The Family Reunion starring Michael Redgrave at the
Westminster Theatre. With teasing
suggestions of a popular comedy and a detective thriller, the play lured
audiences into something rather more complex and high-minded, a play based on Aeschylus’s
The Oresteia but
transmuted by a Christian view. Harry Monchensey, scion of a family of landed aristocrats, has
returned to the family home, Wishwood, seeking to
escape the Eumenides who pursue him, he thinks, to
obtain satisfaction for his guilt, stemming from his wife’s falling overboard
to her death on a cruise ship just after he had wished her dead. At Wishwood he
discovers from his Aunt Agatha the cause of his own barrenness of heart—it is a
family curse, an original sin, brought on by his father’s having wished his
wife dead when she was pregnant with Harry, the father having fallen in love
with Agatha. The play consists of Harry’s being led to the realization that he
has been “elected,” in the Christian sense, for some special suffering, on
behalf of a cursed family, suffering that through the proper purgation may lead
to salvation. The Eumenides are thus to be viewed,
not as vengeful agents, but as friendly spirits who drive him toward his
salvation. Eliot, however, was not happy
with the Eumenides’ original visibility to the
audience, the play’s only violation of naturalistic decorum, later urging
directors to present them as invisible agents sensed only by the spiritually
aware.
The war then intervening, it was 1949
before Eliot returned to the theater with The Cocktail Party, the first of the three plays to be
introduced at the Edinburgh Festival, before going on to Broadway and the West
End. With an increased flexibility of
verse, soliloquies and lyrical duets eliminated, elements of ritual and choric
speaking reduced, symbolic figures given a naturalistic base (the spiritual
advisor is here a psychiatrist; the chorus are friends of the family and speak
individually), Eliot’s invasion of the West End became more subversive. Eliot wanted “to make his hearers forget
about poetry as a special organization of language in order that they might
respond to it as a special mode of awareness.”20 But the question remains whether in
thinning out the poetry to make it sound like prose it didn’t vanish
altogether—actors needed special drill from Martin Browne to give any feel of
verse at all. Certainly A Cocktail Party, a three-acter with a circular plot, can have more of the look and
sound of a slick social comedy than a religious drama in verse. But in basing the play on Euripides’ Alcestis, Eliot’s intention
was to make the social surface a subject of satire, evidence of a spiritual
desert. These are people in need of
salvation.
Edward and Lavina
Chamberlayne are at the center of the action, each
having betrayed the other with an adulterous relationship. Their friends have
been invited to a cocktail party at their place at a time of great social
embarrassment—Lavinia is missing as hostess because
she has left Edward on discovering that he has a mistress, Celia. The shock of being confronted with his wife’s
defection sets Edward on a course of self-exploration, assisted by an
Unidentified Guest, later discovered to be a psychiatrist (the secular world’s
substitute for the father confessor) and by Guardians, Alex and Julia, who work
for some sort of undeclared spiritual Red Cross Society. Edward, Lavinia,
and Celia are led to an understanding that they have been imposing roles on
each other that falsify the self; they are made to see that given life as it is
(“fallen,” in the Christian view), one is faced with the choice of living an
ordinary married existence, making the best of things, or living as a celibate
wholly devoted to God. Realizing they
are not heroic types, the Chamberlaynes choose the
former, returning to their old life but with a renewed spirit. At the end, two years later, we find them
preparing for a cocktail party that they will do their best to make a communion
of souls. As Celia chooses atonement and
the saint’s life, ending up martyred in Africa, the news of her horrible death
causes the Chamberlaynes to identify with her as
redeemer and acknowledge their complicity in her death; with heighted spiritual
awareness, they draw closer together.
Believing now that “life is only keeping on,” and “every moment is a
fresh beginning,”21 they hope to elevate the cocktail party
from a secular exchange of meaningless chatter to a religious ritual in which
they keep the faith, however mundane their style.
The
Confidential Clerk (1953),
another three-act play, went even further in suiting West End requirements—the
poetry is even thinner, the verse dialogue more conversational, the theological
message more muted, and the tradition behind it partly that of
mistaken-identity farce. The plot is too complicated for brief summary but
involves questions of misplaced and illegitimate offspring, with young people
turning out to have parentage different from what was thought. The point is
that one’s heavenly Father is the one to be counted on, and with a right
relationship to the spiritual Father, all other relationships fall into place.
The title puns on clerk and
cleric, the
confidential clerk (private secretary) hired by Sir Claude, one Colby Simpkins,
turning out to be, not Sir Claude’s illegitimate son, as they think, but a
young man with a legitimate spiritual vocation, that of a cleric; the action of
the play leads Colby to discover his true identity among the spiritual elect.
The
Elder Statesman (1958),
also in three acts, is loosely based on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, and like
Sophocles Eliot too ended with a more mellow and optimistic view of
things. Lord Claverton,
a retired politician, has discovered that his lifelong cultivation of a public
self has caused his inner self to atrophy, and now, a “hollow man” in
retirement, he is terrified by loneliness.
He is also haunted by vengeful “ghosts,” people from his past on whom he
inflicted “crimes of the heart” and who return now to force his conscience,
just what he needs to awaken the inner self, though he resists that path of
rebirth. His son seems destined to make
similar mistakes, but fortunately his daughter is loving
enough to hear his confession and give him some absolution. He at last is reconciled to death by the
discovery of love and forgiveness, and, having found himself as a father, he
leaves his daughter and her fiancé to their celebration of mutual love. Unlike
former Eliot plays, here the central character, though achieving some spiritual
illumination, does not find himself among the
spiritual elect who can expiate the sins of others. And he “finds his salvation not by rejection
of ordinary family life, but by purification of the life within the family,”22 as Eliot himself was doing in
his second marriage and in his frequent visiting with close relatives. Family love is now something not to rise
above in heroic sacrifice, but to accept as a manifestation of the divine in
ordinary life.
Arguments for verse drama by
enthusiasts are usually one way— they emphasize gains but never losses. Eliot was no different in seeing the
advantages but never the disadvantages of writing the kind of drama he was
inclined to write anyway (though he encountered plenty of the disadvantages in
his practice). Eliot argued that “the
tendency . .
of prose drama is to emphasize the ephemeral
and superficial; if we want to get at the permanent and universal we tend to
express ourselves in verse.”23 Such an argument was constantly disproved by the day’s best
playwrights. And it indicates a fundamental
misunderstanding of that realistic drama the modernists reacted so strongly
against—the drama of Ibsen—which was anything but superficial and
ephemeral. But these critical blindnesses aside, Eliot clearly stands as a significant
ground breaker, who provided a rationale for verse drama that keeps its future
open, and though his practice was flawed, it contains enough successful
material to provide models and food for thought for young poets for some time
to come. Certainly we need the enrichment
of verse drama if the theater is not to become too monotone.
Curiously, at the same time Eliot
was in some way groping toward the sort of poetic theater eventually realized
by Beckett, Pinter, et al., he was also a reactionary figure. As Martin Browne points
out, the tide that was gathering against the conventions of the theater of
realism “Eliot forestalled . . ;
he accepted the conventions because his audience would expect to start there.”24 He was a bit like conservatives on our own Supreme Court who for
conservative reasons refuse to overthrow liberal precedents. And so while Eliot, as leader of the
verse-drama movement after Yeats’s death, was driving toward a theater
transcendent of the conventions of realism, he was simultaneously delaying the
advance by compromising tactics that steered clear of a too radical overthrow
of realism’s precedents. And so the
times would have to wait for Beckett.
No longer wishing to be “Georged,” Bernard Shaw amazed the world with his resurgence
as a playwright at age seventy-three.
Six years after Saint Joan
had seemed to cap his career, Shaw suddenly exploded with The Apple Cart in 1929, ushering in his final phase,
in which he wrote enough significant plays to constitute a career for most
playwrights. This final phase took the
form of an increasingly oracular and sometimes apocalyptic performance, as
Shaw, building on the prestige of receiving the Nobel Prize and having been
proved right about World War I, found in radio, film, and international
translations of his plays a wider and wider public forum, in which he was more
and more celebrated. Of course
celebration did not necessarily mean that people changed their ways or heeded
his warnings about the catastrophe he foresaw, a fact that brought a bit of
wistful sadness to the clown face and made him look more like the exasperated
prophet he really was.
The news media, rapidly becoming more like our
own, would not leave Shaw alone, no world event being complete without his
opinion being solicited. With more devilment than reverence, reporters
approached his Whitehall apartments near Parliament or his Ayot
St. Lawrence estate north of London as though visiting the oracle at Delphi but
expecting a quotable jest along with the riddling prophecy. As Shaw was accustomed to
public performance, however privately weary of the role, he appeared to be
enjoying himself as “G.B.S.,” the clown-prophet of international politics.
The laughing oracle even took his act on the road, following his wife’s
disposition to travel, and dispensed upon the continents a kindly but sometimes
prickly wisdom that was not always understood even when indulged with good
humor. Shaw’s international parade
largely came to an end with his wife’s ill health in the thirties (she died in
1943).
Perhaps his most ballyhooed trip was his visit to Stalin in 1931, accompanied by Lord and Lady Astor,
in which he got a bit carried away with the clown act and made unfortunate
testimonials to Stalin (while nevertheless satirizing Stalinist society; he was
taken to see a horse race where he remarked that he was surprised to see more
than one entry!). The increasing
celebrity was no compensation for the increasing frailty of old age, but he
found some comfort in a pen that continued to flow almost to the end.
Perhaps the epitome of his celebrity came
with the establishment of a summer drama festival in Malvern, near Wales,
featuring his plays. Not since Granville
Barker’s Court Theatre days had a single theater so devoted itself to him. Established in 1929 by Barry Jackson, philanthropic entrepreneur of many theatrical
ventures (beginning with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre), the Malvern Festival
was stopped only by World War II.
Several attempts have been made to revive it, so far with no lasting
success. Shaw no doubt received much
encouragement from Malvcrn to write new plays. Other encouragement paradoxically came from
the discouraging times, which, with its increasing polarization of political
Left and Right, cried out for dramatization. The “political extravaganza” was
Shaw’s form for depicting the extravagance of the day’s politics.
Shaw’s celebrity had always been a mixture
of fame and notoriety, and he took care to keep it that way. He had started out
by shocking conventional thinking, and from then on whenever he saw the times
coming his way, his ideas
becoming conventional, he would instinctively attack the very ideas he had earlier
seemed to espouse. He did not like to be
at ease in Zion. Evolution, operating
dialectically, he thought, moves on. (A reading of Shaw’s early work shows that
all his ideas had actually been there from the beginning—it was just that the
dialectic of history required different emphases at different times.) For example, in the thirties, after decades
of working largely by diligent, courteous, peaceful Fabian means to institute
social democracy, Shaw gained notoriety by seeming to turn against the parliamentary
method of social reform and to take up with rude “strong men.” He made a few complimentary remarks about
dictators (the old “Mussolini got the trains running on time” routine) and, as
a friend of Lady Astor, was at home at Clivedon, an
aristocratic house notorious for its anti-democratic sentiments. Guilty by association. But this is one of the most misunderstood
aspects of Shaw’s career, granting that his own deteriorating forensic powers
may have contributed.
Shaw had never been a democrat in the sense that he thought people at
present and in general were capable of governing themselves or even of electing
wise, capable rulers, and he had always admired what he believed to be more
highly evolved talents. Well, never mind
the political buffooneries of more recent history, one has only to contemplate
the breakdown of the immature Western democracies in the thirties to see some
justice in Shaw’s view, and the possibility that these democracies survived
only because World War II allowed them to declare martial law under “strong
man” rule is further supportive.
But Shaw’s skepticism of democracy as a political system did not
prevent him from supporting the democracies in their war with the fascist
states, just as he supported England in the Boer War, because it was a question
of the survival of the more highly civilized.
Nor did it prevent him from being a democrat in a more important
sense—he had unusual fellow feeling for the humblest of beings and had no wish
to keep anyone down. His belief in
evolution was partly a hope that natural inequities would be overcome in the
long run by a natural process of the lower rising to the higher, and he stood
ready to welcome or encourage any such progress. As his John Tanner put it, in the idiom of Man and Superman, “a democracy of
Supermen” is the goal, an ideal as ancient as Athens. But Shaw thought naive the notion that one
could achieve a democracy of Supermen by goose-stepping and “Heil Hitlering” (the Superman
would be known by his self-control,
he wrote, not his control over others), and the plays and prefaces of his last
phase made quite clear that he thought the fascist dictators a misguided lot,
however much he liked to use them as sticks to brain the muddling-through,
vote-peddling democratic politicians.
Being a member of the political Left
himself, however, he was much more circumspect in criticizing the shortcomings
of leftist dictatorships, such as Stalin’s, though he did criticize them. In the days of the rapid rise of the fascist
bully boys, it seemed to many that the only hope for humane government lay with
the Left, and so when news came of Stalin’s purges, Shaw did not want to
believe that things had gone that wrong; rather than openly denounce Stalin, he
characteristically tried to steer leftist thinking in a more civilized
direction. In something resembling Swiftian irony of the “modest proposal” sort, Shaw in the
preface to On the Rocks modestly
proposed the Stalinist position that intractable political opponents of social
progress must be eliminated, but he eventually made it clear that he thought a
truly liberal education a better
means of elimination—he preferred changing minds (i.e. killing bad
ideas) to killing people. Under the
guise of an ironic Stalinism, Shaw was still preaching social toleration and
peaceful enlightenment, though he wished to make everyone see how desperate the
times were.
Shaw’s last plays illustrate Tanner’s
dictum from “The Revolutionist’s Handbook” that the true revolutionary becomes
more radical with age but appears to grow conservative because he has lost
faith in conventional methods of reform.
These plays took what had always been a strong Shavian theme—the need
for change to go deeper than mere social reform, the need for it to reach into
the soul and psyche of individuals—and made it a dominant theme, as Shaw seemed
to lose patience with transitory and mostly cosmetic social change while human
nature continued incorrigible. This more radical stance found expression in the
full flowering of his most radical nonrealistic form— the extravaganza.
In the 1890s, Shaw had had to cover his
basic extravaganza method with a realistic veneer (accompanied by a brief
propaganda for the realistic mode in his criticism) because extravaganza, a
form employing fairy-tale worlds or “otherworlds”
remote in time and place (such as a tropical island or a futuristic society),
had gotten a reputation for being frivolous, mindless, and sometimes
cynical. The extravaganza had come to
Shaw (and Barrie) from J. R. Planché and W. S.
Gilbert, with whom he associated “pointless fun and soured idealism.”25 Shaw was further put off extravaganza
because, in correctly perceiving that there was something fantastic about the
play worlds Shaw created, William Archer drew precisely the wrong conclusion
that this therefore identified them with a tradition of trivial and cynical
fun, which disqualified them as serious New Drama. But as the generation that shared Archer’s
critical categories passed away, Shaw felt less constrained, and his career saw
the gradual emergence into the open of an extravaganza method.
From The Apple Cart on, Shaw openly acknowedged
extravaganza as his method; he nevertheless made clear that he was returning
the genre to its Aristophanic seriousness of purpose. While Planché, and
later Barrie, used it primarily for escapist reasons (their whimsical fairy
tales were meant to charm one into a belief in the primacy of imaginative
reality in the face of the day’s degrading materialism), and Gilbert to express
his cynicism about the failure of the world to live up to imaginative ideals,
Shaw used the imaginary world of the extravaganza to comment, satirically and
ironically, on the everyday and commonplace world, particularly its foolish
idealism.
At first Shaw had not wanted
to relinquish the word “realist” to those who painted only surfaces, trying
valiantly for a while to argue for himself as a ‘realist (though his reference
was confusingly more to “visionary realism” than “mimetic realism”), but he
gave up that game when he saw that his own need for expression required him
more and more to use what everyone was calling (however incorrectly)
“nonrealistic” modes. As Meisel sums it up, “He . . . turned from
discrediting fixed idealisms by a standard of actuality to commenting upon
actualities through a medium of fantasy.”
This allowed him to use the drama as “a means of foreseeing and being
prepared for realities as yet unexperienced, and of
testing the feasibility and desirability of serious Utopias (Shaw’s definition
of the ‘realistic imagination’).”26 Shaw’s otherworld
method was to carry to their logical extremes tendencies already present in the
political, social, and spiritual life of England, and to embody them in a
mythical world of the future or the past (or, if of the present, placed in a
strange, defamiliarizing environment). The
extravaganza, with its remote and exotic world, looks romantic (and is
romantic, in Planché and Barrie), but in Shaw
that’s often a booby trap, for he makes the romantic the target of satire and
burlesque. The extravaganza form aided
Shaw in showing how unrealistic the world had become. Lending itself to the allegorical methods of
parable and fable, and to anachronism (the deliberate confusion of different
times and places), the extravaganza of his youth was the perfect device for the
elderly Shaw to use to startle the West into an appreciation of how dreamlike
modern life had become, on its way to Armageddon.
Shaw’s extravaganzas were labeled “political”
or “philosophical,” but they were both political and philosophical—it was a matter of emphasis—and they served
his “religion of the future” by being “parables of evolution” or “parables of
futurity.” The extravaganzas reflect on
a postwar world in which sensitive, thinking people are aware of living in a
condition immortalized by Eliot in The
Waste Land. Shaw deeply felt
the nihilism of that period and understood his complicity in creating it (as embodied in Tanner’s maxim that
“the Golden Rule is that there is no Golden Rule”). He knew too that the world would go to wrack
and ruin if it rested in that vacuum (nature was already abhorring it by
rushing in with military dictatorships), and so he worked desperately to find
affirmations. Since his own belief
system—Creative Evolution—worked well for him in overcoming the day’s
negations, he tried in his last plays to give more direct expression to
it. The extravaganza, a free form
employing myth, fable, parable, and fairy tale, was the perfect vehicle for the
expression of an essentially religious vision.
Having a faith that would work for the future, Shaw tried desperately to
impart it to others. That desperation some incorrectly took to be despair.
Of the fifteen plays of his last phase, over
half were full-length, and their innovations placed Shaw once again in the
vanguard. Stanley Weintraub
has argued, in “The Avant-Garde Shaw,” that many of Shaw’s plays, especially
the late plays, can be seen as leading directly to the Theater of the Absurd
and other experimental drama of the fifties and sixties.27 Through the period of realism’s and
naturalism’s strongest hold, Shaw helped keep alive the arts of the
pre-realistic stage. The self-conscious
theater that calls attention to itself as theater was Shaw’s forte long before
it was Brecht’s or Beckett’s or lonesco’s. Too, in presenting an essentially grave
message comically, Shaw anticipated the dark comedy of the absurdist
theater. And when a character in Too True to Be Good defines man as
an inefficient machine for making bad manure, the Augustinian scatology of
several Beckett plays comes easily to mind.
Of course Shaw would not go as far in embodying absurdity in absurdist
forms as Beckett and lonesco would, but many of his
late plays come closer to that than the plays of most of his younger
contemporaries.
The
Apple Cart (1929), set in a mythical kingdom of the
future, typically (for the extravaganza) rationally follows out an irrational
proposition—what would happen if a popular constitutional monarch should
abdicate out of frustration with his powerlessness and run for office? King Magnus uses the probability that he
would be elected as a threat to force the politicians and bureaucrats to govern
more wisely. But ultimately, as Shaw wrote in the preface, “the conflict is not
really between royalty and democracy. It
is between both and plutocracy, which, having destroyed the royal power by
frank force under democratic pretexts, has bought and swallowed democracy.”28 Capitalism in the form of a
corporation called Breakages Limited runs everything for its own ends, to make
money, and cares not what social wreckage it creates in the process, wreckage
being as profitable as any business, if not more.
Perhaps the best of the late plays is Too True to Be Good (1931-32), which ironically depicts the plight,
not of the poor, but of the rich. The real opposition to a civilized
distribution of income, Shaw supposed, lay in the fear of the majority poor
that the new system would cut off the possibilities of becoming filthy rich; he
wrote therefore to disillusion the poor about the happiness of the rich. He shows that modern wealth, frequently
detached from work, responsibility, tradition, and routine, leaves the idle
rich with an unstructured life and an emptiness that grows emptier the more
they try to fill it with pleasure-seeking.
And soon they become sick unto death with a spiritual malaise, though
they try to blame it on microbes and the like and bring in expensive
doctors. Shaw’s opening scene finds a
sick bacillus complaining to the audience not only that it is innocent of the
illness of Mops, the spoiled, petulant rich girl in bed, but that Mops gave it the measles. Her illness being spiritual or psychosomatic,
Mops is rescued by a burglar and his mistress-accomplice who persuade the girl
to flee her boring, bedridden existence and join them in an adventurous life,
made possible by selling her jewelry.
The rest of the play is set in a strange Middle Eastern,
Lawrence-of-Arabia sort of place, just what the adventurous require. Disguised, they meet others who are also
pretending to be something they’re not.
Complications ensue that eventually force out the truth about everyone’s
identity and expose as well the nihilism that is at the root of their
dilemma. After much discussion of the
dilemma (that of Hemingway’s “lost generation”), they head for different fates,
variously resolved. Mops, for example, finds her way to a more healthy existence
by determining to found a sisterhood devoted to cleaning up the world. This general departure leaves the burglar,
Aubrey, alone. Shaw may not have been
waiting for Beckett, but Aubrey is.
Secretly an ordained minister but demoralized by his having dropped
bombs on civilians in World War I, Aubrey preaches in the void on the text of
civilization and its discontents. Aubrey
declares himself “the new Ecclesiastes,” obsessed with finding and preaching
“the way of life,” but despairing because he has no Bible and no creed, for
“the war has shot both out of [his] hands.”29 He
goes on and on, in a marvelous rhetorical crescendo, seemingly words without
end, but in the final stage directions Shaw dismisses Aubrey’s despair as long
on talk and short on action, expressing his preference for the women who take
action.
On
the Rocks (1933) presents the
disaster of The Depression in a contemporary setting (beginning at No. 10
Downing Street), but in the extravaganza manner of imagining what would follow
if something so improbable should happen as a prime minister actually bringing
himself up-to-date, thinking intelligently, and making the necessary radical
proposals for reform. The play depicts the inability of an emergency coalition
government to deal with either rampant unemployment or the prime minister’s
unlikely transformation into an intelligent and informed statesman. And so, with the
floundering of the masses in their leaderless condition, the ship of state
drifts ever closer to the rocks.
The next major play, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934-35),
returned to the “philosophical extravaganza” method of Back to Methuselah, presenting an
allegorical Day of Judgment. The setting
is the tropical outposts of the British Empire, ranging from the present to
about twenty years into the future. In
the present a young Indian priest and priestess, Pra
and Prola, persuade four English types, two male and
two female, to participate in a polygamous eugenic experiment, to see if a
mingling of East and West would produce superior offspring, capable of living
fruitfully and happily in Utopia. Some
illumination comes from the mixing of cultures, but twenty years later, on an
island that has risen unexpectedly in the Pacific, the experiment has
backfired. The four experimental children, though physically perfect and of a
high artistic sensibility, are without moral purpose or sense. Pra and Prola, trying again, then lure “Iddy,”
a simpleton English curate abandoned by pirates, into mating with the group’s
two daughters; but the unions prove sterile.
An outraged, parochial-minded Britain, hearing of the bigamous
clergyman, persuades Western fleets to move on these immoral isles, but Eastern
peoples unite in protecting them. At the
brink of war between East and West, a rather unheroic
angel descends to announce a Day of Judgment, one’s right to live being based
on one’s social utility. News comes of
people vanishing all over the world. Pra and Prola conclude that “in
the Unexpected Isles all plans fail. . . . We are not here to
fulfill prophecies and fit ourselves into puzzles, but to wrestle with life as
it comes. And it never comes as we expect it to come.”30 The future belonging to “those who prefer surprise and wonder to
security,”31 Prola and Pra will go on creating
new children and new ideas, with no fear of a perpetual Day of Judgment, as
they embrace a purposeful pursuit of the life to come. Shaw’s last plays are not hosannas to the
emerging welfare state (that profanation of Fabian principles) but celebrations
of heroic risk and adventure.
The
Millionairess and Geneva have
in common Shaw’s increasing fascination with “born bosses” who thrive on heroic
risk and adventure. The Millionairess (1934-36)
investigates both the character of Epifania, a millionairess who even when beggared rapidly rises to bossdom again by virtue of her mastering nature, and that
of an Egyptian doctor, who is dedicated to the poor through his love of
compassionate Allah but who cannot resist the vitality of a woman he morally
disapproves of. “I think Allah loves
those who make money,”32
Epifania cajoles the doctor, but the doctor, who has
a talent for making money for others, perhaps sees in his union with Epifania a mysterious working out of the ways of Allah, a
possible synthesis of their opposite talents for the good of the world. Geneva
(1936-38) deals with the beginnings of modern internationalism and its
unsuccessful attempts to control the dictators who are leading the nations
toward war. The play comically supposes that the dictators could be summoned to
trial before an international court, as though they were subject to English
common law. Being poseurs and hams, however, the dictators rush to the
spotlight—Battler (Hitler) dressed out as Wagner’s Siegfried, Bombardone (Mussolini) appearing in the drapery and laurel
crown of a Roman emperor, and General Flanco (Franco)
showing up in a gaudy military uniform.
Shaw allows them to make points that expose the weaknesses of the
liberal democracies, but the dictators are also satirized as dangerously
deluded and monomaniacal. The trial
exposes too the inability of any court to restrain such men, and with disaster
imminent, the judge declares that “man is a failure as a political animal. The creative forces . . . must
produce something better.”33
After news comes that Battler’s troops have invaded Ruritania
(Poland), the end of the world is announced, which, though a false alarm, has
the salutary effect of breaking up a farce of a trial. But the judge finds some
hope for international law in the fact that at least the dictators came to the trial.
In Good King Charles’ Golden Days (1939) charmingly
recreates the Restoration in anachronistic terms, as Shaw imagines what would
happen if the likes of Charles II, his brother James, Sir Isaac Newton, George
Fox (founder of the Quakers), Godfrey Kneller (the painter), and three of
Charles’s mistresses—Nell Gwynn (the actress), the Duchess of Cleveland, and
the Frenchwoman Louise de Keroualle—were all to meet
in the same house and have to deal with opposing points of view, the scientific
with the artistic, the unworldly with the worldly, the male with the
female. The resulting uproar sends
echoes all the way down to the mid-twentieth century, as we are forced to
recognize the contentiousness of the modern world as mere consequence of
earlier disharmony. Charles despairs of
bringing order out of all this chaos, but his reassuring wife sends him back
into the fray to at least try, as Shaw felt the nations on the brink of World
War II must do. Charles, who rules by
his wits, understands that “the riddle of how to choose a ruler .
. . is the riddle of civilization.”34 The preface to this play
proposes an interesting although partial solution—the “coupled vote.” Candidates for office would be paired as male
and female and would vote in Parliament as one.
Just as Charles gained much political insight from the constant
criticisms of his mistresses and his wife, so “detailed criticism by women has
become indispensable in Cabinets.”35 The “coupled vote” would
institutionalize that arrangement.
Though at work on other matters during the
war, Shaw produced no more new plays until 1947, when he completed Buoyant
Billions, a play started in 1936. In its preface, Shaw apologizes for his
need to write but explains that he is only a medium—”the play writes itself.”36
Though past the age that would justify his writing, he
feels compelled to write one more “smiling comedy with some hope in it.”37 The hope in Buoyant Billions is that the Life Force will make irresistibly
attractive to one another one Junius Smith, “world-betterer,” and Clemmy Buoyant,
eldest and most capable child of a billionaire, who have met in faraway, exotic
Panama, where Clemmy has fled to escape civilization,
and Junius has fled to find himself. Their union is
meant to give creative impulse to their instincts for making a better
world. Junius
has been “a missionary without an endowed established Church,” but with the
buoyancy provided by marriage to this particular Buoyant, he feels that he can
keep afloat in the uncertain waters ahead, even without the direction an
established faith can provide. An interesting aspect of the play’s hopefulness
is that it looks to an atomic-weaponry stalemate to keep the peace and to the
peaceful use of atomic energy to make world-bettering a less frustrating
occupation. Shaw at ninety-one was
keeping up with the times.
In the preface to Farfetched Fables (1948-50), Shaw
underscores that he has no panaceas to offer, only suggestions for
sociopolitical experiments. And as
people seem to understand such suggestions better when presented in the forms
of popular entertainment, he employs “childish fables” for the task. Through a series of six fables, then, Shaw
shows humankind becoming entranced with the idea of creating what we would call
a “clean bomb” (a poison gas that kills people but leaves real estate
untouched), using it destructively but somehow surviving into the distant
future, continuing on the never-ending quest for knowledge and power, and
evolving beyond the body to “a vortex in thought.” In the last of the fables, sixth-form
students, throwbacks to the twentieth century (in a reversal of evolution),
question their teacher about a legend that a Disembodied Race once escaped the
body and became a vortex of thought that still uses physical beings, such as
the students, by planting thoughts in their heads that encourage the pursuit of
knowledge and power. In the midst of
their discussion they are visited by an angel named Raphael, one of the
Disembodied, who has again taken a body out of curiosity and out of a passion
for discovery and exploration and has become “the word made flesh” to encourage
these qualities in the students.
In closing his career, Shaw managed, in
verse, a short puppet play for the Malvern Festival in 1949—Shakes vs. Shav. An
outraged Shakes arrives in Malvern to do battle with the upstart Shav, who would rival his Stratford Festival. As they spar in Punch and Judy fashion, they
cite their claims for literary fame. Shav concludes: “Peace, jealous Bard: I
We both are mortal. For a moment suffer / My glimmering light to shine.” But Shakes has the last word,
“Out, out, brief candle,” and puffs out the candle.38 Shaw
may have completed another short comedy, Why She Would Not (1950), before his fatal accident in September of 1950, but his preface to Shakes vs. Shav
announces that this is his final play, and whether or not that’s the case,
it makes a more fitting conclusion to the career of the only serious challenger
to the eminence of Shakespeare the British Isles (now known as Ireland and the
United Kingdom) have known.
It is somewhat to England’s discredit that
she has not done better by her second greatest playwright than she has in
recent years or that Ireland hasn’t done better by her own Shakespeare. But this is not to say that Shaw’s star has
completely fallen; it has only moved west, appropriately enough since it is now
the North American continent that occupies the position in world affairs that
Britain once held. In America and Canada
Shaw still thrives, as the Shaw shelf has become second in drama only to
Shakespeare in sheer weight. Theater
companies devoted largely to Shaw, such as the ShawChicago
Theater Co and Shaw New York (also known as “Project Shaw”) continue to do
every single one of Shaw’s sixty-some odd plays and dramatic sketches. Even more remarkable is the Canadian
achievement of establishing at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, just east of
Shakespeare’s Stratford, Ontario, Festival, the very successful Shaw Festival
Theater. In four theaters, including one
of the most attractive in the world, the plays of Shaw and his contemporaries
have been revived every year since 1962, supplemented by our contemporaries thought
to have continued the spirit of Shaw. This critically acclaimed festival
flourishes for six months annually, employing a permanent company of over
seventy people, one of the largest repertory companies in the world. As one
stretches out on the wonderful rolling picnic grounds that overlook the Niagara
River as it rushes into Lake Ontario, sail boats and sea gulls everywhere, or
simply bicycles around this charming old town, once the capital of Canada, it
is easy to imagine that even so disembodied and turbulent a spirit as G.B.S.
would be tempted into an occasional visit to Niagara-on-the-Lake. In the manner
of his own fables, one might even fantasize that the rare peregrine falcons
that have chosen the Shaw Festival Theatre for their nesting grounds are
embodiments of those soaring spirits of the modern drama whose plays swoop down
on us in the theater within, to the delight of their prey.
Link to Title Page
& Table of Contents of Entire Book
Link to
Chapter 6--"Common Cause: A National Theater"
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