George Bernard Shaw: Plays Unpleasant (1898)

Edition:  Penguin, 1946
Review number: 433

The three plays in this volume, Widowers' Houses, The Philanderer and Mrs Warren's Profession, are Shaw's earliest plays. Considered extremely daring at the time - it proved impossible to produce Mrs Warren's Profession for over twenty years - they can still in places shock us today. Each play is a blatant attack on Victorian society, on the hypocrisy of those who believe themselves morally blameless yet condemn the poor to live in degrading squalor and then live off the money this produces. This is clearest in Widowers' Houses (about slum landlords) and Mrs Warren's Profession (prostitution); The Philanderer is about attitudes to women, and has dated rather more.

The plot of Widowers' Houses is the simplest. Harry Trench falls in love with a girl he meets on holiday in Germany. Accepting her father's description of the source of his income as the respectable "property", they get engaged. Then Trench discovers that the property in question is one of London's most unpleasant slums and is horrified, and eventually he is astounded when it is revealed that his own wealth comes from the interest on a mortgage on the property. The idea is that even the most respectable are not far removed from the immoral and degrading, and this is also the central idea in Mrs Warren's Profession.

Though today most of the Victorian slums in Britain have long been cleared, prostitution is still a surprisingly important part of the economy. Shaw's message, though, is perhaps better applied in other areas. In the West, our relatively affluent lifestyles are to an extent dependant on the poverty of the Third World. People starve not just while our supermarkets are full, but to keep them full. Without the arms trade vital to the economy of many Western nations, much suffering would be eased. Pornography continues to degrade both those involved in making it and those addicted to it, while making fortunes.

Shaw manages to avoid the pitfall of preachiness which traps so many who write fiction to support a campaign, except perhaps in The Philanderer. The central location of this play is the fictional Ibsen Club, which stands for everything progressive in society. Today Ibsenism is an obsolete word, and it is clearer that Ibsen wrote about far more than Shaw thought, blinded as he was by his own social agenda. But at the turn of the century, plays like An Enemy of the People, Ghosts and (above all) A Doll's House seemed iconoclastic attacks on injustice in society. Ibsen was the subject of violent denunciation for the immorality seen in his plays (to the extent that he had to write an alternative happy ending to The Dollshouse before it could be performed in Germany), and this is what attracted Shaw the social campaigner. These plays are far simpler than Ibsen's, and much more obviously making a non-dramatic point. Their effect was much the same, and Shaw (unlike Ibsen) revelled in it.

George Bernard Shaw: Plays Pleasant (1898)

Contents: Arms and the Man (first performed 1894), Candida (1900), The Man of Destiny (1897), You Never Can Tell (1905)
Edition: Penguin, 1953
Review number: 61

As the introduction makes clear, this collection is intended as a companion piece to Shaw's Plays Unpleasant collection. Not having read the earlier collection, I'm not quite sure what makes a play pleasant or unpleasant; I guess that it's to do with whether it is trying to impart a non-dramatic message. The four short plays here are not really anything other than fun comedies; there is a hint of a social message here and there (particularly in Candida and You Never Can Tell), but it is incidental to the plays themselves.

The play I liked best from the collection, and the best known of them, is Arms and the Man. This is set in Bulgaria, then an exotic barely civilised location, during a war with Serbia. The main characters are a rich Bulgarian family, the Petkoffs. The spoiled daughter of this family, Raina, is engaged to the dashing young soldier Sergius Saranoff, currently at the front. As Raina is going to bed, a young man in Serbian uniform climbs into her bedroom through the window. She is initially scornful of his cowardice, but she sheilds him when Bulgarian troops arrive to find him. She calls him her "chocolate cream soldier", because he avidly eats her sweets. It is perhaps surprising to read in the introduction that Shaw was criticised for portraying a soldier in an unheroic light; attitudes were so different before the First World War.

Candida is about a man who is a genuine Christian and a genuine Socialist, James Morrell. He and his wife, Candida, are a couple who attract those around them; his preaching and public speaking draws hundreds, and she finds herself the idol of the lovesick young poet, Eugene. Neither of them understands the attraction they, or their spouse, have for others; that is their tragedy. The contrast is made between them with their ideals and Candida's father, Burgess, who is a most unpleasant capitalist only interested in the welfare of his dependents because he can make it pay.

Man of Destiny is virtually a two-hander; the other characters are tiny by comparison with the leads. The main character is Napoleon Bonaparte in his youth, as a young general in the French Republican army invading Italy - his first great success. He is at an inn in northern Italy, awaiting the arrival of dispatches. The lieutenant carrying them arrives, but they have been stolen from him on the way by a youth; he recognises a mysterious lady (whose identity we never discover) as the youth. Napoleon protects her, denying the possibility that she can be the same person. The play develops into a battle of wits between him and her.

The final play, You Never Can Tell, is a fairly straightforward comedy. The Clandon family have been living in Madeira, after Mrs Clandon felt forced to leave England following attacks on her feminist views. Returning to this country with her three children (Gloria, a young woman after her mother's heart; Philip and Dolly, who are young enough not to have quite outgrown their childishness), the family meet up with a Mr Crampton, landlord of a dentist who falls in love with Gloria, and who turns out to be Mrs Clandon's abandoned husband and father of the three children.

George Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion (1916)

Edition: Penguin
Review number: 43

Pygmalion is a play which is concerned with Shaw's ideas about society and class in much the same way as Saint Joan is concerned with his ideas about religion. Pygmalion doesn't have a useful introduction like Saint Joan's, so the ideas have to come from the narrative in the play.

The play is rather unusual in its appearance; it is set out as though it were a novel with dramatised speech, which can be a little bit disconcerting (and is certainly irritating). The particular Penguin edition I read also has pointless illustrations.

The title comes from the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who created a statue of surpassing beauty; at his request, the gods animated the statue as Galatea. The myth is updated, and substantially altered, by Shaw; instead of a statue, Galatea is Eliza Doolittle, a Covent Garden flower-girl, whose accent immediately marks her out as from the very bottom of the English class structure. Pygmalion is represented by Henry Higgins, who is an expert on accents and pronunciation, and who undertakes to transform her speech so that she can be taken for a duchess at a society party.

The play concentrates on the comedy of the early lessons, and the early attempts to pass Eliza off into society. Shaw makes some effort to avoid sentimentality - the fact that despite the title Henry and Eliza don't end up falling in love is an example - and his lead could with profit have been followed by those who adapted Pygmalion as the musical My Fair Lady. However, Shaw suffers from a sort of non-romantic sentimentality, as can be seen from the Epilogue, which tells the later stories of the characters. This is about success through personal endeavour - Eliza ends up setting up a flower shop with her upper class but poor husband, studying accounting and making a good living. In the cynical 1990s, this seems almost as unbelievable as the romance.

George Bernard Shaw: Saint Joan (1924)

Edition: Penguin, 1966
Review number: 24

This is Shaw's play based around the life of Joan of Arc, who was canonised by the Catholic church just before the play was written. The story is well known. Joan was a young farm girl (not, as Shaw is at pains to point out, a peasant), inspired by visions of saints, who gave new heart to the French and caused a complete change of fortune in the Hundred Years' War with the English at a time when it seemed as good as lost. She was eventually caught by the English and burnt by the church as a heretic. The story allows Shaw a whole play (and, in this edition, a long preface as was his custom) to expound his ideas about religion.
As you would expect from Shaw, his ideas are interesting. As I didn't expect, he doesn't deny the reality of religious experience (and specifically, the reality of Joan's visions, at least to herself); he looks upon it as a way to rationalise the irrational. In Joan's case, visions of saints giving instructions was the natural way for a fifteenth century farmer's daughter to understand the ideas she had. This is far less patronising than to declare those who experience these visions to be insane, as many rationalists would do, though it doesn't explain the source of the ideas rationalised as visions.

In the introduction, Shaw also writes perceptively about the various retellings of Joan's story from Shakespeare to the publication of the heresy trial transcripts in the nineteenth century. He is scathing about how strongly these accounts are affected by the ideas of the time in which they were written rather than by those of the time in which Joan lived; this taint is clearly impossible for a writer to avoid, but is something they should at least be aware of. Many writers of the currently fashionable genre of medieval mysteries completely ignore the differences between modern thought and medieval thought, and present twentieth century people in medieval dress.

Shaw's major thesis is that Joan was effectively a Protestant martyr, whose error as seen by the church of her day lay in putting the content of her visions above the authority of the church and its churchmen. The play itself, particularly with the strange epilogue where the ghosts of several of the characters reflect on their lives, argues persuasively for this point of view. (In the introduction, Shaw attacks the playing of his work without the epilogue, saying that to leave it out as an embarrassment shows a complete lack of understanding of what he was trying to do.) He ignores the major difference between Joan and the Protestant reformers; they did not rely on direct inspiration for their ideas, but advocated a return to the Bible, which the Catholic church acknowledged as the foundation of the faith (though abuses had arisen which took it a long way in doctrine from the Bible). To look instead to one's own inspiration encourages arbitrariness and megalomania; just look at the doctrines of some of today's cults. That is not to say that Joan suffered from this. She was far too much a daughter of the fourteenth century church to stray far from accepted teaching, but the church recognised a threat in the insistence she made on her visions and her unwillingness to submit to the conventions of the time where these differed from what she had seen (for example, in the wearing of masculine clothing).

The play is certainly thought provoking, and provides one of the biggest female roles in modern theatre. However, I myself found the introduction more interesting, perhaps because Shaw has to present his thought more clearly and provide more justification; fiction and drama are good for rhetoric but it is easier to see the strengths and weaknesses of Shaw's arguments when they are presented directly.