Man and Superman and Three Other Plays Read Free

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INTRODUCTION
    THE HIDDEN SHAW
    Bernard Shaw’s reputation as a writer was controversial in the last decade of the nineteenth century and remains controversial in the first decade of the twenty-first. No writer, however, would want to carry the current state of Shaw’s literary reputation. It is, at least for the moment, at as low an ebb as Poins’s linen shirts were according to Prince Hal. Shaw’s plays were at one time revived regularly in London and New York, but they have now become rarities. Worse, star-actors do not push to play the lead roles. Hollywood types may take a break from receiving multimillion-dollar salaries for playing whatever the public wants to see in order to rededicate themselves to the Art of the Theater by appearing comparatively gratis in an O‘Neill or Chekhov revival, but they seem uninterested in Shaw. Whether their shyness with Shaw proceeds from an inability to speak the sculpted rhetoric of his longer sentences or from discomfort with the politeness of his language, the effect is the same: They do not play him and he does not get played. Even the wonderful Shaw Festival in Canada has cut the number of Shaw plays it produces each season from three or four to two. There has not been a film of a Shaw play since Great Catherine in 1970. Nor has American television shown a Shaw play since the Rex Harrison Heartbreak House (1986), preceded by the Peter O’ Toole Pygmalion (1983).
    In academe, the situation is bleaker still. Most of the commonly used anthologies of drama that once automatically included Shaw in the modern canon have dropped him (while retaining Ibsen) in order to include multicultural contemporary plays, or have replaced Shaw with Oscar Wilde, as if the two were interchangeable. Fewer colleges offer seminars in Shaw; indeed, some English departments do not even bother to include his plays in their drama courses—that is, when they deign to teach dramatic literature besides Shakespeare at all. Yet he seems still to be read, if the major bookstore chains are any indication, for on the ever-dwindling number of shelves they devote to plays other than those by Shakespeare, Shaw continues to jostle in among the twenty-or-so other playwrights for a respectable number of inches of shelf space.
    The decline in Shaw’s literary reputation and theatrical popularity proceeds from varied causes, but there are three major ones. Contemporary audiences and readers are used to explicit treatments of sexuality, so that Shaw’s reticence in this regard makes him seem outdated, suitable only for the graying crowd. Not that Shaw’s plays do not quake with sexual subtext and symbolism—they do—but nothing is explicit, nothing denoted, and all the sex receives ferocious comic treatment instead of the usual transgressive representation in so much contemporary drama. The worldwide failure of communism in the late 198os, and the revelations of the murderous and massive abuses of human rights it produced, makes Shaw’s life-long devotion to socialism—and especially his naive acceptance of the rosy picture of itself the Soviet Union presented to him during his trip to Russia with Lady Astor in 1934—seem somehow corrupt, or at least stupendously idiotic. But Shaw was not the first, nor will he be the last writer with a huge public profile to look at political situations and see more what he wants to see than what is actually there.
    The third cause for the decline in Shaw’s popularity is the explicitness of his stage directions. In our era, when the director and the production concept—meaning the director’s and actors’ “creative” reinterpretation of the play’s meaning to fit their view of the world, morality, and politics, as opposed to the author’s views—have dominion, Shaw’s elaborate stage directions are inhibiting. Shaw believed that directors and actors who wanted to convey