Man and Superman and Three Other Plays Read Free Page A

ideas and views that differed from the author’s should feel perfectly welcome to write their own plays, but not to undermine his carefully wrought way of dramatizing his ideas: There is a difference between finding new things in the text and putting them there yourself with your own hands. In truth, though, anyone who has rehearsed and performed Shaw’s plays knows well the practical value of his stage directions, based as they usually were on Shaw’s own experience of directing the first performances of the plays, working out the stage business, seeing what needed to be made clear to an audience. His stage directions are rather like a film director’s use of the camera to tell the story. Shaw uses the stage and everything on it, including the actors’ bodies, faces, movements, and clothing, to tell his story. The adverbial indications as to how lines should be delivered (“aggressively,” “gallantly”) are not as ubiquitous as they seem; they mainly aid readers who are not actors themselves, but they also rescue actors from the danger of misinterpretation.
    Theatrical fashions change; new generations of actors appear; discredited ideas gain currency again—and Shaw too may yet rise from his present supine condition. He certainly should because he is worth reading and seeing and hearing. Arthur Miller, who in his twenties read a lot of Shaw, was once asked what attracted him to the playwright. Miller replied: “Laughs. The irony of his plays. Terrific style and stylishness. And his ability to handle ideas—which I think is unapproachable” (Conversations with Arthur Miller, 1987, edited by Matthew C. Roudane, p. 274). One can see why a playwright like Miller, who by his own confession could write pathos easily, would admire precisely these qualities of Shaw’s writing for the theater: humor, comic irony, stylishness, and the interplay of ideas.
    Along with the best comic playwrights, Shaw has a gift for stage humor. He is a master of the running gag, as in Candida, where Burgess successively finds every other character to be mad. Shaw can turn anything to wit, including gallows humor, as in The Devil’s Disciple, in which General Burgoyne presides over Dick Dudgeon’s trial for treason and their exchanges turn into a duel as to who can be more wittily urbane and “gentlemanly” about the execution of the latter. The result is one of the most genuinely hilarious discussions of capital punishment.
    Above all, Shaw has an uncanny instinct for how much discussion of ideas an audience can take before it needs comic relief. The debate on the purpose of Life in Man and Superman (in the third act, “Don Juan in Hell”) shows that instinct working at its peak. The Commander, in the midst of refuting Don Juan’s criticism of the Devil, takes the latter’s name in vain, and then suddenly stops with the thought that he may have inadvertently offended the Devil. His sincere concern elicits from the Devil a most deferential exhibition of largesse in allowing the Commander to use his name whenever he needs it. The Devil, man of the world that he is, even turns the Commander’s moment of embarrassment into an opportunity to display his devilish good manners by suggesting that he regards the use of his name “to secure additional emphasis” as “a high compliment to me.” When people apply the term “high comedy” to Shaw, this is the sort of thing they mean, and they are quite right. But behind the “high comedy” lies the substantial implication that good manners can be used by the Devil as well as by anyone, perhaps even more cleverly, and for not such innocent ends.

MRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION
    Mrs. Warren’s Profession was written in 1893, published in 1898, but not performed until 1902, and even then privately. Its first public production in New York in 1905 resulted in the actors’ being arrested, for