Plays Unpleasant Read Free

acknowledge Ibsen’s influence on his work; he was less happy to admit the influence of the well-made play. One immediate effect of this influence is the location, look and milieu of the plays: although the settings are intriguingly various (moving from outside to inside, cleverly exploiting different times of day) the dominant milieu is the familiar one of the servanted classes at home. Despite their subjects, we never visit a slum tenement or a brothel in
Widowers’ Houses
or
Mrs Warren’s Profession;
we never meet a victim of Sartorius’ or Kitty Warren’s grisly trades. But more fundamentally, the influence of contemporary popular drama gave Shaw a template of emplotment into which he could insert a contrary set of meanings, by the simple device of denying the audience’s expectations of where the plot would lead. In all of the
Plays Unpleasant
, Shaw sets up a moral dilemma for his central characters, absolutely in the manner of the Scribean well made play, if not in two of the three cases with its usual matter. What he then nearly does in
Widowers’ Houses
, fails to do in
The Philanderer
, and triumphantly succeeds in doing in
Mrs Warren’s Profession
is to defy the audience’s expectations of how the plot will be resolved, without losing plausibility or denying its own terms.
    Before seeing how Shaw does this, it’s worth looking at the opening of the plays, to see how skilfully – even at the outset of his career – Shaw establishes his characters, their situation and their dilemmas. Again, his beginnings distinguish Shaw from his mentor: however brilliantly he manages his denouements, Ibsen was usually pretty hamfisted with his exposition
(The Wild Duck
is by no means the only play in which the first act consists largely of one central character telling another central character what they both already know). The opening of
Widowers’ Houses
on the other hand tells us within seconds who Cokane and Trench are by thesimple expedient of hearing them discuss what sights they wish to visit on the current stage of their improving continental tour (‘There is a very graceful female statue in the private house of a nobleman in Frankfurt. Also a zoo. Next day, Nuremberg! Finest collection of instruments of torture in the world’), in the same way that, in
Candida
, we learn all we need initially to know about the politics and personality of the Rev. James Morrell by hearing him finalize his upcoming diary engagements. This cunning use of Baedeker as a clue to character is then reiterated, not only to establish the next set of characters, but also to remove two of the subsequent assembly from the stage so that a proposal of marriage can take place under the pressure of their imminent return. And just as this device is in danger of wearing thin, Shaw introduces another, when Sartorius (for reasons about which we are already intrigued) asks that Trench write a letter to his relatives soliciting approval of his engagement to Sartorius’ daughter, a task which falls to Cokane, who then calls upon Sartorius’ assistance to complete it. Thus Shaw can map both the spoken and unspoken assumptions of three of the main characters concerning an as-yet-unrevealed skeleton in one of their closets, by the expedient of having one draft a letter on behalf of another in collaboration with the third.
    Shaw does not pose himself nearly as much of an expositional challenge in
The Philanderer
, though it has to be said that he none the less starts the show with a bang. The initial stage direction reads ‘A lady and gentleman are making love to one another in the drawing room of a flat in Ashley Gardens’, from which Shaw goes on to chart Leonard Charteris’ politics, attitude to marriage and questionably-concluded liaison with a third party, in preparation for the entry of that third party, whose opening line unconsciously expresses the very attitudes that Charteris has