Plays Unpleasant Read Free Page A

been repudiating a few moments before. But most elegant of all is the opening duologue of
Mrs Warrren’s Profession
, in which a middle-aged man attempts to find common intellectual andcultural ground with what he and we see as ‘an attractive specimen of the sensible, able, highly-educated young middle-class Englishwoman’, who chooses to defy his expectations of such a person, thereby effortlessly establishing not only what sort of person she is, but (via his assumptions) what sort of person he is as well. In addition, Shaw has set up a series of vital trails and teasers for the future (including Vivie Warren’s ignorance of her mother’s occupation and intention to become an actuary).
    By the end of the first act of both
Widowers’ Houses
and
Mrs Warren’s Profession
, then, Shaw has established his agenda, not by stating it, but by posing what is in fact the same question: how does one of the central characters earn their living and what effect will the answer have on the rest? Because he is more skilful by then, Shaw has inserted a false trail into his third play: for a moment, we are fooled into thinking that the big secret is not Mrs Warren’s profession but Miss Warren’s parenthood (and if we’re really clever we note that ‘profession’ can mean assertion as well as occupation, and thus could well apply to both scenarios). But, in fact, the third play like the first is about a presumably virtuous younger character having to confront their dependence on the wickedness of an older one, and the question Shaw poses at the end of each play is how they and the rest respond to this knowledge in practical terms.
    For it is in the endings that Shaw’s meaning is revealed. The whole art of the stage is dedicated to concealing a single dirty little secret: that we know how most plays end before they begin. In tragedy, this is because the audience typically know the story already; in comedy it is because, from V century Athens to the end of the nineteenth century, the vast majority of comedies consisted of two young people overcoming parental or quasi-parental obstacles to their union, and getting married. Even in our century, with its bewildering array of new genres, we find that while we may not know the outcome of the story (who did it) we certainly know theending of the plot (the murderer will be unmasked). Be the milieu the western, the thriller, the spy story or the romance, we will know from the outset who is the villain, who is the victim, and who is the hero, and thereby pretty much how the thing will turn out.
    What Shaw took from Ibsen was the blindingly simple idea that this doesn’t have to be the case. As he put it in the ‘Quintessence’, the new drama ‘arises through a conflict of unsettled ideals’, and the question which makes the play interesting ‘is which is the villain and which the hero’. But by setting his plays within familiar theatrical milieus, Shaw gave himself an additional theatrical weapon. In Ibsen, there are no familiar landmarks to help us decide what kind of territory we’re in. In Shaw, we think we know where we are (six of the seven
Plays Pleasant
and
Plays Unpleasant
appear to promise a betrothal) but in fact we find we are somewhere else. In Ibsen we don’t know who the hero or the villain is, so we have to work it out for ourselves; in Shaw, we think we know but we find we’ve been deceived.
    No wonder then that the inexperienced Shaw had trouble with his endings. Only in his third play does he bring off the reversal he has been striving for in both the others. In
The Philanderer
, his first, implausible but dynamic, ending was jettisoned in favour of a kind of evasion. In
Widowers’ Houses
, his ending took him seven years.
    As stated,
Widower’s Houses
began life as a collaboration between Shaw and William Archer to adapt a French comedy, whose inciting incident is the discovery by a