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CONTENTS

Introduction

Preface

PLAYS UNPLEASANT

Widowers’ Houses

The Philanderer

Mrs Warren’s Profession

Principal Works of Bernard Shaw

INTRODUCTION

Shaw claimed that he wrote Widowers’ Houses with the sole purpose of inducing people to vote on the progressive side at the next London County Council elections. For many critics (and some devotees) of Shaw’s work, this boldly utilitarian statement of aims applies to most of the canon. But, for Shaw himself, Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer and Mrs Warren’s Profession stand apart from his later plays, in purpose, content and form. Indeed, in defining these three plays as ‘unpleasant’ he was seeking to make a firm distinction between plays that exposed social evils (slum landlordism, the marriage laws and prostitution) from the ‘pleasant’ plays which he published simultaneously, and which deal with ‘romantic follies’ and the individuals who struggle against them. In this he anticipates critics who regard the plays unpleasant as, at best, an apprenticeship and, at worst, a false start.

Certainly, the writing and production history of these plays was disagreeably tortuous. Widowers’ Houses was conceived as a collaboration between Shaw and the critic William Archer to rework a recent Parisian success (Emile Augier’s Ceinture Doree), on the principle that Archer could do the story and Shaw the dialogue. Claiming to have run out of plot by the beginning of Act III, Shaw read out the story so far to Archer, who hated its construction, characterization and jokes, and washed his hands of it. There things remained, until seven years later, when J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre was looking for a follow-up to its brave British premiere of Ibsen’s Ghosts. For this purpose, Shaw dusted off, completed and titled Widowers’ Houses, which premiered in December 1892 to the cheers of the politicos in the audience, and the boos of everyone else.

The second play in this volume also suffered from an ending problem; having read out the first draft, Shaw was advised by Lady Colin Campbell to burn the third act on the grounds of the moral outrage it would undoubtedly provoke1. Even revised, Shaw couldn’t find a producer for the play (Grein, for whom it was written, was the first to turn it down). The play was eventually produced by the amateur New Stage Club in 1905, going on to receive its professional premiere at the Royal Court Theatre two years later, to indifferent reviews.

But the problems with The Philanderer were as nothing to those of the third play. Although the word prostitute does not appear in Mrs Warren’s Profession (any more than the word ‘syphylis’ appears in Ghosts), Shaw knew perfectly well that the play would be denied a licence by the Lord Chamberlain, whose power to censor plays in the English theatre, granted by Sir Robert Walpole to suppress the political satires of Henry Fielding, is the subject of his specific preface. (Shaw’s proposed alternative to this arcane system – control by local authority licensing – seems a risky strategy, particularly if the voters failed on all occasions to take Shaw’s electoral advice).

Thus it was not until 1902 that Mrs Warren’s Profession received two private club performances in London, to an apparently bemused audience (Grein reporting that some of the audience failed to pick up what the Profession was2). According to Shaw’s preface, those who were not confused were outraged (William Archer accusing Shaw of wallowing in pitch, Grein himself announcing that Shaw had shattered his ideals). Subsequently, the play was performed in New Haven (where the theatre’s license was revoked), New York (where half the cast were arrested) and in Kansas City (where the actress playing Mrs Warren was summoned to the police court for indecency). The play was eventually performed professionally in England in 1924.3 Because of – or despite – this checkered history, none of the Plays Unpleasant has entered the main Shavian canon. True, the fiftieth anniversary of Shaw’s death in 2000 saw revivals of both Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession; and a version of The Philanderer with the original last act was presented at the Hampstead Theatre in 1990. But compared to three of the four Plays Pleasant – Arms and the Man, Candida and You Never Can Tell – Plays Unpleasant could be retitled ‘Plays Undone’.

Why should this be? Is it, as conventional wisdom has it (and the preface appears to confirm), that the Plays Unpleasant are arid agitprop while the Plays Pleasant (and the string of subsequent successes, from Major Barbara via Man and Superman to Pygmalion) are essentially agreeable if quirky romantic comedies, from which – in Egon Friedell’s phrase – you can suck the theatrical sugar from the pill of propaganda, and put the pill itself back on the plate?4 Or is it, as I believe, that Shaw’s mistaken view of his own work led him to accept a fundamentally false dichotomy between the didactic and dramatic elements of his plays, rejecting what he had learnt in at least two of the Plays Unpleasant, and thus confirming the ‘false start’ thesis which has consigned one partially and one almost entirely successful political play to the fringes of the repertoire?

Shaw’s mission statement as a dramatist was an essay about another one. The ‘Quintessence of Ibsenism’ was initially written as a paper for the Fabian Society, delivered in July 1890. As revised over the years, it became certainly the best essay by one playwright about another; it is actually one of the best pieces of sustained dramatic criticism ever written. Shaw defines Ibsenism as a confrontation with Idealism, which he defines as the tendency to mask the shortcomings of existing institutions by pretending that they are perfect and celebrating them as such (we might more easily call this ‘conservatism’ or ‘traditionalism’). In A Doll’s House, the idealized institution is marriage, the idealizer Torvald Helmer, and the ‘realist’ (Ibsen’s term for the anti-idealist) is Nora, who realizes that her family life has been a fiction and so walks out on it, slamming the door behind her. In The Wild Duck, the idealist is a man who believes that honesty is always the best policy, and thereby destroys a family and kills a child.

In addition to describing what Ibsen is saying, Shaw also describes how he thinks it is done. He argues that Ibsen’s great innovation as a playwright was the discussion: while pre-Ibsenite (and by implication pre-Shavian) plays consisted of exposition, situation and unravelling, he argues, ‘now you have exposition, situation and discussion: and the discussion is the test of the playwright’.

In fact, this argument seems a little dubious in Ibsen – if (as Shaw argues) the final argument between Nora and Telvig is a ‘discussion’, then this applies to every non-violent climactic scene in dramatic literature. But much more importantly, it implies that the discussion as a dramatic element is distinct from the traditional dramaturgical tools of emplotment, that somehow all the storytelling stops for the discussion to take place (as when Shaw contentiously claims that Nora unexpectedly stops her emotional acting and says: ‘We must sit down and discuss all this that has been happening between us’).

Now, of course, the discussion in this sense happens in Shaw, but it doesn’t always happen, and when it is fully integrated into the plot it is almost always better. And this misunderstanding of Ibsen and his own art implies an even more profound mistake in Shaw’s thinking: the idea that great drama is an escape from and not a development of pulp drama; so that, for example, ‘Shakespeare survives by what he has in common with Ibsen, and not by what he has in common with Webster’. In the political theatre, this misconception leads to the idea of the sugar of entertainment somehow being suckable off the pill of propaganda (or, as T. S.