Bernard shaw and his drama of intellectual conflict.

The most significant British playwright since the 17th century, George Bernard Shaw was more than merely the best comic dramatist of his time. His development of a drama of moral passion and of intellectual conflict and debate, his revivifying the comedy of manners, his ventures into symbolic farce and into a theatre of disbelief helped shape the theatre of his time and after.

Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses (1892) with a flouting of the romantic conventions that were still being exploited in the English theater. It was eventually published in his Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). These first seven works for the stage (the others were Candida, The Philanderer, Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny, Mrs. Warren's Profession, and You Never Can Tell) received brief runs at best or no productions at all.. One of his Three Plays for Puritans (The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Captain Brassbound's Conversion), published in 1901, fared slightly better. The Devil's Disciple, a spoof of 19th-century sentimental melodrama set in America during the Revolution, became a success in the United States because of its wit and the very melodramatic elements Shaw had set out to satirize. Shaw's next work, Man and Superman (1903), transformed the Don Juan legend into a play, and play-within-a-play. Although on the surface it was a comedy of manners about love and money, its action gave Shaw the opportunity to explore the intellectual climate of the new century in a series of discussions.

Shaw continued, through high comedy, to explore religious consciousness and to point out society's complicity in its own evils. In Major Barbara (1905), Shaw has his heroine, a major in the Salvation Army, discover that her estranged father, a munitions manufacturer, may be a dealer in death but that his principles and practice, however unorthodox, are religious in the highest sense. In The Doctor's Dilemma (performed 1906), Shaw produced a satire upon the medical profession (representing the self-protection of professions in general) and upon both the artistic temperament and the public's inability to separate it from the artist's achievement . In Androcles and the Lion (1912), Shaw dealt with true and false religious delight in a philosophical play about early Christianity.

Possibly Shaw's comedic masterpiece, and certainly his funniest and most popular play, is Pygmalion (performed 1913). The plot of the play is based on a myth about an ancient sculptor, who created a statue of the beautiful Galatea fall in love with her & with the power of his strong love & help of the goddess Aphrodite, mentioned to enliven her. In Shaw’s version the part of Galatea was given to a London flower-girl Eliza Doolittle, & Pygmalion – professor, phonetician Higgins. In this play Shaw demonstrates his deep believe in the infinity of human abilities. It was claimed by Shaw to be a didactic drama about phonetics, but the play is a humane comedy about love and the English class system. The play presents the training Higgins gives to Eliza to enable her to pass as a lady and is also about the consequences of the experiment's success. The scene in which Eliza Doolittle appears in high society when she has acquired a correct accent but no notion of polite conversation is one of the funniest in English drama. Eliza appears as a very talented girl and develops into harmonious individuality. Something similar happens to Eliza’s farther, who was a dustman - he becomes a preacher & proves himself to be a good speaker. Pygmalion has been both filmed (1938), winning an Academy Award for Shaw for his screenplay, and adapted into an immensely popular musical, My Fair Lady (1956; motion-picture version, 1964). Beginning with 1894 Shaw directed his plays himself, while staging Pygmalion he strongly forbade to demonstrate a strong feeling, that appeared between the professor & the girl at the end of the play. It wasn’t a play about love, but about the following – the changed Eliza, as she appears at the final, cannot take a worth place in the modern bourgeois society. Shaw appreciated open finals of his plays, which enable the reader to think, to worry about characters and to sympathize with them.

The intellectual watershed of World War I (1914-1918) caused the difference. Attempting to find his way out of postwar pessimism, Shaw next wrote five linked parable-plays under the collective title Back to Methuselah (1921); they explore human progress from Eden to a science-fiction future. Despite some brilliant writing, the cycle is uneven in its theatrical values and seldom performed.
In Heartbreak House (1920), Shaw exposed, in a country-house setting on the eve of war, the spiritual bankruptcy of the generation responsible for the war's bloodshed. It was even called “a fantasy in Russian style”, because of a special manner of narration close to Chekov’s style (“Dachniki”). The play was preceded by quite a large introduction, consisting of 30 chapters. The house here is very like a ship, that was built by captain Shotover for his daughters. Three generations are shown in the play - 1) the oldest : captain Shotover, who calls England “the prison of souls”, & modern Europe seems to him to be a ship falling into abyss with drunken sailors on board; he wants to explode everything, that’s why he creates new means for destruction of the enemy. 2) The middle generation – the daughters with their husbands; they seem to be romantic & beautiful, but in fact they are useless, because they don’t bring any use to society (it was very important for Shaw). 3) The young Elly, her heart gets broken the first when she looses her dream about beautiful love. Here Shaw explores the inner world of a person with irony & sympathy. Heartbreak House is a bright example of great ability to show unique, expressive characters, typical for modern intellectual theatre. The canonization of Joan of Arc in 1920 reawakened within Shaw ideas for a chronicle play about her. In the resulting masterpiece, Saint Joan (1923), the Maid is treated not only as a Catholic saint and martyr but as a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius. Acclaim for Saint Joan led to the awarding of the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature to Shaw (he refused the award).
Shaw continued to write into his 90s. His last plays, beginning with The Apple Cart (1929), turned to the problem of how people might best govern themselves and release their potential. These were themes he had handled before, but he now approached them with a tragicomic and nonrealistic extravagance and also Farfetched Fables (1950), Shakes Versus Shav (1949), and Why She Would Not (1956), which is a fantasy with only flashes of the earlier Shaw.
Although he founded no "school" of playwrights like himself, by forging a drama combining moral passion and intellectual conflict, reviving the older comedy of manners, using paradoxes, and experimenting with symbolic farce, Shaw helped to reshape the stage of his time. His bold, critical intelligence and sharp pen, brought to bear on contemporary issues, helped mold the thought of his own and later generations.

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 2972