George Bernard Shaw

[Redlass]

In another thread, Bob said he thought George Bernard Shaw was a great critic, but a lousy playwright. I'm curious to hear why.

I'll confess that the first play I thought of was actually one of Oscar Wilde's, but I still remember Shaw being praised by my English teacher as one of the great playwrights and that I enjoyed the plays of his that I've read. I don't think I've seen any of them performed. And, the last time I read his plays was before I knew much about staging.

So...

Do tell, do tell.

[drmomentum[$]]

I loved "Pygmalion." It remains a nostalgic favorite of mine.

-JP

[Redlass]

I have fond memories of "Pygmalion" as well. A friend and I read it aloud one summer when we were about 13. It was a lot of fun but I think I drove her crazy by the way I did the aw-aw-oh-oh-eee sound.

I also liked "Saint Joan," though I was much older when I read it. I have a vague memory of reading "Arms and the Man" and "Candida" in school, but I can't remember anything about them. I just recently read "Mrs. Warren's Profession," but felt rather lukewarm about it.

[theeye]

Mrs. Warren's Profession was actually the first of Shaw's plays I ever read, when I was a teenager, and I adored it. Read it over and over again and then went on to Major Barbara, Pygmalian, Arms and the Man, etc.

I can only remember once seeing a Shavian play performed, though, and it was, in fact, Mrs. Warren's Profession which, by that time, I knew practically by heart, so I can't really speak much to how well they fare on stage.

In any case, I adore Shaw.

[rmthunter]

To more or less repeat and expand on what I got my knuckles rapped for saying on the other thread:

Shaw's plays are, to my way of thinking, very literary, which means simply that they read well and they are hell to stage. They tend to get very talky, nay, downright expository and the action just dies. If not, it can very easily seem very forced.

I have seen productions of Major Barbara, Arms and the Man, and a "concert" production of Don Juan in Hell which had the advantage of a brilliant cast, including Claire Bloom, and no pretense of staging.

Major Barbara lost most of the audience in the third act.

So I suppose I can qualify my initial statement to say that, as far as drama as literature is concerned, Shaw is great; regarding drama as theater, he's generally pretty lame. I think Pygmalion may be the exception for him -- I don't remember whether I've ever seen it staged, but as I remember, it manages to maintain much more momentum than most of the rest of his plays. Based on my experiences with productions of others, particularly the "Don Juan," he can only benefit from a cast that is trained in dealing effectively with the language of the text, i.e., hard-core Shakespearean or Restoration training so that they can actually shape the script.

So now you have my revised and/or clarified opinion.

Bob

[theeye]

I didn't see Bob's initial post, but this revised opinion certainly won't earn any rapped knuckles from me.

Yes, Shaw is very 'talky': I think that sort of play can be staged well, but only with top-notch acting and directing and a deep understanding of the text.

Of course, it's precisely that quality that also makes for really great reading.

[rmthunter]

Actually, the "rapped knuckles" were more for going OT on the other thread, even though (ahem! ahem!) I really, really tried to find this one (which may not have existed yet).

(And, as you might expect from Bridgette, it was a very gentle rap.)

Bob

[theeye]

Bridgette rapped your knuckles?

Anyway, if you're going to go OT, it might as well be with GB Shaw.

[Redlass]

I was about to object! I didn't rap--I mean, I helped you drag it off topic. I was just trying to be helpful and point out where we had started this thread. Really!

There is a Shaw Festival held not far from me (in Canada) that I keep meaning to get out to but have yet to do. From what you're saying, it does sound like Shaw could be a directing nightmare. I'm really tempted now to go back through some of his plays and think about the staging. I wonder if you could retain the heart of the play by cutting some of the dialogue when staging it. It's often what you have to do to Shakespeare to make it palatable to a modern audience.

Based on my experiences with productions of others, particularly the "Don Juan," he can only benefit from a cast that is trained in dealing effectively with the language of the text, i.e., hard-core Shakespearean or Restoration training so that they can actually shape the script.

Or at least the experience if not the training, eh?

I may be in danger of taking this thread off topic too, but I've been surprised at the number of actors I've seen lately (locally) who do struggle with language. I've always considered literacy to be one of the first requirements of being a good actor. Given that there are a small number of actors out there who don't understand what they are saying, I could see where this could lead to some wretched performances, particularly for someone as talky as Shaw.

[rmthunter]

Welll, since Shaw is almost as much about language as someone like Shakespeare or Wilde, we'll agree to agree that you're still on topic.

My first reaction to your observation is that it's part of a larger and much more fundamental phenomenon. English has become a language that is a stripped-down version of itself, structurally if not in vocabulary, although I would hazard a guess that the general "use" vocabulary of American speakers is shrinking. We speak in acronyms. (I suspect this may be more true of American than British English, but I wouldn't want to put money on it.)

We don't read. Yes, Americans read, but American's don't read they way they did fifty years ago, and they don't learn to read with anywhere near the degree of facility that my contemporaries did. There's another thread on this forum that made reference to the fact that the reading level of the general population is around 7th grade. That just blew me away. I think there are a lot of reasons for it, mostly revolving around 1) we don't learn to read early enough, and 2) reading is a "necessary skill," not something of worth in its own right. And perhaps a corollary of this is that we don't like language, much less love it, and if you're going to do something like Shaw, Shakespeare, Marlowe, etc., etc., etc., you have to love language. For most people, it's just a tool, not something with a life of its own, so they have little sense of what poetry is about, what good writing is, what effect the actual sense and sound of words on a stage can have. (The dialogue in LOTR, the movies, was, if I remember correctly, almost entirely rewritten. My own feeling was that it should have been the key to the style of the production.)

I've also noticed that schools with focused art curricula, while they require academics to keep their accreditation, don't emphasize them at all. They're art schools, after all. (And to me, that's not only a fudamental warping of education, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what being an artist is.)

Shaw? you say. Weren't we talking about Shaw? And actors being able to understand what they're saying? You are, of course, absolutely right: it is critical for an actor to be able to understand his lines. Even in the Dark Ages of high literacy and liberal arts education, I had acting classes in which students didn't understand the basic sense of the dialogue, and consequently, instructors who were tearing their hair out. I also remember that "text" in lines was often de-emphasized in favor of "subtext" when we got into rehearsals. Well, you have no hope of figuring out the subtext if you can't figure out what the text is. (It's also very fashionable to think of actors as being dumb. It never seems to occur to anyone that they can't afford to be. Even someone as prone to chewing on the scenery as Richard Burton was an intelligent and very literate actor.)

Frankly, language skills in this country are going down the toilet, which must necessarily mean that those activities which depend on them, like acting, are in serious trouble. And playwrights like Shaw, Wilde, Shakespeare -- frankly, any of those highly literate artists whose work depends on the language -- are suffering from it.

I also have the opinion that you can get away with being semi-literate in film much more easily than on stage, because a director will guide you through the scene, the focus is much closer so you can get away with emoting rather than speaking (and how fashionable are pregnant silences these days?), and if you flub it, it winds up on the cutting-room floor.

On the other hand, take an actor like Patrick Stewart or Diana Rigg, who can bring a dimension to a TV series that is just unbelievable. Anyone want to try to tell me that they didn't understand what they were reading?

OK -- this is turning into a rant, but you get some sense of where I'm coming from on this: how often is Shaw performed these days outside of a dedicated festival or a college production (and I don't think colleges focus on classics as much as they used to)? I think it's as likely to be that he's difficult as that he's not fashionable, and I won't try to guess how much one feeds into the other.

Bob

[Redlass]

So here is a question: Does the lack of ability of modern-day actors and directors make Shaw a poor playwright? Or was he creating plays with the abilities of his contemporaries in mind?

Most of the actors I hang out with are Shakespearean actors, ones who really have a love and a flair for it. They are able to handle the language with incredible ease and manage to really draw the audiences into their productions.

On the other hand, in my local community, most of the theater people hate Shakespeare and most classic theater. Without over-generalizing, these are often people whose language range is strictly utilitarian.

I just got done assistant directing a show in which I was sometimes saddened by the lack of understanding of the text--and we were doing a pretty fluffy comedy. These were people with a pretty high level of education--some were English majors, another was a teacher with a master's degree.

So do we have to stop performing talky plays? Do we put such modern playwrights as Tom Stoppard out of business?

Or do we try to challenge our actors and our audiences knowing that the results may often be painful.

[rmthunter]

Redlass said

So here is a question: Does the lack of ability of modern-day actors and directors make Shaw a poor playwright? Or was he creating plays with the abilities of his contemporaries in mind?

I'm not sure that Shaw was concerned with the abilities of actors of any era, and I don't know that I would categorically say that actors or directors today are less able than in the past -- in the US it's largely a matter of style and training; we don't emphasize classic drama here. I really do consider Shaw a literary playwright. Drama can ride on the language, but it has to be much more than the language. It is entirely possible in theatre to get a message across without being completely didactic -- in fact, the message is usually more effective if it is not delivered as a "lesson," which Shaw tends to do. Shakespeare certainly didn't have any problems in that regard. From that standpoint, it don't think Shaw is a good playwright.

I just got done assistant directing a show in which I was sometimes saddened by the lack of understanding of the text--and we were doing a pretty fluffy comedy. These were people with a pretty high level of education--some were English majors, another was a teacher with a master's degree.

I'm afraid we're at the point where degree of education is no guarantee of language skills. I used to work for a law firm where, as head of word processing, all too often I found myself in the associates' offices saying "I think this is what you meant to say here." The irony is that they could understand something in legalese, but not necessarily in English.

So do we have to stop performing talky plays? Do we put such modern playwrights as Tom Stoppard out of business?

Or do we try to challenge our actors and our audiences knowing that the results may often be painful.

I'm all for challenge, but let's challenge their brains, not the endurance of their behinds. If you're going to get something across to an audience, you have to grab your audience and hang onto them. You don't have to sugarcoat everything, but by the same token, if I want a lecture, I'll go back to college. My problem with Shaw in production is that his plays often turn into lectures. (Now I'm going to have to go back and reread Shaw, which I haven't done in years, just to see if I still have the same opinion from my much older and much wiser viewpoint.)

College students can do Shakespeare and keep people's interest, soliloquies and all. Very few people can do Shaw and keep people's interest, and I can't lay that at the feet of actors and directors, necessarily. Talky plays are not necessarily bad plays, but it has to be more play than talk, I think. I mean, Eugene O'Neill was certainly not light comedy, but his stuff is compelling -- exhausting, but compelling. Shaw isn't particularly compelling -- just exhausting.

Bob