THEATER CHRONICLE
SHAW, FRY, AND OTHERS
With three full Shaw productions on, and an effective fourth
by Equity of
Pygmalion
doing the rounds, the Grand Old Boy as he
had to be called-to get around the incongruous notion of his ever
having been an "old man"-has had no more trouble than he would
have expected in dominating the theater season so far. It has been a
GBS winter, and a main consequence of that has been to make one
more receptive, meaning more alert, to theater in general. The second–
rate suffers, the art gains; and Shaw, as he himself said of Wilde, had
and still has "the property of making his critics dull," another gain.
Taking his master-craftsmanship as having been beyond argument for
some decades now (it was never in argument except as judged for
purposes he disclaimed), the general lift and prodding of theater–
consciousness that he provides, for us his first and most quarrelsome
posterity, have to do with a double element: moral matter and gray
matter. For several fairly obvious reasons one reapproaches the old
Fabian Socialist and Ibsenite just now with a nervous fear of dis–
appointment, of something "dated"; it is too well proved that didactic
drama does date, and does so worst at just this interval; and so the
first pleasure is finding oneself still at grips, and not in any Ibsenish
period fashion, with an extraordinary intelligence. Shaw is very bright;
he is also the only successful modern stage moralist, which is to say,
not that one is altogether happy with him on this score, but at least
that one can forget about his nervous-making admiration for John
Bunyan, and think with a humility not always so becoming about
dramatic questions.
The questions, for just now, seem to be whether there can be such
a thing as a morality play, and whether there could be any modem
drama worth the name that was anything else. Their season's context
(with some perspective by Mark Antony) has been mainly marked
out by Shaw's two most nearly titanic characters male and female,
drawn from among the "mighty dead" that he favored as company -
Joan and Caesar, and by the perhaps more titanic Don Juan or dream
act, one of the world's great moral dialogues, from
Man and Superman.
That the latter stands above everything for the year
has
of course
