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PARTISAN REVIEW
the only one who was recognizable as a man was Frederic Worlock,
as Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington. He played the ignorant old impostor
as a thespian, which at least was close to Shaw's idea. Bright-cheeked
Roddy McDowall, playing the artist, Dubedat, was right in
his
early
scenes. He gave very well the feline, animal alertness that Dubedat's
impudence needs to make his demands bearable. But he lost hold of the
part in the death scene, where Dubedat delivers his artistic credo: "I
believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt.... " As this scene
was played and directed, it was a sentimental apotheosis of the artist–
figure. Mr. McDowall, spotlit, was rapt as he pronounced his exordium,
as if he were about to be floated off on invisible wires to a stage
heaven. But the point of this scene, as I understood it, should have been
different. The religion of art was not sympathetic to Shaw. And Dube–
dat is amusing himself, even on his deathbed. When he recites his artist's
creed, he is mocking the moralists grouped around him; it is partly exal–
tation and partly naughtiness and teasing. Dubedat is not the hero;
there is no hero.
The real daring of this play, in fact, is that no one is heroic and
nothing is sentimentalized, not even death. Dubedat dies, so to speak,
baldly and matter-of-factly, surrounded by his medical chorus. It is not
an emotional moment. It carries a shock because of the lack of emo–
tion. "Was that death?" inquires the artist's widow, almost curiously.
Death is a sort of anti-climax, a disappointment. One is tempted to
echo the widow. "Is that all?" "All this fuss about
that?"
Dubedat's
funeral is promptly spoken by the quack who killed him: old Sir Ralph
Bloomfield Bonington, who mouths a pastiche of Shakespeare and
keeps reiterating, "He died
well."
There is a good deal of irony in this,
but no tragedy. And the death scene becomes pure comedy when the
young widow appears, dressed in a white evening gown and flashing
with jewelry, this being her interpretation of her husband's injunction
not to mourn for him.
Jennifer, the artist's widow, is a fool. She is the perennial wife of
the Great Man-ardent, admiring, uncomprehending. She believes she
understands her husband and sets her love for him, like a
deli,
against
the whole world of philistines. But she does not understand her husband
any more than the philistines do; she is taken in by him, so that she
makes him into a noble, sentimental lie. This greed for punishment,
this obdurate gullibility, this craving to admire, can satisfy itself only in
one way: the wife must become the widow. Jennifer does not directly
cause Dubedat's death, but she, as they say, asks for it, by her tenacity
in pursuing the great Sir Colenso Ridgeon, whose medical powers she
