THEATER CHRONICLE
257
kill you, the doctor who does it on purpose or the one who does not
know any better? Behind the wit of the play, in the Chinese box of the
plot, there is a somewhat enigmatic conception of the destiny of the
superior man. Dubedat and Ridgeon, the two supermen of the cast,
combine between them most of the crimes and vices of humanity. The
others, except for Sir Patrick, are only fools.
Shaw's plays are said to be actor-proof, but this is not true. This
performance demonstrated only that laughs will come from an audience,
no matter what the actors do. The plays are mined with laughs, and the
actors cannot help detonating them as they stumble through the text.
But the audience, half the time at Shaw revivals, does not know why
it is laughing; underneath its amusement, it is puzzled and wary. The
quicksilver of Shaw's temperament makes his plays elusive and even
dissatisfying, unless the director and the actors take a firm line with
them, as they did last year with
Misalliance.
It
was not altogether Mr.
Strudwick's fault that the part of Sir Colenso appeared to be a cipher.
How is the actor to reconcile the ingenuous enthusiast of the first act
with the diabolical Paracelsus of the later ones? He will have to find
a way to impose his own authority on the character, to make it behave.
Shaw's characters are often refractory; they step out of themselves to
make speeches, to make a dramatic reversal, or merely to make a joke.
And Shaw himself keeps popping out of them, like a Jack-in-the-box.
In this play, he is in Sir Patrick Cullen, in Schutzmacher, the Jewish
doctor, in Ridgeon, and in Dubedat. This does not matter in the smaller
roles, but in the case of Dubedat, it presents the actor with a poser. Is
Dubedat a great artist, as the doctors and his wife are convinced? Or
is he a "great artist" in the same sense that they are "eminent physi–
cians"? That is, is he a bit of a hoax, not only in his personal dealings,
but in his role of the genius?
Shaw's greatest limitation was that he regarded himself as a com–
pletely rational man-indeed, often, as the only rational man in a
world of fools and lunatics. His optimisim, such as it was, was a scientific
and rational optimism: he looked forward to a day not when people
would be better (he was too rational to expect that) but when they
would be more sensible, that is, when there would be more people like
himself. He had a diversity of opinions but only one simple idea: equal
distribution of money. He recognized the existence of other problems,
but these problems amused his mind without really engaging it. He
stated them wittily as dilemmas or paradoxes. A dilemma or a paradox
is eternal. When Shaw looked at the cosmos under the aspect of eternity,
