104
PARTISAN REVIEW
his youthful experience of haranguing crowds in Hyde Park; what
the orator requires is simply to maintain an equable and fluent tone
so that any remark which is a slight varia tion from the expected
cliche falls upon the ears as the most extravagant witticism. This Shaw
does, and the result is that all of his plays are vehicle-plays, depending
on the presence, timing, and general fluency of the acting. The greatest
plays, of course, do not live merely as vehicles of acting; but know–
ing what a good actor may do with a very banal statement is a
good part of the dramatist's craft. Thus Shaw is never funny out
of context. He gets his humor only on stage through the voice and
presence of the actor, and then usually through the most platitudinous
of material-a completely typed cockney, a stuffy dowager, or a milksop
gentleman.
As Shaw is able to circumvent his lack of a great comic imagination,
he is almost able in one play,
Saint Joan,
to get around his most serious
limitation, an almost total lack of poetry. This is the reason Yeats found
his glibness so appalling, and the Irish can perhaps best spot him as the
type of "the plausible Irishman," a character who often ends up in
politics though not usually at Shaw's intellectual level. In
Saint Joan
Shaw was tempted into material to which only a great poet could do
justice--the ordeal and tragedy of a saint-and it is something of a tri–
umph that he does not fall flat on his face, and with acting like that of
Siobhan McKenna can even manage to put the whole thing across.
Miss McKenna's performance is by far the most memorable
in
the
current revival; she manages to get poetry into Shaw almost at the
expense of wrenching her own larynx. Only after corning from her
performance to the text do we realize how much of this poetry
is Miss McKenna's own. What can be said for Shaw is that he did not
write a play that would have made impossible a performance like Miss
McKenna's-and this is more positive praise than it might at first
seem, for the achievement is one that could be managed only by a few
dramatists. Shakespeare takes up an actor by the scruff of the neck
and hurls him bodily into poetry, and whatever comes out of the actor's
mouth, botched or wrenched or awkward as it may be, is still poetry;
Shaw writes a play which can be a "vehicle" for a great poetic perform–
ance. That is the measure of the difference between the two.
Even to produce such a vehicle the old fox has to draw on all
his dramatist's bag of tricks ; if he cannot take the theme of the saint by
direct frontal assault, at least he knows how to proceed by flanking
maneuvers: the introduction of Joan, for example, in the first scene, with
the business of the hens' miraculously laying again, is perfectly right for
setting the frame for a saint's legend; he surrounds the action with
