Reviews for Plays by George Bernard Shaw

The average rating for Plays by George Bernard Shaw based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-04-13 00:00:00 Karthikeyan Ramanathan No author who has ever known the exultation of sending the press into an hysterical tumult of protest, of moral panic, of involuntary and frantic confession of sin, of a horror of conscience in which the power of distinguishing between the work of art on the stage and the real life of the spectator is confused and overwhelmed, will ever care for the stereotyped compliments which every successful farce or melodrama exhibits from the newspaper. It seems a mystery of science why some writing, though apparently skillful and stylish, sits dead on the page; and other writing, at first glance no different, roars into life, screaming at the top of its lungs. My most consistent impression from this collection was just this: Shaw turns the printed page into a loudspeaker. Reading through one of his prefaces is like standing right in front of him as he yells into your ear, close enough for his spittle to wet your face. It would be unpleasant if it wasn't so pleasant. I do wonder how much Shaw actually enjoyed writing his plays. He was so loquacious, so energetic, so strident and vociferous, that the time and effort required to polish a play, to prepare his actors for performance, must have bored him a bit. I sometimes got the impression that the plays were just a sly way of getting his views heard; that they were intellectual versions of advertisements, slick productions meant to sell a product. It doesn't matter if they were; excellence is excellence, even if it arises from sordid motives. To me, Shaw is at his best when he is in the comic mode. For all his intellectualism, all his activism, all his progressive and political preaching, he is capable of quite a light and airy touch. My favorite play in this collection was by far Arms and the Man; for there, Shaw's message and his medium coalesce into a perfect product, a convincing love story with an anti-war moral. The most questionable of his plays, on the other hand, though by far the most ambitious, was Man and Superman. There, Shaw drops the act and simply inserts his views in a kind of Platonic dialogue. Not only is this heavy-handed story-telling, but the views he expresses are frankly ridiculous. It's not Shaw's fault that Hitler made eugenics so taboo; at the time, a lot of people were enthusiastic about the prospect of bettering the species, so we must give Shaw a pass there. Still, the extreme vagueness of the scheme, the extraordinary sexism, the scientific ignorance, the political arrogance, and the intellectual elitism, come together to make the whole thing smell rotten, and the love story didn't add enough perfume to cover it up. An odd tension I noticed running through these plays was that between predictable plot and naturalistic personalities. The stories of these four plays were hardly innovative; the prospect of love or marriage provides the tension, and some concatenation of circumstances combines to provide a neat conclusion. Yes, the ending of Candida or Mrs. Warren's Profession were perhaps not the most satisfying; yet Shaw merely tweaks the expected, traditional ending, to give an added piquancy and savor; he still relies on the conventional machinery of plot. By contrast, his characters are often so wonderfully lifelike that it seemed odd they would fall into this neat pattern. This tension does not, however, detract from the plays; rather, I think it is an essential aspect of Shaw's taut and frenetic quality. The plays seem to strain at the seams, threatening to burst forth any minute; but the pressure is gradually relieved, the machine cools, and we arrive safely, albeit a bit ruffled, at our destination. I had great fun reading these plays on my ride to work. Shaw really knows how to shake a man until he's wide awake. But Shaw is exhausting after a while. I think I need to take a break and let the ringing in my ears go away before I can listen any longer; and I should probably wipe the spittle off my face.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-28 00:00:00 Drezz Parker There are times when Shaw is incredible. He can be so funny, in that dry snarky way late 19th century Englishmen could. And I absolutely love Arms and the Man. But I have a couple of issues with the other plays here. Mrs. Warren's Profession didn't make that much of an impression on me, though I imagine it would be more shocking to a contemporary audience not used to seeing sexuality displayed on stage. I didn't care for the end of Candida, mostly because it seemed like a very conventional ending to a play that seemed to set itself up for an unconventional ending. And the Man and Superman was pretty good, except that it was so overly long. The play is definitely not stageable as written; a former prof told me he had seem it staged leaving out the "Don Juan in Hell" section, but even leaving that out the play seems really long. The way Shaw creates his women is pretty fascinating though. He seemed really interested in the notion of the New Woman, and I'm not sure whether he approves or disapproves of her. A video on Mrs. Warren's profession: