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TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Some Common Complaints from Critics Some Warnings about Criticizing Critics |
Ho Hum, same old, same old |
FIRST AID TO CRITICS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY by
Lawrence Switzky |
INTRODUCTION
First Aid to Critics is a germinal archive of common complaints about Shaw plays,
representative instances, and tentative responses. It is a database on the move: as a group
project inaugurated at the ISS Conference in Guelph in 2011, it depends on the
collective genius of Shavians everywhere.
Over the next few months and years, it will expand and flourish and
hopefully become a useful resource in the cause of keeping Shaw on the boards
and the critics on their toes.
On that note: we want you to contribute to the effort to improve
criticism of Shaw in production. Have
you seen a theatre critic disparaging Shaw’s playwriting for the same baseless
reason that other critics have taken him to task for over a century? Fight back against cliché-ridden criticism
by sending a link to the review (and a possible response) to firstaidtocritics@gmail.com. Together, we can create the more thoughtful
theatre critics of tomorrow.
SOME COMMON COMPLAINTS FROM
CRITICS
1. All Shaw’s
Characters Are Shaw
“all Shaw’s characters are himself: mere puppets struck up to
spout Shaw. It’s only the actors that make them seem different” (“Epilogue” to Fanny’s First Play)
2. Shaw is
Unoriginal [Corollary: Shaw is Reheated Nietzsche, Ibsen, Wilde, etc.]
“Practically
all of the sagacity of George Bernard Shaw consists of bellowing vociferously
what every one knows.” (H. L. Mencken, “The Ulster Polonius”)
3. Shaw is
Didactic and Therefore Tedious
“…if
Chaucer is the father of English literature, Shaw is the spinster aunt….It is
only in his writing that the aunt in him rises up, full of warnings, wagged
fingers, and brandished umbrellas.” (Kenneth Tynan, Profiles)
4. Shaw is
Irrelevant/Dated
“Despite
the revamp, On the Rocks remains unwieldy - long-winded with a pair of love
subplots that seem as perfunctory as ever. But, in a paradox that would please
Shaw, Healey’s divergence from the original text in fact brings us closer to
its spirit. This is perhaps the nearest to what it was like to see a new Shaw
play in his heyday, the thrill of a sparkling and sometimes startling storm of
ideas provoking debate and discussion rather than passive reverence in the
audience.” (J. Kelly Nestruck, Globe and Mail review of On
the Rocks)
5. Shaw Wrote
Debates and Books, Not Plays
“Shaw’s
plays document the ways the accessories of the page can be used to represent
the drama: the setting and even the texture of performance are absorbed by how
the play is done into print. The accessories of print are deployed so
completely in the service of objectifying the fictional drama that the signs of
the theatre are very nearly erased.” (William Worthen,
Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama,
p. 57)
6. Shaw’s
Prolixity is Outmoded in the Post-Dramatic/Formalist/Neo-Avant-Garde Theatre
“Connoisseurs
of Shavian paradoxical wit will quickly recognize Major Barbara as one of the
most characteristic works of the canon: long stagebound
arguments lit up by rhetorical fireworks, delivered with mellifluous British
accents in attractive drawing rooms…the cast begins to break the predictable
cadences of the Shavian sentences by exploring asyncopated
rhythms in them, unexpectedly emphasizing portions of some words over others,
accompanied by a percussion player at the side of the stage” (George Hunka, 2006 review of the Kabuki Major Barbara by Theatre of the Two-Headed Calf in New York City)
7. Shaw
Doesn’t Understand/Can’t Represent Emotions
“But it is
really "Major Barbara" itself that has limits; its concerns—its "issues"—are spelled out all too thoroughly and
clearly. One could say that there's nothing at stake in this play except the
future of humanity; when it comes to actual human beings, Shaw here is perhaps
too clever by half, the extra half-portion of cleverness serving as a
substitute for emotional depth. The play does draw you in on its own
terms—those of a spirited debate—but while "Major Barbara" appears to
be an invitation to the audience to think, underneath its merry-prankster
ironies is a finger-wagging schoolmaster telling you what to think.” (Nancy
Franklin, New Yorker review of Major Barbara in 2001)
8. Shaw Can’t Structure a
Play
“Plum-pudding
unity, on the other hand—the unity of a number of ingredients stirred up
together, put in a cloth, boiled to a certain consistency, and then served up
in a blue flame of lambent humour—that is precisely
the unity of Getting Married. A
jumble of ideas, prejudices, points of view, and whimsicalities on the subject
of marriage is tied up in a cloth and boiled into a sort of glutinous fusion or
confusion, so that when the cloth is taken off they do not at once lose the
coherent rotundity conferred upon them by pressure from without.” (William
Archer, Play-Making)
9. Shaw is Superficial
“The tragic
dramatist must feel pity and terror in a certain way. It is through the hearts
of men and women that he must feel them. He must be able to see into their
hearts, and show us what he has seen there. He must be able to create human
beings. Comedy’s main appeal is to the head, tragedy to the heart. We can be
intellectually interested in figures that do not illude
us as real, but we cannot feel for them as figures. Thus in comedy a
subjectively created figure will do well enough, but in tragedy it is useless.
Mr. Shaw cannot create a figure objectively, and thus he cannot communicate to
us through drama a tragic emotion.” (Max Beerbohm, “Mr. Shaw’s Tragedy”; also,
cp. Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt, “Shaw had no sense of evil”)
10. Shaw’s Bad/Inadequate
Politics Taint His Art
“Shaw had one great intellectual virtue: he has been taken in by
almost everything else but never by capitalism. He succumbed to Nietzscheism,
Lamarckism, vegetarianism, imperialism, fascism, Stalinism, anti-vivisectionism, Fabianism and
what have you; but he knew how rotten were the internal social workings of
capitalist society and never stopped saying so. As a result his magnificently
composed pamphlets, polemics and prefaces are full of some of the most eloquent
and effective anti-capitalist agitation of our times. But that was all. His
best writing was always in terms of particularities, always very
concrete and limited. As soon as he entered the field of theory, as soon as he
essayed generalizations, he usually made an ass of himself.” (Irving Howe,
“Bernard Shaw’s Anti-Capitalism”)
11. Good Productions of Shaw Save Otherwise
Irredeemable Plays
12. Shaw is a Good Artist;
Unfortunately, His Politics are Awful
SOME POSSIBLE REPLIES TO CRITICS:
In
developing this section, we’re looking for model replies to critics that can be
used as templates adaptable to the event.
Write to Larry Switzky at firstaidtocritics@gmail.com with proposals,
with copies to lconolly@trentu.ca and dietrich@shawsociety.org.
SOME WARNINGS ABOUT CRITICIZING CRITICS:
It might be
counter-productive to adopt Shaw’s audacity in the care and feeding of critics,
despite our title, so here we’re looking for advice about what NOT to write in criticizing critics,
such as ad hominem arguments. Write to Larry Switzky
at firstaidtocritics@gmail.com
with proposals, with copies to lconolly@trentu.ca
and dietrich@shawsociety.org
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