The best performances of George Bernard Shaw's plays many witnesses claim, occurred at the first rehearsals when Shaw read his plays to the cast. Shaw, a born actor, played all the parts himself. With characteristic energy and devilish good humor, this Irishman moved spryly from argument to argument, character to character, keeping his actor-audiences rapt.
This mental and emotional agility is apparent in almost every part Shaw ever wrote, a fact that has intrigued and challenged the greatest actors of our century. The list of Shaw's interpreters reads like a who's who of twentieth-century theater history: Ellen Terry, Harrley Granville Barker, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Johnston Forbes Robertson, Lillah McCarthy, Wendy Hiller, Maurice Evans, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Sybil Thorndike, and Dame Edith Evans. These actors and others of their stature tackled Shaw's plays as they premiered - some in London, some in New York - between the mid-1890s and the late 1920s.
Change in Reputation
Although Shaw continued to write until his death in 1950, and although the tradition of producing his work in England continued, he fell out of favor in America. His plays were often dismissed as didactic or glib. The playwright's presence behind his characters jarred with the emergence of the new social naturalism exemplified in the work of the Group Theatre in the 1930s. Likewise, his characters seemed to American actors, who were approaching acting with a new realism inspired by the teaching of Konstantin Stanislavsky, to be lifeless stick figures of the stage, mouthpieces for Shaw's long-winded didacticism. Even the man himself appeared to be a living caricature: intellectual imp, the eternal devil's advocate. Essentially, American naturalism left Shaw for dead.
Americans failed to see that Shaw is a realist, who, rather than hiding behind "The veneer of lively wit," as critics have charged, cuts through the veneer of society to expose its workings. He may set his plays in drawing rooms, but he never partakes of their stuffiness. He is the devil in the drawing room who uses truth as a weapon to surprise his victims and penetrate their romantic poses. As a director Shaw strove for greater realism in acting than others of his own time; as a writer he sought to create round characters, a point interpreters have missed for too long.
Now, however, great American actors are rediscovering Shaw's realism. They are rediscovering the greatness and challenge of his roles. Moreover, these actors are finding a place where Shaw's mind meets American naturalism.
The past four years have seen four major Shaw revivals in New York, featuring some of this country's finest actors (with a sprinkling of their British counterparts). Circle in the Square Theatre has produced Heartbreak House, starring Rex Harrison, Rosemary Harris, and Amy Irving; Arms and the Man, with Kevin Kline, Raul Julia, and Glenne Headley; and this year's You Never Can Tell, featuring Uta Hagen, Philip Bosco, and Amanda Plummer. During the 1985-1986 season, Hagen also starred in the Roundabout Theatre's revival of Mrs. Warren's Profession, along with Pamela Reed. The new realism these actors are bringing to Shaw's plays stems from a discovery of something hitherto overlooked in his writing - passion.
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