Before turning to the last of the fantastic farce-comedies, I would mention very briefly the three little topical pieces which exhibit the joker Shaw at his Shawest. First, there is that petite comédie rosse, so slight as to be dubbed by Shaw himself a “comediettina,” How He Lied to Her Husband—written in 1905 to eke out Mr. Arnold Daly's bill in New York. “I began by asking Mr. Shaw to write me a play about Cromwell,” relates Mr. Daly. “The idea appealed to him in his own way. He said he thought it good, but then he raced on to suggest that we might have Charles the First come on with his head under his arm. I pointed out to Shaw that it would be highly inconvenient for a man to come on the stage with his head under his arm, even if he were an acrobat. Shaw, however, said he thought it could be done. In the end, he said he would compromise. 'Write the first thirty-five minutes of that play yourself,' said he, 'and let me write the last five minutes.'”[156] What a convenient recipe for Shaw's formula of anti-climax! The point of the little topsy-turvy, knockabout farce is the reductio ad absurdum of the “Candidamaniacs”; but the penny-a-liners usually paragraphed it as a travesty on Shaw's own play of Candida. Shaw finally cabled: “Need I say that anyone who imagines that How He Lied to Her Husband retracts Candida, or satirizes it, or travesties it, or belittles it in any way, understands neither the one nor the other?” This comediettina is a bright little skit, but it is no more amusing than it is untrue to the intellectuels who made Candida a success in New York and laid the foundations of Shaw's—and Daly's—success in America.
Playbill of You Never Can Tell. Vasa-Theater, Stockholm. Director: Albert Ranft.
February 27th, 1908. Thirty-seventh performance.
Playbill of The Man of Destiny. Schauspielhaus, Frankfurt. April 20th, 1903.
First performance in the German language.
On July 14th, 1905, in a booth in Regent's Park, London, for the benefit of the Actors' Orphanage, was “performed repeatedly, with colossal success,” a “tragedy,” entitled Passion, Poison and Petrifaction; or The Fatal Gazogene, written by Shaw at the request of Mr. Cyril Maude. It is an extravagant burlesque on popular melodrama, and the main incident of the “tragedy” is the petrifaction of the hero caused by swallowing a lot of lime as an antidote to the poison administered to him by the jealous husband of his inamorata, Lady Magnesia Fitztollemache. “The play has a funny little history,” Mr. Shaw told me, “having its origin in a story I once made up for one of the Archer children. In the early days of William Archer's married life I was down there one night, and one of the children asked me to tell him a story. 'What about?' I asked. 'A story about a cat,' was the eager reply. It seems that at one time my aunt was interested in making little plaster-of-paris figures; and one day the cat came along, and, thinking it was milk, lapped up some of the moist plaster-of-paris. And so the sad result, as I told the Archer children, was that the poor cat petrified inside. 'And what did they do with the cat?' one of the children asked. 'Well, you see,' I replied, 'one of the doors of the house would never stay shut, so my mother kept the cat there ever afterwards to hold the door shut.' The funny part of it all was that Mrs. Archer said that she had caught me in a lie—and to her own children at that. To this day she never believes a single thing I say!”
“Passion, Poison and Petrifaction is, of course, the most utter nonsense,” Shaw continued. “But, would you believe it,”—with a chuckle—“it was recently successfully produced in Vienna, and seriously praised as a characteristic play of the brilliant Irish dramatist and Socialist, Bernard Shaw!”[157]
Slightest of all three is The Interlude at The Playhouse, written for Mr. and Mrs. Cyril Maude, and delivered by them at the opening of The Playhouse, Mr. Maude's new theatre, on Monday, January 28th, 1907.[158] The little piece extracts all the comedy to be got out of the embarrassment of an actor-manager over having to deliver a certain speech, and the solicitude of his wife in making an appeal to the audience on his behalf, but without his knowledge, for sympathy and encouragement. The genuine delicacy and lightness of touch with which the situation is handled, and the absence of Shavian intrusiveness, unite in making of the interlude a little gem, quite perfect of its kind.
The last of the comedies of character is Captain Brassbound's Conversion, classified by Shaw as one of the Three Plays for Puritans. This play might never have been written, but for the fact that Ellen Terry made no secret of the fact that she was born in 1848. When her son, Gordon Craig, became a father, Ellen Terry, according to Shaw, said that now no one would ever write plays for a grandmother! Shaw immediately wrote Captain Brassbound's Conversion to prove the contrary. And seven years later Ellen Terry portrayed Lady Cicely Waynflete with a charm, a waywardness, and a grace that gave pleasure to thousands in England and America.
Just as, in The Devil's Disciple, Shaw reduces the melodramatic form to absurdity, so in Captain Brassbound's Conversion does he reduce to absurdity the melodramatic view of life. The scene of the play is an imaginary Morocco, a second-hand, fantastic image vicariously caught for Shaw by Mr. Cunninghame Graham. Not only did Shaw want to write a good part for Ellen Terry: he also wanted to write a good play. So he wrote a whimsical fantasy, half melodrama, half extravaganza, conditioned only by his own mildly philosophic bent and the need for developing Lady Cicely's character. The result, as he is fond of saying, is simply a story of conversion—a Christian tract!