Three by Shaw: Major Barbara, How He Lied to her Husband, and John Bull’s Other Island

      George Bernard Shaw. Major Barbara (1906) Shaw’s Preface is as outrageously wrongheaded as usual: he loved the sound of his own ideas. His comments on the way the world works are acutely and cynically accurate, but his inferences about how we should deal with it simply miss the mark. He is very good at presenting us with real and lifelike characters, but when he thinks about real people he goes awry. It’s as if his intellect and his imagination don’t know of each other’s existence.
     The play works well, what with Barbara eventually recognising the value of her father’s munitions-derived money. It would be a pleasure to see on stage. I’ve seen it as a movie, not memorable enough for me to recall much besides the “modern” architecture of Undershaft’s factory. The plotting is perhaps a trifle too pat, but that’s GBS for you: he will make his plays demonstrate his ideas, and that’s when the machinery creaks. When he just goes with his imagination, as in the Salvation Army scenes, the results are brilliant, witty, emotionally true, and beautifully paced. You can find more about the play here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Barbara *** (2008)

      George Bernard Shaw. How He Lied to her Husband (1907) A youthful poet has a (chaste) affair with a well-married and rather silly older woman. He wants her to leave her husband and run away with him. When the husband shows up, he tries to pass off the incriminating letters and poems as being written to someone else, which annoys the husband, who takes the lie as an insult to himself as well as his wife. He wants her to be attractive to other men, to be the subject of passionate love poems, which bolster his pride in having snagged her for himself. So the young lover tells him what he wants to hear, hence playlet’s title. Shaw shows once again that he understands the conventions of romance and courtly love, and the realities of respectable suburban life. I think this play is more successful than many of his more serious efforts. *** (2008)

      George Bernard Shaw. John Bull’s Other Island (1907) I started to read the preface and gave up. GBS was not the best analyst of politics. His notions of how the Irish Question came about, and how it should be resolved, were shown to be wrong-headed by subsequent events. About the only thing he got right was that it would be a protracted and bloody affair if it wasn’t settled quickly.
     The one thing GBS never seems to have fully understood was the lure of power for its own sake. (This leads him to make Undershaft a seeker after profit, which is the only serious flaw in Major Barbara. Profit, i.e. money, is a means and instrument of power, not and end in itself.) Like many idealistic ideologues, he believed that sweet reason would prevail, if it was made clear enough what the benefits would be. He would not recognise the irony of the Canadian toast, “Peace, order, and good government.”
     That sheer bloody-mindedness and paranoid delusions are more potent motives than the desire for peace, prosperity, and lawful order was something he could never see. That’s one reason he (like many other Socialists of the time) kept excusing the excesses of Soviet Russia, for example. He was of course right that the Protestants would have nothing to fear in a Catholic united Ireland, but he couldn’t see, because he couldn’t understand, that religious paranoia would prevent a settlement. He also couldn’t see that the IRA was dominated by psychopaths, who carried on their bloody vendettas not because they expected politically acceptable results but because they liked the murder and mayhem (as well as the loot).
     So I didn’t read the play. I don’t think I missed anything. ** (2008)