Plays Unpleasant (2 page)

What Shaw took from Ibsen was the blindingly simple idea that this doesn't have to be the case. As he put it in the ‘Quintessence', the new drama ‘arises through a conflict of unsettled ideals', and the question which makes the play interesting ‘is which is the villain and which the hero'. But by setting his plays within familiar theatrical milieus, Shaw gave himself an additional theatrical weapon. In Ibsen, there are no familiar landmarks to help us decide what kind of territory we're in. In Shaw, we think we know where we are (six of the seven
Plays Pleasant
and
Plays Unpleasant
appear to promise a betrothal) but in fact we find we are somewhere else. In Ibsen we don't know who the hero or the villain is, so we have to work it out for ourselves; in Shaw, we think we know but we find we've been deceived.

No wonder then that the inexperienced Shaw had trouble with his endings. Only in his third play does he bring off the reversal he has been striving for in both the others. In
The Philanderer
, his first, implausible but dynamic, ending was jettisoned in favour of a kind of evasion. In
Widowers' Houses
, his ending took him seven years.

As stated,
Widower's Houses
began life as a collaboration between Shaw and William Archer to adapt a French comedy, whose inciting incident is the discovery by a young man that the inheritance of the woman he loves was acquired immorally. In the original, his dilemma was resolved by the intervention of a major national economic crisis, so that the heroine's father might be ruined and the problem removed. In the first Archer–Shaw version (originally titled ‘The Way to a Woman's Heart') the hero has to confront his problem, which he does by literally pitching the father's money into the river at Remagen (hence the
second Shaw–Archer title ‘Rhinegold'). In the final and completed Shaw version, however, the hero does not behave heroically, not least because the heroine chooses to behave in a most surprising way.

By the end of the first act of
Widowers' Houses
, young Harry Trench has become engaged to Blanche Sartorius, whose brisk and unsentimental attitude to things (including Dr Trench himself) we have learnt to enjoy and admire. We have also discovered that there is a problem with the means by which Blanche's father amassed his fortune. In the second act, Trench discovers that Sartorius is a slum landlord, and, like the heroes of both
Ceinture Doree
and ‘Rhinegold', proclaims that he cannot possibly accept this tainted treasure, proposing to his fiancée (without, being a Victorian gentleman, entirely explaining why) that they live off his income alone.

Then two unexpected, but by no means implausible, things happen. The first is that Blanche refuses to abandon her inheritance, on the impeccably feminist grounds that it's her money not his, that she does not wish to be absolutely dependent on her husband, and that if (as she suspects) this is an excuse to renege on his commitment to her then this is ‘so like a man'. The second is that Sartorius reveals that Trench's own income comes from mortgages on Sartorius' property – in order to free himself of it he would have not only to impoverish his wife but bankrupt himself.

This situation is left unresolved at the second interval, but given a further twist in Act III, when Sartorius is faced with a choice rich in irony – if he improves his hellish properties he might make a killing from compulsory purchases by (yes, here they are again) the London County Council, but he can only do so by risking Trench's capital and thus his livelihood. The only way this conundrum can be resolved is if Trench overcomes his scruples and marries Blanche after all.

Now this doesn't
quite
work in plot terms; basically, Trench faces the same moral dilemma twice, though in the second
case it is not so much a dilemma as a
fait accompli
. But anyone who has attempted to make such material work will recognize that Shaw has presented a complicated financial plot in a way that is plausible, intriguing of itself, and consistently clear; at each stage, the plotting faces the characters with unavoidable practical choices rich in moral meaning; and at the climax of the play he has complicated an already potent situation with a surprising, ironical, and yet plausible twist (the fact that in order to make an even fatter profit out of compulsory purchase, it suddenly becomes in Sartorius' interests to become a model landlord). All of which communicates Shaw's message, that capitalism has made everyone complicit in its evils whether they like it or not; and that the alternative is not to attempt to live an individually moral life, but to change society. Which Trench cannot do, so we, by implication, must take on the task.

Having brought that off, there is a sense of Shaw giving up: in order to top and tail Trench's surrender, he must bring Trench and Blanche back together, which he does in a long speech by Blanche in which the text is abuse and the subtext animal sexuality (‘It suddenly flashes on him', Shaw instructs the Trench actor disarmingly, ‘that all this ferocity is erotic: that she is making love to him'). Silent until the embrace, Trench informs her re-entering father that he'll ‘stand in, compensation or no compensation'. So the challenge that in
Ceinture Doree
is avoided, and in ‘Rhinegold' confronted, is here surrendered, from which Shaw invites us to draw the obvious conclusion.

The Philanderer
is different from the other two
Plays Unpleasant
, but less different in its first version than the one Shaw published. The opening love triangle was drawn from Shaw's own life, with the current lover (Grace Tranfield) based on the actress Florence Farr (who played Blanche in
Widowers' Houses)
, and the spurned ex-lover, Julia Craven, being an unflattering portrait of Jenny Patterson (who had taken Shaw's virginity eight years before). By the end of the
second act, Grace has rejected the idea of marriage to Charteris on good ‘New Womanly' grounds (‘I will never marry a man I love too much. It would give him a terrible advantage over me: I should be utterly in his power'). While in order to evade his earlier entanglement, Charteris is busily organizing the marriage of Julia into the sub plot (a Dr Paramore, whose main function is to diagnose Julia's father as terminally ill with a liver disease of his own discovery, and to be most put out when he discovers that there's nothing wrong with his patient after all).

The original third act is four years later. Paramore has indeed married Julia, but fallen out of love with her, and wants a divorce so he can marry Grace. Shaw assembles the characters (rather clumsily) for precisely the kind of detached discussion of the iniquity of the marriage laws which he ascribes erroneously to Ibsen and (on his good days) equally erroneously to himself. It is agreed that Dr and Mrs Paramore should be divorced abroad, and there is a neat (if psychologically implausible) coda between Julia Paramore and Charteris, in which it is revealed that they have been having a secret liaison for most of the course of her marriage. Now she is free of Paramore, she insists that if Charteris wants to continue the affair, they will have to wed (‘No more philandering and advanced views for me'). But Charteris' magnetism is too much for her, and despite his refusal, she ends the play in his arms.

Assured by Lady Campbell that this wouldn't wash, Shaw's substitute last act is continous with the second. Again, all the characters assemble at Dr Paramore's consulting rooms, but this time merely to witness the success of Charteris' scheme to marry Julia off to the doctor. Grace repeats her refusal to marry Charteris, Shaw half heartedly offers and withdraws the possibility of Charteris marrying Julia's sister, and the final question posed by the play is whether Charteris will congratulate Julia on her engagement (why would he not?). And like
Widowers' Houses
, the play ends
with a virtually impossible stage direction: ‘Charteris, amused and untouched, shakes his head laughingly. The rest look at Julia with concern, and even a little awe, feeling for the first time the presence of a keen sorrow'.
⁵

So for the second time in a row, Shaw has the problem of a denouement of which the whole point is that a situation
doesn't
change. In both cases – though to a much greater extent in
The Philanderer
– this makes for an unsatisfactory and strangely perfunctory close. In his third play, one would expect Shaw at the very least not to make the same mistake again. But for whatever reason, that is precisely what he does do – with the significant difference that, on this occasion, he makes it work.

Like
Widowers' Houses, Mrs Warren's Profession
was based on two previous stabs at the same story. In his first version of what was to become
Yvette
, Maupassant has a girl respond to the discovery that her mother is a courtesan by suicide. In the actual
Yvette
, the girl becomes a kept woman herself. Armed with these two alternatives, Shaw was again eager to come up with a third.

As in
Widowers' Houses
, Shaw saves his major revelation for the second act, with the third providing another turn to the screw. In Act II, Kitty Warren tells her daughter that she was forced by circumstance into prostitution, thus converting Vivie from a conservative contempt for such self-serving excuses to a wholehearted acceptance of her mother's argument that society offered her no choice (or rather that the only other choices were worse). In Act III, however, Vivie discovers a new piece of information – that Mrs Warren is still running brothels, even though there is no longer any material imperative for her to do so. Sickened by this revelation, Vivie runs off to London and the small accountancy firm she now runs with her friend Honoria Fraser, in Chancery Lane, to make her own way in the world.

Having written two last acts without enough material to fill them, one might expect Shaw to end it there. In fact he adds
a fourth act, in which Mrs Warren follows Vivie to London, to plead for acceptance from her daughter once again. The difference of course is that, unlike Harry Trench, Vivie Warren has actually spurned the tainted treasure, and this act is about the cost, not of doing the wrong thing, but of doing the right one. For that reason it can be, and is, driven not by plot but by character. In Act II, Mrs Warren's arguments are cogent and convincing; in Act IV they are neither, but they are compelling, because they are about her limits as a human being and her fears of growing old alone. In Act II, Vivie can respond joyously to her mother's strength and courage; now, rejecting her, she must be sarcastic and cruel. Modern as well as contemporary critics have seen Vivie transformed (in Chesterton's words) into ‘an iceberg of contempt'
⁶
. But this surely is Shaw's point: that if the logic of capitalism traps all but the bravest into complicity, then the price of escape is the sacrifice of the best bits of oneself.

Shaw was not the last political writer to explore this paradox. At the end of her last scene with her daughter, Mrs Warren cries ‘Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing!', in direct anticipation of the message of Brecht's
Caucasian Chalk Circle
and
The Good Person of Setzuan
. In fact, Brecht wrote a rather silly essay on Shaw in 1926, in which he described him as a terrorist and said that he agreed with Shaw's opinions about evolution even though he didn't know what they were.
⁷
He was not to know the debt he would owe to Shaw as a political writer.

As Eric Bentley points out, Shaw's claim that ‘my procedure is to imagine characters and let them rip' is disingenous; in
Widowers' Houses
and Mrs
Warren's Profession
, the plot was a given, and Shaw's procedure was not to destroy but to upend it.
⁸
The crucial discovery that Shaw made in his early plays was that by placing realistic political content into recognizable theatrical structures he could effect the reversals he sought by allowing his characters to stage a double revolt – against their allocated office in life (as wife, daughter,
servant) but also their expected role in the plot (as hero, victim or villain). When Shaw's great argument scenes work, they do so because both things are happening – the story is forcing the character to question their office, while at the same time the character is challenging their role in the plot. This is what Shaw means when he writes in the Mrs Warren preface that ‘the real secret of the cynicism and inhumanity of which shallower critics accuse me is the unexpectedness with which my characters behave like human beings, instead of conforming to the romantic logic of the stage'. So, in
Arms and the Man
, Raina's failure to sustain the role of sensitive heroine allows Bluntschli to prise her away from her office as dutiful fiancée. But something even more complicated and interesting occurs at the end of
Mrs Warren's Profession
.

As I pointed out above, the plot of
Mrs Warren's Profession
is effectively concluded by the end of Act III. Not only romantic but also structural logic demands therefore that something else will happen in Act IV, which can only be that Vivie Warren changes her mind and returns to her mother's corrupt embrace. The fact that she refuses to do so is a dramatic surprise as well as a psychological shock. Vivie Warren's refusal to accept the office of daughter to a woman she despises is underlined by the heroine's refusal to do what the structure expects of her, which is to turn again. It is the last act which makes
Mrs Warren's Profession
not only a great but also a complete political play.

Shaw's current charge against his polemical plays was that by dealing with the pressing political issues of his day, they inevitably date. By 1895, he resolved to write no more ‘blue-book' plays on current social problems, arguing that in periods when political institutions lagged behind cultural changes, it was natural for the imagination of dramatists to be set in action on behalf of social reform, but that even then ‘the greatest dramatists shew a preference for the non-political drama… for subjects in which the conflict is
between man and his apparently inevitable and eternal rather than his political temporal circumstances'.
⁹