GBS: Holy Terrorist of Iconoclasm

By T.E. Kalem

MAN AND SUPERMAN

by BERNARD SHAW

As a drama critic, George Bernard Shaw demolished most of the plays he saw; as a dramatist, he demolished most of society as he saw it. In his own eyes, Shaw was the anointed saint of iconoclasm, pursuing his vocation like a holy terrorist and treating his audience as his congregation. Though they rarely went forth and practiced what he preached, they could not resist the magnetic sweep of his eloquence and his wickedly amusing way with words.

Time has not appreciably weakened the old spellbinder's grip. Man and Superman is 74 years old; yet playgoers at Canada's Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., are sitting through a 5 1/2hour uncut version of the drama with evident delight. In part, this confirms their good taste, for the production is handsomely mounted, adroitly directed and formidably performed. But it may be due to the fact that these days Shaw fills a newly felt vacuum in the theater. In recent years there have been plenty of playwright absurdists, psychologists, realists or surrealists. But when it came to the drama of ideas or a pure pyrotechnic display of language, there was only Tom Stoppard. And Stoppard is a pussycat compared with that tiger named Bernard Shaw. like his disciple Bertolt Brecht, Shaw regarded plot as the sentimental opiate of the middle-class theatergoer. In Man and Superman, he simply inverts the boy-meets-girl formula: woman wants man, man runs for his bachelor life, woman gets man. As it happens, the man, Jack Tanner (Ian Richardson), is an incendiary charmer with a blowtorch for a tongue. He yearns to puncture all the hypocritical balloons of civilized life. As for the woman, Ann Whitefield (Carole Shelley), she is a spiritedly fetching minx and a sly enchantress of guile to whom any man might feel lucky to surrender.

Decorous sexual pursuit, though, is merely an excuse for more than the usual typhoon of Shavian ideas, the torrential flow of blindingly bright words. Shaw steadily sounds his pet themes: the chicanery of politics, the corruptive power of money, the degrading stench of poverty, the servile dependencies of marriage and family, the charlatanism of medicine, the fossilization of learning, the tyranny of the state, the stupidity of the military and the bigoted, sanctimonious zeal of the church. And ever and always, the eternal humbuggery of the English, used and overused by Shaw for comic relief and casual abuse. All of this might qualify him as a complete cynic or skeptic, except that he was a true child of the 19th century, with an ineradicable faith in the evolutionary process. Taking his text from Nietzsche -- "Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman" -- Shaw found his equivalent for God in what he called the Life Force. He had a messianic faith that natural selection by the Life Force could enable man to produce an improved species of Homo sapiens, which presumably could comprehend the ultimate meaning and purpose of existence. That is his rationalizing sanction of the mat ing of Jack Tanner and Ann Whitefield. They might produce a brainy superbaby.

Philosopher Clown. This apparently obdurate optimism may have been Shaw's final put-on. As machine-gun bursts of talk reduce argument after argument to rubble in Man and Superman, one becomes more and more aware of the self-divided ambiguity of Shaw's nature. Just as he was a celibate husband, he was a plutocratic socialist, a religious atheist, an irrational rationalist, a philosopher clown, a meditative activist and a sexually emancipatory puritan.

The two qualities Shaw most prized, he also possessed -- moral passion and individual integrity. It is not surprising that he portrays hell in this play as a kind of sumptuous nightclub of gourmandizing delights and heaven as a spartan gymnasium of progressive ar dor. Shaw speaks the language of militant betterment, and it is at the heart of Man and Superman.

The play is often cut by one act, at least, and the two-hour Don Juan in Hell segment is sometimes performed alone in concert reading. This full-length production is gloriously fortunate in having in the central role of Tanner an actor who is the pluperfect master of the Shavian rhetoric. At the risk of offending his admirable colleagues in the cast, one must say that it is extremely doubtful if so prodigious an undertaking could have succeeded without an actor of Ian Richardson's scope and power. His voice is like the trumpet of the Lord at the Second Coming. He can insinuate like a violin, wheedle like a clarinet and thunder anathemas like a great bass drum. And alongside that, Richardson maintains a physical counterpoint of impish comic invention, which is an equally essential element of the Shavian rhetoric.

In another key part, that of the Devil, Tony van Bridge lacks a bit of the roguish, demonic assurance that Charles Laughton once brought to the part.

However, in his role as director of a play that resembles a massive military cam paign as much as it does a drama, Van Bridge deserves the rank of four-star general. Everybody involved in Man and Superman merits praise without stint, for they have taken one of the masterworks of the 20th century theater and brought it to effulgent life.

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