Word: joans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny, John Bull's Other Island, Major Barbara, Pygmalion and possibly You Never Can Tell are excepted, the law of diminishing returns begins to work halfway through his plays. There are wonderful moments in Man and Superman and St. Joan, but comedy, or in the last case, tragedy, degenerate into the longueurs of debate; farce becomes crude. Devastating in his ability to talk on both sides of the question and to cap or sink his own arguments, Shaw damps us because he talks his way back to the status...
...emotions-were alone portrayed successfully; the laughing anger of Shaw must be compared to Voltaire's. The brief poetical passages in John Bull's Other Island are the poorest sentimentality; even the saintly figure of Father Keegan in that play occasionally arouses shyness. In St. Joan the pathos is commonplace and the mysticism embarrassing. Shaw hardly goes deeper than the sentiment-pure though it is with the curious Irish purity-of the philanderer; and philanderers of either sex make the mistake of crediting the opposite sex with their own characteristics. Shaw's lovers do not test each...
...device for dramatizing feminism and the new women-one might say Shaw emancipated women and Wells emancipated men-but the emancipation soon appeared to cover a superficial part of life; the doctrine was to lead to a serious nutritional deficiency when he described the spiritual passions, as in St. Joan and in his religious theorizings. On these he is as dry and flat as a biscuit...
...Candida is an excellent portrait of a woman and so is the delightful Major Barbara. The theater, and comedy above all, has always dealt in types; the sentimental Englishman and the disillusioned Irishman in John Bull's Other Island are brilliantly observed. The political characters in St. Joan are a triumph of irreverent dialectic and penetrating understanding...
Peter Pan (St. James, 44th W.), starring Joan Arthur, is a good evening of fun. Welcott Gibbs' tale of life on Fire Island, Season in the Sun (Cort, 48th E.) is this season's first comedy hit. The best comedy, however, is Christopher Fry's literate The Lady's Not For Burning (Royale, 45th W.), which opened Wednesday...