Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Devil's Disciple by G.B. Shaw is a funny play with a serious design. The plot of the play is mostly a joke: there is a hero scene and a heroine scene and a disputed legacy and a last minute gallows rescue, but none of these things happen the way they should. The seriousness is in Shaw's own bored attitude with the melo-dramatic happenings. This comes through best in the amazing words of Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne who appears in the third act when the British are doing their best to lose the Revolution...
Because its plot is almost non-existent, The Devil's Disciple is a tricky play to tackle: unless all the funny lines about George III, the British army, heroism and relatives are held together by the actors, Shaw's own attitude will be lost. What the play needs and what the Lyric Theatre production doesn't always give it, is careful timing to get the funny sayings across. Though the actors do well in the smaller scenes, the pace is harried enough in the group scenes that some of the wittier lines go by too fast. This weakens the performances...
Britain has been made Freud-conscious by the championship of Dr. Jones, the masterly translations of James Strachey, the polemics of Partisan Edward Glover, and the fatal fascination-plus plot ideas -Freud held out to all fiction writers. Yet all of Great Britain (pop. 51 million) has half as many analysts as New York City. There are Englishmen who still like to quote Punch's burlesque "explanation" of Freud back in 1934: "Without psychoanalysis we should never know that when we think a thing the thing we think is not the thing we think we think but only...
...mother apologizes, "but there was no time . . . You'll wear gloves, of course, darling-long ones." Even with gloves, the tutor is too hot to handle. He sets the princess on fire, and by the time the blaze is finally under control, the rest of the flimsy plot has gone pleasantly up in smoke...
Half way through, the picture does pick up a loose plot. After watching a movie about mail delivery in America, the letter carrier decides to modernize his own haphazard methods. But when he takes his job seriously, he scatters leisurely groups of chickens, geese, and villagers in all directions as he races through his route. In the end, American efficiency looses out to the slower pace of France, and peace returns to the village. But the interval of madness, while it lasts, is very entertaining...