Word: shaviana
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Refreshingly, Michael Voysey, who put together this program of Shaviana, has stayed away from the plays altogether. The selections are drawn from letters, essays, critiques and talks on the BBC, plus a frail, touching, ninetyish farewell to all on British TV. The evening moves chronologically from Shaw's arrival in London and includes reminiscences of his early family life, his courtship of Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a millionairess, his epistolary romancing of Ellen Terry, the famed actress, and his meeting with Isadora Duncan at which, to his acute distress, she propositioned...
...many a critic, Saint Joan is the lone instance in which the world's cleverest playwright discards the brakes of self-consciousness and permits himself one glorious swoop of spiritual freewheeling. In common with the body of Shaviana, Saint Joan turns on an agile inversion. But this inversion, the definition of a miracle as an event which creates faith, seems to spring from Shaw's heart instead of his head. A great, noble warmth suffuses the narrative from the time the tomboy Maid (Miss Cornell) makes de Baudricourt's hens lay in order to persuade...
George Bernard Shaw, in a letter to the London Observer, published last week, said: "May I beg my worshipers not to scramble too blindly for alleged Shaviana? Otherwise they may share the fate of one of their number in America who just paid $1,500 for a copy of Locke's 'Essay on Human Understanding.'" The "Essay" was advertised as being profusely annotated by Shaw. But the annotations were those of Shaw's father-in-law, Horace Payne-Townshend of Derry County, Cork. Satirist Shaw has never read the "Essay," and he does "not disfigure books...
Eyes privileged to glimpse the advance proofs, last week, reported that the book is a voluminous answer to a possible hypothetical woman who asked Mr. Shaw to "explain Socialism." From this point of departure he launches into a potpourri of Shaviana keynoted by such statements as the following: The first principle of Socialism is equal income for all. . . . Every other system for distribution of wealth is unjust and illogical. . . . The Socialist experiment failed in Russia because the people were not prepared for it. ... England is today more communist than Soviet Russia...
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