Word: shavianly
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Although this is a bad week-end for theater, Leverett House has worked energetically to produce a pleasant evening from unpromising Shavian dregs...
...just as it was at the start. Neither Shaw nor Shaw's King has really upset the apple cart; he has merely tossed out half a dozen Shavian apples of discord. In the end, King and Prime Minister have taken turns producing cards they have up their sleeves, which is a playwright's way of keeping going no less than a politician's. One such playwright's card is to have Breakages, .Ltd. suddenly amalgamate the U.S. and Britain. Another is to throw in a purely irrelevant interlude of sex-or of the lack...
...play as the impassioned sermon which it really is. His actors therefore do not bounce about the stage, they stand still whenever possible, and frequently they stand facing the audience directly. To make sure that the audience--next to the playwright himself, the most important character in a Shavian drama--is drawn right into the action, he cleverly arranges to have the finishing touches applied to the set with the curtain raised and one of the actors already onstage...
Very possibly Shaw's finest play, Saint Joan is yet one of his most uneven. The first third is little more than competent chronicle play; it is not till the second third that it becomes vibrantly Shavian; and not till the final third that it grows demonstrably great. At the Phoenix a generally torpid production stressed the play's long, slow climb before achieving-in the Trial Scene and the Epilogue-one of the great peaks of 20th century stage writing...
Ervine's view is both more intimate and more level than that of earlier Shavian biographers, who usually presented him as a fabulous monster. Ervine is able to discuss his immense shyness, to chide him when necessary for the "tosh" that often came from his "spinsterly mind," to assert, against all previous evidence, that he was generous in money matters, and to dispose of Oxford Don A.J.P. Taylor's assertion that "Shaw was never unhappy." Shaw's loveless childhood, drink-ridden father and hungry adolescence make it quite clear that few university dons have started life with...