Word: shavianly
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Pose of Arrogance. Worshipful Critic Eric Bentley, who has tried to truss Shavian doctrine into a system of thought, is one of the few who still pay unflagging homage to Shaw's ideas. For him Shaw is not merely a brilliant playwright who handled the English language with a clarity and wit unrivaled since Swift; Shaw is also a profound thinker whose "pose of arrogance was a deliberate strategy in an utterly altruistic struggle" to irritate men into thought. But the "utterly altruistic struggle" failed, and there was Shaw's tragedy: he, the court jester, was idolized...
...character of the modern Don Juan, who is unable to live up to his paradoxically ascetic ideals, has been vulgarized nobly by Maurice Evans. Instead he shows a comically flat and self-conscious hero, who completely lacks the real pathos of the Shavian creation. Emoting in the worst Shakespearean tradition, Evans draws plenty of laughs, and provides adequate surface entertainment; again a more solid treatment is called for. But Frances Rowe as the unscrupulous female, who pursues him to eventual triumph, is superb. Alternately voluptuous and indignant, she glides through her tasty part with complete competence, while the other players...
...classic part of Back to Methuselah, as a play, is the first part, a beautiful Shavian comedy of the Garden of Eden. The second part is second-rate drawing-room Shaw, and most of the rest is cerebral claptrap in settings of 2170 A.D., 3000 A.D. and 31,920 A.D. If the comic spirit were not alive in these scenes they would almost fall into the class of Wellsian monstrosity...
Back to Methuselah, which the Theatre Guild produced on Broadway in 1922, is saved only by the Shavian graces from talking itself dizzy. Of all Shaw's plays it depends the least on his wise dramatic energy and the most on what he thinks of First and Last Things. But the unmatchable writing lavished on it cannot make a reader feel that he has got his hands on something-or an audience feel that anything has actually occurred...
Although unaccustomed to the surrounding soft red drapes and elaborate ionic columns, Donna Holabird and other cast members brushed up on Shavian subtleties until early morning, in preparation for the production's opening on Wednesday night...