Word: shavians
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Decorous sexual pursuit, though, is merely an excuse for more than the usual typhoon of Shavian ideas, the torrential flow of blindingly bright words. Shaw steadily sounds his pet themes: the chicanery of politics, the corruptive power of money, the degrading stench of poverty, the servile dependencies of marriage and family, the charlatanism of medicine, the fossilization of learning, the tyranny of the state, the stupidity of the military and the bigoted, sanctimonious zeal of the church. And ever and always, the eternal humbuggery of the English, used and overused by Shaw for comic relief and casual abuse...
Caesar and Cleopatra is afflicted by the mummy's curse. Despite two or three of the best scenes in the Shavian canon, the play itself may be unworkable: lines by Shaw but construction by Rube Goldberg. Offstage there are battles, mob scenes and the endless clumping of Roman legions. Onstage there are only words; even in this finger exercise for Pygmalion Shaw seemed to be heading toward what he later called playwriting as a "platonic exercise...
What transformation occurs in the play is the work rather of Candida, Morell's wife, who nourishes, sustains and, when necessary, strips away her men's illusions without ever succumbing to them herself. Through the agency of this energetic woman, a remarkable but typically Shavian reversal takes place: the seemingly strong, happily married Morell comes to realize his childish dependency on his wife; at the same time Marchbanks, rejected by Candida as the less needy, internalizes her gift to Morell as his own vision, in the process exchanging childhood for artistic maturity. In Candida, the "best" man fails...
...dowdy to help much; and the contrast in acting styles is matched by sometimes inappropriate shifts in mood. The extremely dark lighting in the last scene is overly somber for the revelatory nature of the action, while many of Marchbanks' scenes descend too far into farce. The proper Shavian mix of irony and humor, tragedy and comedy remains elusive...
...Nothing that is worth saying is proper," Marchbanks tells Morell at one point. but Morell too has his share of Shavian aphorisms. "I like a man to be true to himself, even in wickedness," he lectures Burgess. If Morell the socialist and Marchbanks the poet are two different masks for Shaw himself, then the playwright was not only complex; in the terms of this production, he emerges as schizoid and asymmetrical...