Word: shaw
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Monday evening's opening was marred by none of the foibles which often make the play long, tedious and choked with Shavian didacticism. The production moved quickly from the peaks of Shavian wit and left the sprawling valleys of Shaw's philosophizing to shift for themselves...
...Juan interlude because the rest of the play is long and the interlude is to some extent extraneous to the action. Director Jerome Kilty was wise, however, to include it, for not only does it make the play a whole, but it also includes some of the best of Shaw's didactic dialogue. For those who may prefer plot to opinions on the artist-man and the mother-woman, combined with discussion of the relative merits of Heaven and Hell, there is the consolation of some very excellent special effects. The Hell scene is opened with an eerie concert...
...Superman is not, of course, mere comedy, and the play is susceptible to several levels of interpretation. On the surface, Shaw has built a comedy to explode the popular assumption that man pursues woman. Actually, it's the other way around, Shaw says, as any numbscull might detect. But the issue goes beyond the simple mechanics of who traps whom, sexually speaking...
...issue is complicated in the case of the artist-man who Tanner, or at least Don Juan, is. When such a person, possessing Shaw's enigmatic "Life Force," encounters the mother-woman, conflict is intensified because the artist is unwilling to submit to domesticity. A third twist is developed as the mother-woman also turns out to be an artist-mother-woman, which Anne Whitefield is. Thus the sexual trapping is extended to encompass broad questions of artistic self-realization in the face of domestic morality and social mores...
...Shaw will not let one off with a simple dichotomy; clearly there is a paradox and Hell is not all it's cracked up to be. Don Juan, the hero, chooses to escape to Heaven, while the stupid, if pitiable, Ramsden prefers to prolong his visit to the pleasure pots of Hell. No review can do justice to an interpretation of the play, but suffice to say that Man and Superman has paradoxes, ambivalences, and deeper meanings which the actors present clearly and without strain...