Word: shaw
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Leverett House had the noble idea of honoring Shaw's hundredth birthday by performing two of his one-act plays. Although neither is more than mediocre, enthusiastic acting often makes a potentially plain evening bright...
Thus The Apple Cart caused a mild furore in 1929 because Socialist Shaw put in a good word, not to say several magnificent speeches, for monarchy. Shaw's English King Magnus is far more public-spirited, high-minded and civilized than the Labor Prime Minister and, as it turns out, a shrewder tactician. Heckled for such a political about-face, Shaw insisted-in one of those prefaces of his which are more like second times at bat-that King and Prime Minister not only are not winner and loser, but are not even basic antagonists. "The conflict," Shaw asserts...
...Shaw is resounding an old standard theme, he works variations-and even a fantasia-upon it. He can jiggle his royal puppet in the classic role of the Patriot King; he can even make a kind of If-I-Were-King of Magnus. The Socialist Bernard can act a Strong Man on the throne, a Passionless Shepherd in the boudoir. The disbeliever in monarchy can suggest that a constitutional monarch be flagrantly unconstitutional, and can have him retain his throne by threatening to abdicate and prove ten times as troublesome in Parliament...
...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...
Signe Hasso has plenty of lure, but the duet in the boudoir lags. And though Charles Carson makes an excellent Prime Minister, some of his Cabinet members fall short. Yet it is less that the production lets Shaw down than that he himself often needs inordinate holding...