Word: shaw
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Apple Cart, written in 1929, was perhaps the last of Shaw's plays to kick up any real dust in the theater. Indeed, it marks the point in his career when Shaw began to collect dust as well as kick it up, began to seem stale as well as brilliant. Less the work of a master than of a past master, The Apple Cart still had vital things to say and on occasion a great gift for saying them. There was still the fun of watching a superb showman up to his old tricks-but some of them...
This arrangement, while sometimes visually static, has the advantage of putting the production's emphasis on the argument, where it belongs. The argument itself, partly because of Shaw's extraordinary ability to show both points of view, is as complicated as the plot around which it revolves is simple. Undershaft, a millionaire arms manufacturer, whose religion consists of the belief that poverty is the only sin, converts his daughter Barbara, a major in the Salvation Army, to his position by simply showing her that the Army can be bought. He is also looking for a successor to his position...
While such subjects as religion and capitalism are discussed at length, the real issue resolves itself into a battle of realism vs. idealism. Undershaft holds, with Shaw, that a man may achieve any sort of moral stature only by grappling with the facts of his existence, such as poverty. He shows up Barbara's religion as a false kind of idealism, a romantic if pleasant evasion of the facts of life...
Laughton's production, while it makes all these ideas tangible, gives the actors a peculiar kind of challenge. They must rely on their voices and Shaw's lines to project the matter of the play, rather than on movement or color or the suspense of a tight plot. Laughton handles his role most satisfactorily. Sometimes relaxed into an engaging slouch, he yet rouses himself to an oratorical fervor of Churchillian stature that all but sweeps away his opponents, including the audience. Glynis Johns' characterization of Major Barbara is much less successful. She possesses an interesting voice--a sort of throaty...
Despite the difficulty it gives some of the actors, this static way of staging Major Barbara is admirable. It is admirable because Laughton was willing to accept the play for what it is, at once a sermon and exhilirating theater. The director permitted Shaw to speak, enabling the old man to vindicate himself as a comedian--because the play is often very funny--and to prove it possible to make a play out of ideas. Perhaps the highest praise this production can get is that Shaw would have approved...