Word: shaw
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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MAJOR BARBARA by George Bernard Shaw...
...Shaw is a Vesuvius of eloquent rhetoric. But his ideas are borrowed, chiefly from Nietzsche, Ibsen, Marx, Darwin, Wagner and William Blake. A grand proselytizer, he was to those men what St. Paul was to Christ...
Though a professed atheist, Shaw was possessed by an evangelical passion. He was convinced that if spiritual power could be harnessed to material power, man would be transformed into a higher order of being. That is at the core of Major Barbara, which is being given a top-notch revival at Manhattan's Circle in the Square Theater. The motto of the Salvation Army is "Blood and Fire." Shaw paradoxically translates this into "Money and Gunpowder...
...Major Barbara has a weakness it lies in Shaw's touching belief in the social potency of the seemingly formidable mechanisms of power. Power, like all things human, is fragile. One glimpse of the ruins of all the great European civilizations ought to have taught Shaw that. Revivals, too, may prove fragile. This one shows tensile strength. Director Stephen Porter always holds up a steady mirror to a playwright's inner vision, never more precisely than in Major Barbara. His cast is superb-Bosco's polished diabolism as Undershaft, Kennedy's valiantly wounded purity as Barbara...
...evening is a headlong delight, and a special exhilaration arises from Shaw's gift for wittily unlocking treasures of the mind with the sly, sensitive touch of a safecracker...