Word: shaw
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...called an "arch-artist" by George Bernard Shaw and "that sovereign of insufferables" by Ambrose Bierce. In The God of Mirrors, Oscar Wilde qualifies for both titles, reducing every crisis to an epigram. Some of them are prophetic. In Dorian Gray, "the bad will suffer. The good will be rewarded. That . . . is what fiction means." Some are merely contrary: "It is always an advantage not to have received a good education." As Wilde arcs over London, he decides that the difference between true love and caprice is that caprice lasts a little longer, and that is his undoing. His infatuation...
Throughout, Reilly maintains the properly ironic tone. There is no special pleading about British homophobia; Wilde is a collaborator in his own misfortune. Shaw, Max Beerbohm, Frank Harris and the Edwardian elite are given delightful cameo roles, and the prose has the appropriate drawing-room astringency: Shaw and Wilde might have been close friends "if they only had less in common." If this is a novel with an excess of surface, that was, after all, its subject's salient feature. The important part, as Wilde would insist, is that the thing glitter. And so it does...
...plays, both by old hands: Rosemary Harris as a coy, manipulative grande dame of the stage in Noel Coward's astringent farce Hay Fever and Uta Hagen, the original Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, as a practical and amoral urchin turned madam in George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession...
...Born in poverty but blessed with good looks and a raffish appeal, Kitty Warren went into prostitution and then brothel keeping. She proved to have a genius for recruiting talent and earning a steep profit, and grew to love the challenges of being a businesswoman. The role, the best Shaw ever wrote for a woman, centers on the scenes in which the mother tries to explain her life to a daughter who has always been sheltered from it, away at school. It brilliantly balances two themes: Warren's social-reformist contention that she was forced onto the streets by lack...
...theater is about ideas, but in this century George Bernard Shaw and his disciples have evolved an explicit Theater of Ideas, a vision of playwriting as a means of conducting urbane debates on great issues of the day. In these plays, beauty of language, depth of character and universal truths of human nature are subordinated to the stately combat of conflicting points of view, whether about feminism and prostitution in Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession (1902) or about the moral impact of colonialism in Tom Stoppard's Night and / Day (1978). The excitement comes from hearing important arguments stirringly...