Word: supermans
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Time has not appreciably weakened the old spellbinder's grip. Man and Superman is 74 years old; yet playgoers at Canada's Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., are sitting through a 5½hour uncut version of the drama with evident delight. In part, this confirms their good taste, for the production is handsomely mounted, adroitly directed and formidably performed. But it may be due to the fact that these days Shaw fills a newly felt vacuum in the theater. In recent years there have been plenty of playwright absurdists, psychologists, realists or surrealists...
...casual abuse. All of this might qualify him as a complete cynic or skeptic, except that he was a true child of the 19th century, with an ineradicable faith in the evolutionary process. Taking his text from Nietzsche - "Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman" - Shaw found his equivalent for God in what he called the Life Force. He had a messianic faith that natural selection by the Life Force could enable man to produce an improved species of Homo sapiens, which presumably could comprehend the ultimate meaning and purpose of existence. That is his rationalizing...
Philosopher Clown. This apparently obdurate optimism may have been Shaw's final put-on. As machine-gun bursts of talk reduce argument after argument to rubble in Man and Superman, one becomes more and more aware of the self-divided ambiguity of Shaw's nature. Just as he was a celibate husband, he was a plutocratic socialist, a religious atheist, an irrational rationalist, a philosopher clown, a meditative activist and a sexually emancipatory puritan...
...individual integrity. It is not surprising that he portrays hell in this play as a kind of sumptuous nightclub of gourmandizing delights and heaven as a spartan gymnasium of progressive ar dor. Shaw speaks the language of militant betterment, and it is at the heart of Man and Superman...
However, in his role as director of a play that resembles a massive military cam paign as much as it does a drama, Van Bridge deserves the rank of four-star general. Everybody involved in Man and Superman merits praise without stint, for they have taken one of the masterworks of the 20th century theater and brought it to effulgent life...