Word: undershaft
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...helps that this is one of Shaw's finer plays. While Barbara Undershaft (Jane Alexander), who does the Christian God's goodly work among the poor, owns the play's title, it is her munitions tycoon of a father, Andrew (Lee Richardson), wielding the twin thunderbolts of "money and gunpowder," who is the capitalistic Zeus. Shaw himself had a Caesar complex. He was fascinated by absolute power and that explained his deplorable temporary enthusiasms for Hitler and Stalin. But his Undershaft is of another breed. This merchant of death is also an apostle of life...
William Ritman has ingeniously solved the problem of whisking us from Lady Brit's lovely house, with its profusion of potted plants, to the makeshift Army shelter and, later, to Undershaft's foundry, with its gigantic experimental cannon. And Jane Greenwood has provided appropriate Edwardian costumes...
...Shaw so loved to do, he here took a plausible intellectual position, and proceeded to push it to an outrageous extreme in order to scandalize his audience, while at the same time treating it to a devastating display of wit. Shaw's mouthpiece is Andrew Undershaft, a munitions manufacturer, who holds that mankind's worst crime is poverty, that punishment should be abolished, and that the only two things necessary for salvation are money and gunpowder. Opposed to him is his daughter, a major in the Salvation Army, whose wrestling of conscience are the heart of the play...
Director Edwin Sherin has elicited a remarkable set of performances from his fourteen main characters, with only two exceptions. Lee Richardson's Undershaft is best of all-forceful and unshakeable from start to finish. (And he really plays the prescribed tune from Doninetti's Lucia on a trombone). Lady Brit is his separated wife, a woman given to bossing and tossing off epigrams--clearly modeled on Lady Bracknell in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, written a decade earlier. Jan Miner, in a performance that brings to mind Jessica Tandy, is doing in this role far and away...
...have to voice my annoyance at the director's unwillingness to trust Shaw's text. For some reason he felt it advisable to alter a number of phrases and to make some substantial cuts in the latter portion of the script. Gone are the remarks about Undershaft's Jewish partner Lasarus; gone are some delectable barbs aimed at Parliament; gone is Adolphus's philosophizing about power. Surely, Mr. Sheria, in a performance that runs two hours and twenty minutes, we could hold our seats for ten minutes more. But thanks for doing so well with what you consented to give...