Word: undershaft
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Andrew Undershaft (Philip Bosco) is a munitions magnate. Having renounced his family some 20 years before, he suddenly descends upon them. His wife Lady Britomart (Rachel Gurney) is the same socially ingratiating charmer she always was. Undershaft finds his son Stephen (Nicholas Walker) a simp of propriety, and to his dismay learns that his mettlesome daughter Barbara (Laurie Kennedy) has become a devoted minion of the Salvation Army. Her adoring shadow is Adolphus Cusins (Nicolas Surovy), an elitist teacher of Greek. When Undershaft taunts him as "Euripides" and Cusins flings back "Machiavelli," the tycoon is rather taken with the scholar...
...Undershaft vows to win daughter and suitor over. He visits Barbara's soup kitchen shelter and proves with an open checkbook that he can bribe the poor and buy the Army, which desolates Barbara. He then invites everyone to his munitions plant, where the workers dwell in a model city. From generation to generation the Undershaft inheritance can only go to a foundling, and Cusins qualifies. Moralistically sniffish, Cusins resists Undershaft's blandishments until the cagey old dialectician storms, "Dare you make war on war?" Cusins succumbs, vowing to arm the common man against "the lawyers, the doctors...
...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, Jon De Vries' scruffily belligerent ruffianism as one of the undeserving poor...