Word: undershaft
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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...
...Unashamed." In Major Barbara, characterizing the Undershaft family, Shaw drew a composite portrait of Europe's great munitions makers. After explaining the armorers' creed-"To give arms to all men who offer an honest price"-he assigned them as a device, the one word "Unashamed." The word implies at least some contemplation of a moral dilemma. But there is little evidence that the Krupps and people like them ever really considered the possibility of personal guilt. In the best 19th century patriotic tradition, the Krupps-like weapons makers all over Europe-always worked with their own government...
Still, with imaginative direction he might have squeaked by an inadequate set. He tried, in fact, to make the power of his cast's performance overcome the limits of his theatre, but he overshot his mark. His Andrew Undershaft, the devilish millionaire, should be a calm, self-assured, and enchanting British man of business. With Ronald Bishop as Undershaft, Criss creates a tasteless cross between an absent-minded lecher and a greasy, loudmouthed American tycoon. Undershaft should be civilized; Criss makes him vulgar. He should be easy, going; but in this version he thunders every other word...