Word: undershafts
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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...
...underwrite these marriages, Andrew is most concerned that Barbara should be squandering her high passion on the Salvation Army. He agrees to see her shelter if she and Cusins will visit his cannon works. At the shelter, we meet sycophantic derelicts, ruffians and pitiably broken men. But it is Undershaft who nonchalantly breaks Barbara's heart, and opens her eyes. He signs a check for ?5,000, matching a sum from a notorious distiller named Bodger, so that the Salvation Army shelters may stay open. When the Army's general accepts the money, Barbara breaks down, sobbing, "Drunkenness...
...cold Shavian in Undershaft would say that only illusion has deserted her. He has previously expressed his creed to Cusins: "Have you ever been in love with Poverty, like St. Francis? Have you ever been in love with Dirt, like St. Simeon? Have you ever been in love with disease and suffering, like our nurses and philanthropists? ... I have been a common man and a poor man; and it has no romance for me." At the arms plant, with disconcerting alacrity, Barbara and Cusins accept the Undershaft inheritance, saying they plan to "make...