The London Stage: Metaphysical Tinker Bell

"Somebody," George Bernard Shaw once said, "must take the Garden of Eden in hand and weed it properly." Obviously, the man that Shaw had in mind for the job was himself. In Back to Methuselah, his five-play cycle completed in 1921, he tried to settle once and for all the meaning of creation ac cording to the Shavian doctrine of creative evolution. Written when he was 65 and for once heedless of commercial practicalities, the drama is frankly intended as his philosophical summa. Unfortunately, as a new London production by Britain's National Theater makes clear, it is a...

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