Don Juan in Hell (by George Bernard Shaw; produced by Paul Gregory) is the scene from Shaw's Man and Superman that is regularly omitted on the stage. There are good reasons for omitting it: it is over two hours long, and it is merely tossed into the play. But there are far better reasons for performing it, at least by itself: it is not only the finest thing in Man and Superman, but the most brilliant talkfest, the most glittering dialectical floor show of modern times. And underneath all its riot of paradoxes it contains Playwright Shaw's most serious philosophical beliefs.
The current production, the first ever to reach Broadwav. is all the more noteworthy for its distinguished cast-Charles Laughton, Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke and Agnes Moorehead. Standing in evening clothes in front of mikes, they merely read the scene with an apparent absence of acting that conceals a great fund of it.
Shaw's Hell Scene follows-or rather postscripts-the classic Don Juan legend. Juan has been in Hell for some years; the Commander he slew has been longer in Heaven; and Dona Ana, the Commander's daughter whose seduction led to the slaying, has just died. She is indignant and aghast at having been consigned to the underworld; even the discovery that her father is moving there by choice does not appease her-better, as she sees it, to yawn in Heaven than revel in Hell. This, she is told, is not the fashionable view: Heaven is so dull that almost no one but the English can endure it. Hell, run by an urbane Devil who is as eager to please as a resort-hotel proprietor, is itself a kind of resort, full of animal enjoyments for no longer flesh-bound escapists.
But a highly Shavian Don Juan denounces Hell for just that reason: it is no proper place for man, for the one animal with brains. And what, sneers Satan, has man done with his precious brains?
Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately? I have; and I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself . . . The plague, the famine, the earthquake . . . were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more . . . destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, the electric chair . . .
Juan is even more Shavian about woman than about man. He insists that he kept running off not through boredom after possessing them, but through fear of being possessed. Shaw's Juan is nine parts Puritan to one part libertine, and for him Heaven means hard work, not golden harps. There the Life Force, that instrument of man's purposeful striving, will carry him higher & higher, convert him into superman. Shaw's Heaven, far from being a blissful goal, would seem a mere way station on the road to perfection-as his Life Force, magnificent so long as it is an evolutionary process, would seem to end as pure intelligence functioning in an utter void.