MAN AND SUPERMAN
by BERNARD SHAW
As a drama critic, George Bernard Shaw demolished most of the plays he saw; as a dramatist, he demolished most of society as he saw it. In his own eyes, Shaw was the anointed saint of iconoclasm, pursuing his vocation like a holy terrorist and treating his audience as his congregation. Though they rarely went forth and practiced what he preached, they could not resist the magnetic sweep of his eloquence and his wickedly amusing way with words.
Time has not appreciably weakened the old spellbinder's grip. Man and Superman is 74 years old; yet playgoers at Canada's Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., are sitting through a 5½hour uncut version of the drama with evident delight. In part, this confirms their good taste, for the production is handsomely mounted, adroitly directed and formidably performed. But it may be due to the fact that these days Shaw fills a newly felt vacuum in the theater. In recent years there have been plenty of playwright absurdists, psychologists, realists or surrealists. But when it came to the drama of ideas or a pure pyrotechnic display of language, there was only Tom Stoppard. And Stoppard is a pussycat compared with that tiger named Bernard Shaw. like his disciple Bertolt Brecht, Shaw regarded plot as the sentimental opiate of the middle-class theatergoer. In Man and Superman, he simply inverts the boy-meets-girl formula: woman wants man, man runs for his bachelor life, woman gets man. As it happens, the man, Jack Tanner (Ian Richardson), is an incendiary charmer with a blowtorch for a tongue. He yearns to puncture all the hypocritical balloons of civilized life. As for the woman, Ann Whitefield (Carole Shelley), she is a spiritedly fetching minx and a sly enchantress of guile to whom any man might feel lucky to surrender.
Decorous sexual pursuit, though, is merely an excuse for more than the usual typhoon of Shavian ideas, the torrential flow of blindingly bright words. Shaw steadily sounds his pet themes: the chicanery of politics, the corruptive power of money, the degrading stench of poverty, the servile dependencies of marriage and family, the charlatanism of medicine, the fossilization of learning, the tyranny of the state, the stupidity of the military and the bigoted, sanctimonious zeal of the church. And ever and always, the eternal humbuggery of the English, used and overused by Shaw for comic relief and casual abuse. All of this might qualify him as a complete cynic or skeptic, except that he was a true child of the 19th century, with an ineradicable faith in the evolutionary process. Taking his text from Nietzsche — "Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman" — Shaw found his equivalent for God in what he called the Life Force. He had a messianic faith that natural selection by the Life Force could enable man to produce an improved species of Homo sapiens, which presumably could comprehend the ultimate meaning and purpose of existence. That is his rationalizing sanction of the mat ing of Jack Tanner and Ann Whitefield. They might produce a brainy superbaby.