Word: scepticism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...science and society. He does not want to stick his neck out or get his feelings "mixed up" in things. He knows that strong feelings are as dangerous as disease, having read articles like "Emotion Can Give You a Running Nose." He is a pragmatist, a materialist, a "healthy sceptic," a "tough realist" -and Author Whitman warns-he is "as inadequate to our time as a bow-and-arrow on a 20th century battlefield...
Captain Shotover, portrayed by Philip Bourneuf, is easily the most competent acting job of the performance. Made up to resemble Shaw to an almost uncanny degree, he played the caustic, detached sceptic to perfection. The senile captain is the author's caricature of himself as a bitterly disappointed old man. In sharp contrast is Mazzini Dunn, an ineffective 19th century liberal, whose mealy-mouthed idealism is fit only for the parlor. Earl Montgomery played this part with skill and with a consistency notably lacking in many of the roles. Basil Langton's direction of this difficult play...
...There are many who, if they saw a rich man giving sixpence to a blind man, would at once explain it in terms of economic self-interest . . . Some sceptic [may ask], 'Ha, ha! but what is the U.S.A. getting out of it? ... He would look for the catch rather than for the faith. I will tell you what the U.S.A. is putting into it . . . Marshall Aid to the end of 1950 has cost every crude, rude, grasping, vulgar, selfish, racketeering American fifteen shillings ($2.10) a week out of his back pocket...