Word: passionately
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...tale, all the supporting roles are expertly handled, especially the curious roster of people living in the Count's ancestral chateau: the Count's morphine-addicted mother (Bette Davis), who keeps to her bed and board (chess); his neurotic wife (Irene Worth); his young daughter (Annabel Bartlett) with a passion for the more morbid aspects of hagiolatry...
...close to it; and Helena is the heroine. She is a noble, strong-willed personage, "the most virtuous gentlewoman that ever Nature had praise for creating." But, like the great tragic protagonists, she has a serious flaw of character: the lofty quality of Love becomes in her the lowly passion for Sex. And to achieve her goal, which is a perfectly legitimate one, she resorts to a long concatenation of sins, big and small, on the theory--expressed in the play's title--that the end justifies the means. Through this policy, Helena's nobility and honor are tarnished...
...theatre's immemorial sin against the writer. As a result, not only was the audience deprived of the exciting display of Betti's dialectical fireworks, but the emotional climaxes which are in the script largely failed to come off because the air was already so thickly clogged with gratuitous passion...
...descendant John Tanner is portrayed as a social agitator and the author of The Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion, which Shaw thoughtfully appends to the published edition of the play. In his own person, Tanner enunciates Shavian doctrine on such sublunary matters as sex, social convention, and moral passion. As Don Juan in the hell scene he discourses with equal brilliance on the Life Force, the nature of Nature, and the whole duty of man, arguing against the Devil's hedonistic creed of "love and beauty" in favor of an eterntiy of energetic striving to serve, in contemplation...
...than the excitable little man he gives us. The "Olympian majesty" specified by Shaw is missing; Tanner's magnificent brashness becomes mere cheek. Mr. Morse can lay down doctrine with considerable brio, but his John Tanner never seems committed to his ideas with any great intensity of the "moral passion" he talks about. It becomes a matter of little significance that the revolutionary activities of this Tanner should be circumscribed by marriage. (His air of frivolity vanishes during the hell scene, but here his attempt at the aristocratic chill becoming to Don Juan degenerates sometimes into mere posturing...