Word: shavian
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...bearded windbag of Fabian socialism, is sponsoring a debate premised on the heretical idea that its patron dramatist should be outranked as a playwright by his colleague Harley Granville Barker. Although recalled chiefly as producer (The Doctor's Dilemma), director (Major Barbara) or actor (Man and Superman) of many Shavian debuts, Granville Barker is being ballyhooed by Shaw Festival artistic director Christopher Newton as "maybe the last undiscovered great playwright...
...individual, combining expected elements of the European mainstream with personal tastes that can appear willful or mandatory." He was also a witty and truthful art critic, whose essays and journalism, collected in 1947 by Osbert Sitwell under the title A Free House!, are never dull and often possess a Shavian energy. Courageous to the point of eccentricity, Sickert always followed his own nose...
...characters are interpreted with Shavian wit and style. Mr. Tarleton is especially striking. He is played by Jeremy Geidt, who exudes to perfection the jolly vulgarity of a man who kisses his wife too loudly, a man who drops his "h"'s and speaks with the accent of a true-blue Cockney. He has the reverence for learning of a man whose own education has been rudimentary, and he gleefully refers to Ibsen, Walt Whitman and Kipling with would be casualty. Unashamedly unfaithful to his wife, he has no qualms about attempting to seduce the dashing Polish aviatrix...
...SHAKESPEAREAN ACTORS, playwright Richard Nelson slyly suggests parallels to our era's battles over supposed Eurocentric cultural imperialism. The play's underlying debate: Is art universal, or does it belong exclusively to its nation of origin? Nelson touches on these matters in glittering moments rather than digging in with Shavian relentlessness. He focuses on three actors: William Charles Macready (Brian Bedford), the English Macbeth, a man with no life save work and drinking; Edwin Forrest (Victor Garber), the American Macbeth, a compulsive seducer; and John Ryder (Zeljko Ivanek), dogsbody to Macready and fill-in Macduff for Forrest, who comes alive...
...Jack the Ripper as an 'independent genius' who by 'private enterprise' had succeeded where socialism failed in getting the press to take some sympathetic interest in the conditions of London's East End." Recalling Shaw's epistolary romance with actress Ellen Terry, he quotes a vintage bit of Shavian grumping: "Let those who may complain that it was all on paper remember that only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love." Describing the tergiversations that led up to the marriage, Holroyd trenchantly observes, "Politically, Shaw had put his faith in the power...