Word: undershaft
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...play is a sermon, however, it preaches by demonstrating. Just as Shaw himself debates with the audience, so the play's principal character, Andrew Undershaft, engages in a series of verbal duels with the rest of the cast. Laughton and his designer, Donald Oenslager, chose to underline this element of Shaw's way of constructing the play by making the main feature of the set two identical benches, placed on opposite sides of the stage and remaining fixed even when the scene shifts to a different location. Laughton, playing the part of Undershaft, almost invariably sits on or stands near...
This arrangement, while sometimes visually static, has the advantage of putting the production's emphasis on the argument, where it belongs. The argument itself, partly because of Shaw's extraordinary ability to show both points of view, is as complicated as the plot around which it revolves is simple. Undershaft, a millionaire arms manufacturer, whose religion consists of the belief that poverty is the only sin, converts his daughter Barbara, a major in the Salvation Army, to his position by simply showing her that the Army can be bought. He is also looking for a successor to his position...
While such subjects as religion and capitalism are discussed at length, the real issue resolves itself into a battle of realism vs. idealism. Undershaft holds, with Shaw, that a man may achieve any sort of moral stature only by grappling with the facts of his existence, such as poverty. He shows up Barbara's religion as a false kind of idealism, a romantic if pleasant evasion of the facts of life...
...sides: poet and, ultimately, shrewd businessman. The merchant is present in his performance from the beginning, but somehow the role never grows quite large enough. The veteran actress Cornelia Otis Skinner, on the other hand, adds one more to her long list of impressive performances in the part of Undershaft's rather stupid, tradition-bound and yet charming wife...
...jungle and enchants alligators and snakes by playing a saxophone, could have been a great Shaw character had she occurred to the master half a century earlier. The father has been a great Shaw character already-he is a reincarnation of the jovial merchant of death, Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara, with less wit and more money (he is a billionaire instead of a millionaire). Most of the famed Shavian paradoxes have been reduced to formula; they sound as if they had been turned out by one of Harvard's giant calculators after it had digested the properly punched...