Major Barbara

Charles Laughton has done a rare thing--he has taken George Bernard Shaw seriously. Instead of trying to pretend that Shaw is a clever buffoon and that Major Barbara is a drawing-room farce with some incidental ideas, Laughton has staged the play as the impassioned sermon which it really is. His actors therefore do not bounce about the stage, they stand still whenever possible, and frequently they stand facing the audience directly. To make sure that the audience--next to the playwright himself, the most important character in a Shavian drama--is drawn right into the action, he cleverly arranges to have the finishing touches applied to the set with the curtain raised and one of the actors already onstage.

If the 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 one of the benches, while his opponent of the moment takes the other.

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 as head of the munitions firm, and he ultimately finds the man he wants in Barbara's fiance, a professor of Greek and a poet.

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.

Laughton's production, while it makes all these ideas tangible, gives the actors a peculiar kind of challenge. They must rely on their voices and Shaw's lines to project the matter of the play, rather than on movement or color or the suspense of a tight plot. Laughton handles his role most satisfactorily. Sometimes relaxed into an engaging slouch, he yet rouses himself to an oratorical fervor of Churchillian stature that all but sweeps away his opponents, including the audience. Glynis Johns' characterization of Major Barbara is much less successful. She possesses an interesting voice--a sort of throaty croak--but the playwright's subtle speech rhythms prove too difficult for her to handle, and her performance often collapses into singsong. Burgess, the professor, seems capable enough though, in view of his large experience, he too is a little disappointing. His character possesses two 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.

Despite the difficulty it gives some of the actors, this static way of staging Major Barbara is admirable. It is admirable because Laughton was willing to accept the play for what it is, at once a sermon and exhilirating theater. The director permitted Shaw to speak, enabling the old man to vindicate himself as a comedian--because the play is often very funny--and to prove it possible to make a play out of ideas. Perhaps the highest praise this production can get is that Shaw would have approved of it.