"Shavings." Three One-Act Comedies by Bernard Shaw. (St. Martin's.) HERE,
in one bill, is Shaw the dramatist in three brief bouts with Shaw the polymath ; and the compactness of the one-act form ensures, at least in two of them, that the dramatist prevails. All three agree to be dewdrops from the lion's mane ; the glitter and refreshment of one has evaporated, but the others 1.re still catching the sun and shining with cool and righteous mischief. The intending spectator would do well to come tardily, for the opening item, The Man of Destiny, has gone lame with time, and is not, in this revival, particularly well mounteda This is Shaw's first attempt at a " vehicle " ; how testy, how lamentably flustered he was when Ellen Terry praised it faintly, and Irving declined to act in it ! Mr. Karel Stepanek's Napoleon, a growling peasant, barbarously histrionic, fatally lacks Irving's rapt magnetism ; and Miss Rosamund John's Strange Lady is a gauche cowslip where Ellen Terry would have nourished her into a strong, firm rose. But the actors are not alone at fault. Shaw chose to fill his play with Mediterranean folk, whom he was never able to comprehend or delineate, devoting himself instead to demonstrating how dotingly English even the most free-thinking continental becomes in times of stress—i.e., when faced with the mysterious devil, woman. The conversational war of nerves between Napoleon and the girl who has purloined his despatches is conducted entirely,
and with most unlikely subtlety, on the level of ethical principles ; and when, at the end, the confounded general begins his lengthy tirade against the English, scathingly accusing them of doing everything on principle, one is forced to comment, with that eccen- tric and perceptive critic Maurice Boissard: "Les personnages de U. Shaw son( sous Anglais, uniquement Anglais, rien qu'Anglais." Shaw's Napoleon is a creditable debater ; but the enigma of great- ness, flushed and braided with triumph, has departed from him. Shaw could never see a giant foursquare and whole as Ibsen, his tutor, could ; in these highest reaches of his business he must remain, once more to quote Boissard, " un Ibsen bien diminue. un Ibsen grimacant, un peu clown." The rest of the evening is Shaw at his best, routing all corners on his home ground, England and the contradictory English. The Dark Lady of the Sonnets is a gymnasium display of rhetorical fun ; a bracing rhapsody in which Shaw genuflects, vicariously, to
his oldest enemy—vicariously, since Shaw's lively Shakespeare retains all the nonchalant egotism of his creator. Miss Ellen Pollock (who directed the whole bill) and Mr. Griffith Jones attack the play in energetic league ; their well-judged verve left it and us glowing.
A dashingly shrewd impression of Mr. Shaw at forty, barbed and bearded, is given by Mr. Jones in the last of the three plays, The Village Wooing. He and Miss John (who now plunges in with Doric vigour) manage to make the tale of a querulous author wooed by a hoyden seem seductive as well as witty ; such is Mr. Jones's charm that the forbidding climax, in which the hero, sur- rendering, offers his beloved what Higgins offered Eliza—not " secondhand gratification of the senses," but the athletic com- munion of spirit—produces an effect of lyric abandon ; a sort of careful rapture. Whereupon Miss John makes for the telephone, warning the vicar to put up the banns. Unconsciously summarising Shaw's method, she spells the word out: " B for beauty, A for audacity, two Ns for nonsense—and S for singing." For these two players have the art to make even his flattest stichomythia sound like the tidy to-and-fro of Mozartian recitative. KEN TYNAN.
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