Last Plays by G.B.S.

BUOYANT BILLIONS, FARFETCHED FABLES & SHAKES VERSUS SHAV (138 pp.)--George Bernard Shaw--Dodd, Mead ($3).

The U.S. public was invited to a remarkable but somewhat melancholy show --the farewell appearance of the Daring Old Man on the Flying Trapeze, the one & only George Bernard Shaw, performing without a net (also juggling, card tricks, and monologues for all occasions).

Once, Shaw used to fly through the air with the greatest of ease, from drama to politics and back, followed by the spotlight he loved and accompanied by the rolling drums of Shavian wit--which sometimes would be mistaken for the thunder of truth. But in his last three plays, now published in the U.S.--Buoyant Billions, Farfetched Fables, Shakes Versus Shav--the great performer, by 93, was plainly coming to the end of his long career under the Big Top.

Buoyant Billions is a rambling charade about a young world-betterer who ends up bettering only himself by marrying a rich man's daughter. The daughter, who lives in a 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 slips. The play's major morals: 1) there is nothing wrong with marrying for money, 2) poor people are as tiresome as rich people, 3) all men thirst for God, whether he be called God or Hoochlipoochli.

Farfetched Fables, which reads like an outline of another Back to Methuselah, is Shaw's idea of what will happen after the world's present civilization is destroyed--not by the atom bomb (which Shaw thought would not be used), but by an improved version of an old-fashioned poison gas. As Shaw saw it, men will go onward & upward until they learn how to live on air, to get the same sensual pleasure from the pursuit of pure knowledge which their gross fathers got from the pursuit of other things, and finally to take leave of their bodies, becoming a species of intellectual angels. Then, a new race will develop, remarkably like the old, all set to start the whole business over again.

In Fables, Shaw has pulled himself together to add one more preface to his long and brilliant stock. It is entertaining, but not too entertaining to obscure the fact that perhaps the only things Shaw consistently believed in were himself and that lean deity, Creative Evolution, a sort of mixture of Lilith and Mrs. Sidney Webb. Apart from that he never made a joke which he did not sooner or later pass off as truth, and never stated a truth that he did not eventually turn into a joke.

It was a terribly lonely position for a man to be in, but his audience were not apt to notice it, because they, like Shaw, always had a wonderful time.

Perhaps the best fun among his last plays comes out of Shakes Versus Shav, a puppet play in which he restates his half-serious, half-mocking claim to being the Shakespeare of his own day. After Shakes and Shav have knocked each other down, argued about Sir Walter Scott and debated the relative merits of their own plays ("Couldst thou write King Lear?"

("Couldst thou have written Heartbreak House?"), Shav concludes:

. . . Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

We puppets shall replay our scene.

Meanwhile, Immortal William dead and turned to clay

May stop a hole to keep the wind away. Oh that that earth which kept the world in awe

Should patch a wall t'expel the winter's flaw!

SHAKES. These words are mine, not thine.

SHAV. Peace, jealous Bard.

We both are mortal. For a moment suffer

My glimmering light to shine.

A light appears between them.

SHAKES. Out, out brief candle! [He puffs it out.]

Darkness. The play ends.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.