Blood and Fire

By T.E Kalem

MAJOR BARBARA by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw is a Vesuvius of eloquent rhetoric. But his ideas are borrowed, chiefly from Nietzsche, Ibsen, Marx, Darwin, Wagner and William Blake. A grand proselytizer, he was to those men what St. Paul was to Christ.

Though a professed atheist, Shaw was possessed by an evangelical passion. He was convinced that if spiritual power could be harnessed to material power, man would be transformed into a higher order of being. That is at the core of Major Barbara, which is being given a top-notch revival at Manhattan's Circle in the Square Theater. The motto of the Salvation Army is "Blood and Fire." Shaw paradoxically translates this into "Money and Gunpowder."

Andrew Undershaft (Philip Bosco) is a munitions magnate. Having renounced his family some 20 years before, he suddenly descends upon them. His wife Lady Britomart (Rachel Gurney) is the same socially ingratiating charmer she always was. Undershaft finds his son Stephen (Nicholas Walker) a simp of propriety, and to his dismay learns that his mettlesome daughter Barbara (Laurie Kennedy) has become a devoted minion of the Salvation Army. Her adoring shadow is Adolphus Cusins (Nicolas Surovy), an elitist teacher of Greek. When Undershaft taunts him as "Euripides" and Cusins flings back "Machiavelli," the tycoon is rather taken with the scholar.

Undershaft vows to win daughter and suitor over. He visits Barbara's soup kitchen shelter and proves with an open checkbook that he can bribe the poor and buy the Army, which desolates Barbara. He then invites everyone to his munitions plant, where the workers dwell in a model city. From generation to generation the Undershaft inheritance can only go to a foundling, and Cusins qualifies. Moralistically sniffish, Cusins resists Undershaft's blandishments until the cagey old dialectician storms, "Dare you make war on war?" Cusins succumbs, vowing to arm the common man against "the lawyers, the doctors, the literary men, the politicians, who, once in authority, are more disastrous and tyrannical than all the fools, rascals and impostors."

If Major Barbara has a weakness it lies in Shaw's touching belief in the social potency of the seemingly formidable mechanisms of power. Power, like all things human, is fragile. One glimpse of the ruins of all the great European civilizations ought to have taught Shaw that. Revivals, too, may prove fragile. This one shows tensile strength. Director Stephen Porter always holds up a steady mirror to a playwright's inner vision, never more precisely than in Major Barbara. His cast is superb--Bosco's polished diabolism as Undershaft, Kennedy's valiantly wounded purity as Barbara, Jon De Vries' scruffily belligerent ruffianism as one of the undeserving poor.

The evening is a headlong delight, and a special exhilaration arises from Shaw's gift for wittily unlocking treasures of the mind with the sly, sensitive touch of a safecracker.

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