Royal George Theatre ghost light. Photo by Christopher Wahl (2016).
Downloadable Resources and Links
Program for BUOYANT BILLIONS, concert reading, adaptation by Christopher Wixson
Buoyant Billons programme.pdf | |
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Files and links associated with talks
Reynolds slides: YouTube link
Reynolds talk_Village Wooing bibliography | |
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Reynolds talk_Ong essay.pdf | |
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Abstracts
PANEL 1: Intercultural Shaw
Lawrence Switzky, "Everybody's India: Why Not's Mahabharata Pro and Contra Shaw" [THIS PRESENTATION IS POSTPONED]
Shaw, a vocal champion of Indian independence since at least 1914, met Mohandas Gandhi (“the second greatest man in the world!”) in 1931, and had a transformative encounter with Jainist religious sculptures at the Elephanta Caves during his visit to Bombay in 1933. His enthusiasm for Gandhi’s realist politics and religious devotion, for what he perceived as the variety and unity of Hinduism, and his vision of a South Asian superpower that would, by force of sheer numbers and spiritual enlightenment, determine the future course of the British Empire, resonate through Back to Methuselah, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, and the film treatment he wrote for Major Barbara (in 1940).
In 2020, Shaw will encounter India again—through Why Not Theatre’s six-hour version of the Sanskrit epic poem Mahabharata, premiering at the Shaw Festival Theatre in August and created and performed by members of the Indian diaspora. This is an excellent occasion to reassess Shaw’s Indian affinities, and particularly his repeated stance that universal religious and ethical concerns override specific cultural differences. One might interpret Peter Brook’s “internationalist” version of Mahabharata (1985), the most readily available theatrical version of this often-performed story cycle for Western audiences, as a Shavian staging.
Over the past two years, Toronto Star theatre critic Karen Fricker and I have observed and commented on rehearsals, scripts, and workshop performances of the Why Not Mahabharata in Toronto and Niagara-on-the-Lake. Based on what we’ve seen and discussed, I want to ask how Shaw’s positions on India both accord with Why Not’s appeal to diverse audiences who are asked to decide the fate of the world after a catastrophe and are at odds with Why Not’s presentation of Mahabharata through particular South Asian cultural forms (martial arts, kathak dance, shadow puppets) and the mediated contexts in which South Asians encounter the story (VHS tapes, comic books, aunties who present individual stories as moral lessons over meals). In short, I propose that Why Not’s Mahabharata engages in a respectful but strident debate with Shaw’s views on India and on cultural alterity, adopting some aspects but revising others, and urging us to decolonize Shaw and some of the assumptions of the Festival that bears his name.
R. A. F. Ajith, "G. B. Shaw's Relevance in Modern Tamil Theatre"
Shaw is considered to be the greatest dramatist of the 20th century English theatre. Apart from being a dramatist he is a novelist, a socialist, a critic, a philosopher, a realist, an economist, an orator, an expert in music and above all a humanist who believed that one cannot expect a decent behavior from a man when he is hungry and that is why he advocates a society based on economic equality. Hence, Shaw is the confluence of all these characteristics and he flows smoothly and swiftly through various cultures, languages and so naturally he transcends all national limits. He is considered as a natural phenomenon that has influenced not only the English stage but his influence and relevance in the Tamil literature and the modern Tamil theatre is immense. This presentation showcases how he is relevant even today and continues to influence modern Tamil dramatists.
It was Shaw who first wrote about the evils of the contemporary social and religious institutions and challenged them and tried to make reforms through his plays. Similarly, in the Tamil theatre politicians and dramatists like Annadurai who has held office as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost State of India and M. Karunanidhi who has succeeded him. One more notable personality who is influenced by Shaw is M. Varadarajan, a novelist, a dramatist, an educationist, a literary critic and a Tamil literary historian who later became the Vice-Chancellor of the prestigious Madurai Kamaraj University in Tamil Nadu.
As it is said that Shaw employed his characters to carry his own ideas it is true that Annadurai and Karunanithi succeeded in employing this Shavian technique in their Tamil dramas. Even though the periods in which all these three playwrights lived were different, the societies and their problems were similar, and the Shavian themes were so relevant that the two Tamil playwrights could use them as well in their Tamil plays. Another main unifying point of these three men is ‘man’ and God was secondary to them or they least bothered about the concept of God. They are all socialists and they believed strongly that only a society based on economy can emancipate the oppressed, underprivileged and the women of their respective times. They spent their entire lives in advocating this and tried tirelessly to bring this social change. Both Annadurai and Karunanidhi have confessed in their speeches and writings that the Shavian influence and relevance in them were noteworthy.
On the other hand Varadarajan in whose life the influence of Shaw was also very significant his relevance did not limit itself with his plays only. A real humanist like Shaw, he lived a modest and simple life and was highly ethical. His writings are conditioned by Shavian thoughts and ideas. Most of the qualities of Shaw appreciated by Varadarajan are part of himself. Both these writers even while writing were conscious of the problems of the societies in which they lived. And it is this aspect which made Varadarajan to have drawn towards Shaw more than any other writer.
The three Tamil playwrights taken for this study share some similarities in common and they have many differences too. But the most significant converging point they arrive at is Shaw and Shavian ideas only. English drama owes itself to Shaw for changing the epic themes into contemporary social problems and it is this aspect which remains as a major influence of Shaw in Tamil literature. And Shaw is even now relevant to the Tamil playwrights of this day which will be the topic of future researches.
Kay Li, "Cultural Translation of Colours in The Devil's Disciple"
The aim of this paper is to examine how the new cultural colour recognition application on IBM Cloud Computing Platform, built by our Sagittarius Literature Digitizing Project, reveals cultural translations of Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple in films, theatre productions and publications. I will show how the colours and objects on these images, analysed by the artificial intelligence in the app, uncover new interpretations of Shaw’s play.
With funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and Canadian Heritage, the Sagittarius research team embarked on a project with the Shaw Festival, the International Shaw Society, school boards and IBM Canada to examine arts and artists in the digital age. We arrive at the need to build a brand new application on cultural colour recognition on IBM cloud computing platform, which has been piloted with proven success. Colours are strategies, that can be strategically used in numerous contexts, such as branding, product design, fashion, lifestyle, marketing, not to mention colour psychology. Colours also have cultural significance, appealing to different cultures in different ways because of the different cultural interpretations of colours. Our new IBM cultural colour recognition app analyses the cultural significance of colours by artificial intelligence.
In this study, we input images related to Shaw’s Devil’s Disciple, ranging from theatre and film posters, book cover, images from theatre productions and films, online homepages, into the IBM cultural colour recognition app. The app breaks down the images into not only its colour components, but also into the objects populating the images. I will show how such colours correspond to the context of the productions and publications, as well as the intentions behind.
The visual images in the film and theatre posters, book covers, images from theatre productions and films, and online homepages are often the first encounter between Shaw’s play and the prospective audience and reader. As means to attract them to The Devil’s Disciple, the visual images are often cultural translations of Shaw’s play corresponding to the contexts of the productions. With the visual recognition app, we can quantify such cultural translations in terms of colours and objects. The app, functioning like an informed non-expert audience and reader, will reveal what the latter are guided to expect when they watch or read the play. The app shows the cultural indexes that act as keys to Shaw’s play under different contexts of productions. It also shows the cultural translations of The Devil’s Disciple captured in the visual images, and the likelihood of attracting people from different backgrounds to the productions.
Ultimately, we hope the cultural colour recognition app can be a useful index to show objectively how productions of Shaw’s plays should consider the cultural significance of colours, especially when they are going global in the connected world.
PANEL 2: The Devil's Disciple
Brigitte Bogar, "The Operatic Devil: Operas Based on Shaw's The Devil's Disciple"
The Devil's Disciple by George Bernard Shaw is also the title of an operatic version by Joyce Barthelson that premiered in 1977 at the Highlands School in White Plains. It is the first opera based on this play written in 1975 – but only one year later in 1976 another opera by Paul Whear is listed as having been composed. These are two earliest American operas to be based on a play by Shaw, and both are based on The Devil’s Disciple: this begs the question, why did neither of them make it into the general repertoire? This paper will examine the struggles of converting Shaw’ plays into an opera, and consider why the only perceived successful composer of Shavian opera is Philip Hagemann, who has composed no fewer than six operas based on Shaw’s plays. Hardly any research has been done and very little has been written on operas based on Shaw’s works, and I would go as far as to say that we are all unaware of the two works based on The Devil’s Disciple. Given the musical nature of Shaw’s works, it is important to document the existence of operas and other musical adaptations of Shaw.
James Armstrong, "The Devil's Actress: Shaw's Search for the Anti-Bernhardt"
Bernard Shaw frequently wrote to actresses that they should look to Sarah Bernhardt as a perfect example of how not to do things. He told Janet Achurch that Bernhardt had "no brains," complained to Ellen Terry that the Divine Sarah was "a worn out hack tragedienne," and warned Florence Farr that he was made sick by "Sarah Bernhardt's abominable 'golden voice'." Over and over again, Shaw espoused an anti-Bernhardtian style of acting that privileged intellect over emotion. In the 1890s, Bernhardt was appearing in a variety of emotional potboilers, and this influenced Shaw's writing during that period, as he sought to create roles that could do the opposite of what Bernhardt had done. With Judith Anderson, the heroine of The Devil's Disciple, Shaw constructed a role for an anti-Bernhardt, an actress who could avoid what he saw as the sentimental pitfalls and romantic excesses of conventional acting.
This paper will look specifically at Bernhardt's portrayal of Magda, the heroine of Hermann Sudermann's play Heimat, and how her performance of the role influenced the writing of The Devil's Disciple. Shaw reviewed Bernhardt's performance in Heimat in 1895, the year before he began writing The Devil's Disciple. He also got to judge her portrayal of the character against that of Eleonora Duse, who appeared in London in the same role shortly after Bernhardt's appearance, inviting audiences to make an explicit comparison between the two actresses. "The contrast between the two Magdas is as extreme as any contrast could possibly be between artists," Shaw wrote. Though he called Bernhardt "beautiful with the beauty of her school" he also found her "entirely inhuman and incredible" in the role. In Duse, on the other hand, he found a "high quality which marks off humanity from the animals."
The character of Judith reaches to express a genuine humanity that belies Shaw's description of the piece as a mere "melodrama" as indicated in the play's subtitle. Rejecting the conventions enshrined by Bernhardt's acting, Shaw sought to create a role that could do more than just bring forth what he derisively called "a liberal pennyworth of sensation" in the audience. Though he did not intend the role of Judith for Duse specifically, he did want to create a part for "an actress who understood the author" as Duse had in Heimat. By writing for a different style of acting than was usually seen on the London stage, Shaw created a character that could be relished by performers for generations to come. He also devilishly sabotaged the artful but artificial acting style that had been made famous by Bernhardt.
John McInerney, "The Devil's Disciple: Characters in Discovery"
This paper focuses on the major characters in the play, Mrs. Dudgeon, Judith Anderson, Richard Dudgeon, General Burgoyne, and Anthony Anderson, as circumstances they did not expect lead them into crisis situations during which they discover who they really are: what they believe, what they will do, and what they will not do. In the process, they validate Fintan O’Toole’s contention that the true characters of the people Shaw creates are not set at birth, or sculpted by their upbringing; instead, characters are discovered in their responses to the events they encounter, and those responses can often surprise themselves. Indeed, we will see those responses range from bitter despair to a radical change of career. And all the discoveries of these characters demonstrate again that Shaw’s characters are not just mouthpieces for his opinions; they are individuals as three dimensional as any of us.
Christopher Wixson, "Buoyant Burgoyne: Bernard Shaw, The Devil's Disciple, and No Manners Comedy"
The Devil’s Disciple’s most fantastical incident is the appearance in act three of British General John Burgoyne. The character materializes quite far from his campaign headquarters in Quebec so that, as Shaw wrote to Ellen Terry, Dick Dudgeon can prove “superior to gentility---that is, to the whole ideal of modern society.” The playwright though is not content to render Burgoyne a mere straw gentleman and instead, informed by E. B. DeFonblanque’s 1876 biography, endows him with prescient foresight and transfigures him into an ardent critic of the various structures of authority and the conspiracy of privilege he represents. Most scholars writing about The Devil’s Disciple have taken their cue from GBS’s “Notes” --- considering the character mainly with regard to its namesake’s significance in British military history. This essay ponders its emblematic resonance when we consider Burgoyne an equally prominent figure at a key moment in British theatre history.
As a surprisingly successful, respected, and high-profile playwright in the 1770s and 1780s, Burgoyne collaborated with both David Garrick and Richard Brinsley Sheridan at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane as part of an effort to restore Restoration-style wit to its proper role in English comedy, pushing back against the sentimental form that had dominated the stage for most of the century as a corrective to its predecessor’s licentiousness. Burgoyne achieved such notoriety that Horace Walpole prophesied his sparkling comedies would endure long after his “battles and speeches [are] forgotten” and ultimately displace his tarnished Saratoga legacy. Viewed from this angle, Shaw’s characterization of Burgoyne in The Devil’s Disciple indexes his ambivalent relationship to the tradition of manners comedy, and his weaponizing of a gentleman’s wit in the service of systemic critique rehearses his refinishings of the genre --- from The Philanderer (1893) to Buoyant Billions (1949) --- in intertextual dialogue with the work of its most brilliant purveyors on the modern British stage, St. John Hankin and Noël Coward.
PANEL 3: Shaw and Gender
Tanner Sebastian, "'Goodbye, Home': Queer Domesticity in The Devil's Disciple"
How does queerness affect the space of a home, and how does a queered home affect its occupants? In this paper, I work through these questions while examining Bernard Shaw’s melodrama The Devil’s Disciple. I argue that Richard Dudgeon’s anti-Puritan and anti-British sentiments queer him as a character (queer in the sense of non-normative), and his queerness alters both the Dudgeon and the Anderson households. In both households, female characters find the queering of their space to be liberating by granting them agency to speak and act. Essie, Richard’s illegitimate cousin, finds safety in Richard’s newly acquired home, queered through Richard casting out his Puritanical family and declaring the space a home for the Devil. Richard grants Essie permission to live in his home if she desires and allows her to cry as she desires. Free from the shame the rest of the Dudgeon family forces onto her for her illegitimacy, Essie finds liberation and familial love in Richard’s queer home.
Similarly, Judith Anderson escapes shame to embrace love and agency after Richard queers her home. By pretending to be Judith’s husband in order to save her real husband from arrest, Richard creates a relationship that resembles polyandry between himself, Judith, and her husband Anthony. This faux polyandry gives Judith permission to defy her husband Anthony and to act on her own free will to save Richard. Queer domesticity, then, has liberating potential regarding shame.
Laurie J. Wolf, "Gender Disparity in The Devil's Disciple"
Issues of gender and theatrical space are predominant concerns within the production of nineteenth-century melodrama. Notions of gender and sexuality, and the appropriate spheres within which each existed were embedded in Victorian consciousness, and manifested themselves throughout dramatic texts. Playwrights of nineteenth-century melodrama were concerned with stage pictures, and the specific roles assigned to women and men. At the most fundamental level, particular constructions of ‘womanness’ defined the quality of being a ‘man,’ so that the natural identification of sexuality and desire with the feminine allowed the social and political construction of masculinity. From a relatively early juncture in his career, Bernard Shaw came to be known as something of a champion for women’s rights. Certainly, by Victorian standards, many of his heroines, such as Candida, Saint Joan, Vivie Warren and Ann Whitefield were progressive, and in many cases their ideals and determination seemed to elevate them above their male counterparts. In addition, these characters not only offered actresses an alternative to traditional roles, but they also provided a new role model for thousands of Victorian women. In his ‘The Quintessence of Ibsenism’ in 1891, he wrote: "Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous, I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under the pretense that she likes it ... if we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot because they have never seen one anywhere else." This is a writer who appears to be in touch with the needs and desires of women. He was not a feminist, in the twenty-first century understanding of the term, but he did romanticize (and frequently empathize) with women.
I plan to question Shaw’s intentions for the women (Mrs. Dudgeon, Essie and Judith) in The Devil’s Disciple, using examples from his own oeuvre. For a writer who took pride in disrupting expectations and standards of his day, Shaw remained faithful to the traditional female melodramatic stereotypes. Despite the many subversions that are part of the textual dramaturgy of this play, the three women were constructed by an unyielding patriarchal ideology. Did Mr. Shaw let his characters down?
Wan Jin, "In and Out of the Garden: Gendered Landscapes in Mrs. Warren's Profession"
In a large number of plays, Shaw prescribed detailed information about the settings, especially geographical settings for the directions and performances. J. Ellen Gainor (1991) in Shaw’s Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender exemplified how dressing could be used by Shaw’s heroines to perform singular gender identity. This theory of performative gender identity, together with Tony Stafford’s recent monograph Shaw’s Settings: Gardens and Libraries, invites an understanding of Shaw’s dramatic landscapes through the lens of feminist theory. How does Shaw’s taking female experience as paradigmatic inject more meaning to his landscape descriptions? How do his female characters take advantage of discursive system concerning this gendered landscape to perform and subvert gender identity or to empower themselves? The term “landscape” is used here instead of scenery or setting because landscape has always an intimate bond with theatre in terms of etymology and genealogy. It is a more complex idea that can incorporate the three-dimensional space and the two-dimensional image, the prospect and the refuge.
Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893) repeatedly stages a walled garden against tough and hilled common land. Part of wild natural landscape is tamed as garden which encloses the occurrence of most actions, metaphorizing the taming of middle-class Victorian women. Freedom of mobility between the wild and the tamed landscape, between the tamed landscape and urban landscape gives three females onstage Vivie, Mrs. Warren and Frank’s mother the chance to empower themselves by breaking through the gender spatial distribution. Yet, garden as tamed landscape also is highly embedded with system of conventional Victorian gender discourse, disciplining the manners and actions of either New Woman like Vivie or conventional woman like Mrs. Warren. Women involuntarily or unconsciously endorse or abide by the gendering ethic of civilized garden. Their mobility as Doreen Massey would say was limited as “a critical means of subordination” towards patriarchal structure of society as much as the English landed class deprived the labor of land by enclosure movement and then reorganized, allocated and controlled substantially access to their land for fear of mobility of landless labor.
The contradictory forces between gendering of walled garden, woman’s voluntary endorsement, men’s subordination of woman and their dread of woman’s mobility constituted the tensions in Mrs. Warren’s Profession. The clashes were resolved by the voluntary outing of landed system, of the enclosed landscape into urbanity. Yet it is hard to say if Vivie completely broke the myth of gendered landscapes, as Shaw situated her into an urban landscape of networks of sub-patriarchal relations.
PANEL 4:
Jesse Hellman, "Searching for Agnes in Bernard Shaw's Plays and Life"
We know very little about Bernard Shaw’s sister Elinor Agnes beyond that she died from consumption just shy of twenty-two years of age. Shaw himself revealed so little of his feelings for her — at times disguised by his characteristic humor — that we might even wonder how important Agnes was to him and how her death affected him. Within two years of her death Shaw finished My Dear Dorothea, a “letter” to a five year old girl about to begin school. Beyond that it reflects issues important to him during the years after he left Dublin, My Dear Dorothea offers clues to Shaw’s attachment to Agnes and how he experienced her death. There is more, too, in his 1897 play You Never Can Tell, his 1921 Preface to his 1879 novel, Immaturity, his 1949 Sixteen Self Sketches, and his description of the death of his sister Lucy. Too much is still missing for us to truly understand and appreciate Agnes and how her death impacted Shaw’s plays and life. Despite his humorous deflections in speaking of Agnes our search affirms that a close bond existed between the two siblings, telling us more about him than about her. Yet one question stands out: what led Shaw to so protect himself from the emotional pain he experienced from death and loss?
Jean Reynolds, "Village Wooing: A Play about Reading and Writing"
Village Wooing is a short play by Bernard Shaw that has recently been garnering more critical interest. John Bertolini calls it “a play of reading and writing,” and Peter Gahan describes it as “an encounter between writer and reader.” Those elements in Village Wooing, and its similarity to Pygmalion, suggest that Shaw was thinking about writing another play about language, but with a focus on written rather than spoken words.
If that indeed was his intention, Shaw had a challenging task ahead of him. Reading and writing are silent, solitary activities that don’t lend themselves to the stage. And because Village Wooing has only two speaking parts, there’s little opportunity for a brilliant intellectual discussion.
I believe that Shaw overcame those difficulties when he wrote Village Wooing. The play explores what happens when a travel writer (A) and a shop assistant (Z) have a chance encounter on board the Empress of Patagonia. Z has already read A’s books and fallen in love with his romantic descriptions of faraway places. A relies on “dreaming shop girls” like Z to buy his books and provide him with a steady income. Village Wooing is the story of how their relationship moves from a relationship lived within the covers of a book to a face-to-face relationship that culminates in marriage. Insights from a provocative article by Walter Ong—“The Author’s Audience Is Always a Fiction”—will provide a springboard for examining the complex relationship between an author and a reader.
Sharon Klassen, "Bernard Shaw and Feliks Topolski: Creating the Penguin Illustrated Pygmalion"
The title page of the illustrated Penguin edition of Shaw’s Pygmalion, published in 1941, states that there are “over a hundred drawings by Feliks Topolski.” An examination of many of the original sketches, however, reveals that Topolski completed various drawings that were never published. This paper will discuss some of these sketches, particularly of Eliza, Higgins and Mr. Doolittle, along with Shaw’s written comments and Topolski’s replies, to deepen our understanding of Shaw’s vision of his characters.
Lawrence Switzky, "Everybody's India: Why Not's Mahabharata Pro and Contra Shaw" [THIS PRESENTATION IS POSTPONED]
Shaw, a vocal champion of Indian independence since at least 1914, met Mohandas Gandhi (“the second greatest man in the world!”) in 1931, and had a transformative encounter with Jainist religious sculptures at the Elephanta Caves during his visit to Bombay in 1933. His enthusiasm for Gandhi’s realist politics and religious devotion, for what he perceived as the variety and unity of Hinduism, and his vision of a South Asian superpower that would, by force of sheer numbers and spiritual enlightenment, determine the future course of the British Empire, resonate through Back to Methuselah, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, and the film treatment he wrote for Major Barbara (in 1940).
In 2020, Shaw will encounter India again—through Why Not Theatre’s six-hour version of the Sanskrit epic poem Mahabharata, premiering at the Shaw Festival Theatre in August and created and performed by members of the Indian diaspora. This is an excellent occasion to reassess Shaw’s Indian affinities, and particularly his repeated stance that universal religious and ethical concerns override specific cultural differences. One might interpret Peter Brook’s “internationalist” version of Mahabharata (1985), the most readily available theatrical version of this often-performed story cycle for Western audiences, as a Shavian staging.
Over the past two years, Toronto Star theatre critic Karen Fricker and I have observed and commented on rehearsals, scripts, and workshop performances of the Why Not Mahabharata in Toronto and Niagara-on-the-Lake. Based on what we’ve seen and discussed, I want to ask how Shaw’s positions on India both accord with Why Not’s appeal to diverse audiences who are asked to decide the fate of the world after a catastrophe and are at odds with Why Not’s presentation of Mahabharata through particular South Asian cultural forms (martial arts, kathak dance, shadow puppets) and the mediated contexts in which South Asians encounter the story (VHS tapes, comic books, aunties who present individual stories as moral lessons over meals). In short, I propose that Why Not’s Mahabharata engages in a respectful but strident debate with Shaw’s views on India and on cultural alterity, adopting some aspects but revising others, and urging us to decolonize Shaw and some of the assumptions of the Festival that bears his name.
R. A. F. Ajith, "G. B. Shaw's Relevance in Modern Tamil Theatre"
Shaw is considered to be the greatest dramatist of the 20th century English theatre. Apart from being a dramatist he is a novelist, a socialist, a critic, a philosopher, a realist, an economist, an orator, an expert in music and above all a humanist who believed that one cannot expect a decent behavior from a man when he is hungry and that is why he advocates a society based on economic equality. Hence, Shaw is the confluence of all these characteristics and he flows smoothly and swiftly through various cultures, languages and so naturally he transcends all national limits. He is considered as a natural phenomenon that has influenced not only the English stage but his influence and relevance in the Tamil literature and the modern Tamil theatre is immense. This presentation showcases how he is relevant even today and continues to influence modern Tamil dramatists.
It was Shaw who first wrote about the evils of the contemporary social and religious institutions and challenged them and tried to make reforms through his plays. Similarly, in the Tamil theatre politicians and dramatists like Annadurai who has held office as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost State of India and M. Karunanidhi who has succeeded him. One more notable personality who is influenced by Shaw is M. Varadarajan, a novelist, a dramatist, an educationist, a literary critic and a Tamil literary historian who later became the Vice-Chancellor of the prestigious Madurai Kamaraj University in Tamil Nadu.
As it is said that Shaw employed his characters to carry his own ideas it is true that Annadurai and Karunanithi succeeded in employing this Shavian technique in their Tamil dramas. Even though the periods in which all these three playwrights lived were different, the societies and their problems were similar, and the Shavian themes were so relevant that the two Tamil playwrights could use them as well in their Tamil plays. Another main unifying point of these three men is ‘man’ and God was secondary to them or they least bothered about the concept of God. They are all socialists and they believed strongly that only a society based on economy can emancipate the oppressed, underprivileged and the women of their respective times. They spent their entire lives in advocating this and tried tirelessly to bring this social change. Both Annadurai and Karunanidhi have confessed in their speeches and writings that the Shavian influence and relevance in them were noteworthy.
On the other hand Varadarajan in whose life the influence of Shaw was also very significant his relevance did not limit itself with his plays only. A real humanist like Shaw, he lived a modest and simple life and was highly ethical. His writings are conditioned by Shavian thoughts and ideas. Most of the qualities of Shaw appreciated by Varadarajan are part of himself. Both these writers even while writing were conscious of the problems of the societies in which they lived. And it is this aspect which made Varadarajan to have drawn towards Shaw more than any other writer.
The three Tamil playwrights taken for this study share some similarities in common and they have many differences too. But the most significant converging point they arrive at is Shaw and Shavian ideas only. English drama owes itself to Shaw for changing the epic themes into contemporary social problems and it is this aspect which remains as a major influence of Shaw in Tamil literature. And Shaw is even now relevant to the Tamil playwrights of this day which will be the topic of future researches.
Kay Li, "Cultural Translation of Colours in The Devil's Disciple"
The aim of this paper is to examine how the new cultural colour recognition application on IBM Cloud Computing Platform, built by our Sagittarius Literature Digitizing Project, reveals cultural translations of Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple in films, theatre productions and publications. I will show how the colours and objects on these images, analysed by the artificial intelligence in the app, uncover new interpretations of Shaw’s play.
With funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and Canadian Heritage, the Sagittarius research team embarked on a project with the Shaw Festival, the International Shaw Society, school boards and IBM Canada to examine arts and artists in the digital age. We arrive at the need to build a brand new application on cultural colour recognition on IBM cloud computing platform, which has been piloted with proven success. Colours are strategies, that can be strategically used in numerous contexts, such as branding, product design, fashion, lifestyle, marketing, not to mention colour psychology. Colours also have cultural significance, appealing to different cultures in different ways because of the different cultural interpretations of colours. Our new IBM cultural colour recognition app analyses the cultural significance of colours by artificial intelligence.
In this study, we input images related to Shaw’s Devil’s Disciple, ranging from theatre and film posters, book cover, images from theatre productions and films, online homepages, into the IBM cultural colour recognition app. The app breaks down the images into not only its colour components, but also into the objects populating the images. I will show how such colours correspond to the context of the productions and publications, as well as the intentions behind.
The visual images in the film and theatre posters, book covers, images from theatre productions and films, and online homepages are often the first encounter between Shaw’s play and the prospective audience and reader. As means to attract them to The Devil’s Disciple, the visual images are often cultural translations of Shaw’s play corresponding to the contexts of the productions. With the visual recognition app, we can quantify such cultural translations in terms of colours and objects. The app, functioning like an informed non-expert audience and reader, will reveal what the latter are guided to expect when they watch or read the play. The app shows the cultural indexes that act as keys to Shaw’s play under different contexts of productions. It also shows the cultural translations of The Devil’s Disciple captured in the visual images, and the likelihood of attracting people from different backgrounds to the productions.
Ultimately, we hope the cultural colour recognition app can be a useful index to show objectively how productions of Shaw’s plays should consider the cultural significance of colours, especially when they are going global in the connected world.
PANEL 2: The Devil's Disciple
Brigitte Bogar, "The Operatic Devil: Operas Based on Shaw's The Devil's Disciple"
The Devil's Disciple by George Bernard Shaw is also the title of an operatic version by Joyce Barthelson that premiered in 1977 at the Highlands School in White Plains. It is the first opera based on this play written in 1975 – but only one year later in 1976 another opera by Paul Whear is listed as having been composed. These are two earliest American operas to be based on a play by Shaw, and both are based on The Devil’s Disciple: this begs the question, why did neither of them make it into the general repertoire? This paper will examine the struggles of converting Shaw’ plays into an opera, and consider why the only perceived successful composer of Shavian opera is Philip Hagemann, who has composed no fewer than six operas based on Shaw’s plays. Hardly any research has been done and very little has been written on operas based on Shaw’s works, and I would go as far as to say that we are all unaware of the two works based on The Devil’s Disciple. Given the musical nature of Shaw’s works, it is important to document the existence of operas and other musical adaptations of Shaw.
James Armstrong, "The Devil's Actress: Shaw's Search for the Anti-Bernhardt"
Bernard Shaw frequently wrote to actresses that they should look to Sarah Bernhardt as a perfect example of how not to do things. He told Janet Achurch that Bernhardt had "no brains," complained to Ellen Terry that the Divine Sarah was "a worn out hack tragedienne," and warned Florence Farr that he was made sick by "Sarah Bernhardt's abominable 'golden voice'." Over and over again, Shaw espoused an anti-Bernhardtian style of acting that privileged intellect over emotion. In the 1890s, Bernhardt was appearing in a variety of emotional potboilers, and this influenced Shaw's writing during that period, as he sought to create roles that could do the opposite of what Bernhardt had done. With Judith Anderson, the heroine of The Devil's Disciple, Shaw constructed a role for an anti-Bernhardt, an actress who could avoid what he saw as the sentimental pitfalls and romantic excesses of conventional acting.
This paper will look specifically at Bernhardt's portrayal of Magda, the heroine of Hermann Sudermann's play Heimat, and how her performance of the role influenced the writing of The Devil's Disciple. Shaw reviewed Bernhardt's performance in Heimat in 1895, the year before he began writing The Devil's Disciple. He also got to judge her portrayal of the character against that of Eleonora Duse, who appeared in London in the same role shortly after Bernhardt's appearance, inviting audiences to make an explicit comparison between the two actresses. "The contrast between the two Magdas is as extreme as any contrast could possibly be between artists," Shaw wrote. Though he called Bernhardt "beautiful with the beauty of her school" he also found her "entirely inhuman and incredible" in the role. In Duse, on the other hand, he found a "high quality which marks off humanity from the animals."
The character of Judith reaches to express a genuine humanity that belies Shaw's description of the piece as a mere "melodrama" as indicated in the play's subtitle. Rejecting the conventions enshrined by Bernhardt's acting, Shaw sought to create a role that could do more than just bring forth what he derisively called "a liberal pennyworth of sensation" in the audience. Though he did not intend the role of Judith for Duse specifically, he did want to create a part for "an actress who understood the author" as Duse had in Heimat. By writing for a different style of acting than was usually seen on the London stage, Shaw created a character that could be relished by performers for generations to come. He also devilishly sabotaged the artful but artificial acting style that had been made famous by Bernhardt.
John McInerney, "The Devil's Disciple: Characters in Discovery"
This paper focuses on the major characters in the play, Mrs. Dudgeon, Judith Anderson, Richard Dudgeon, General Burgoyne, and Anthony Anderson, as circumstances they did not expect lead them into crisis situations during which they discover who they really are: what they believe, what they will do, and what they will not do. In the process, they validate Fintan O’Toole’s contention that the true characters of the people Shaw creates are not set at birth, or sculpted by their upbringing; instead, characters are discovered in their responses to the events they encounter, and those responses can often surprise themselves. Indeed, we will see those responses range from bitter despair to a radical change of career. And all the discoveries of these characters demonstrate again that Shaw’s characters are not just mouthpieces for his opinions; they are individuals as three dimensional as any of us.
Christopher Wixson, "Buoyant Burgoyne: Bernard Shaw, The Devil's Disciple, and No Manners Comedy"
The Devil’s Disciple’s most fantastical incident is the appearance in act three of British General John Burgoyne. The character materializes quite far from his campaign headquarters in Quebec so that, as Shaw wrote to Ellen Terry, Dick Dudgeon can prove “superior to gentility---that is, to the whole ideal of modern society.” The playwright though is not content to render Burgoyne a mere straw gentleman and instead, informed by E. B. DeFonblanque’s 1876 biography, endows him with prescient foresight and transfigures him into an ardent critic of the various structures of authority and the conspiracy of privilege he represents. Most scholars writing about The Devil’s Disciple have taken their cue from GBS’s “Notes” --- considering the character mainly with regard to its namesake’s significance in British military history. This essay ponders its emblematic resonance when we consider Burgoyne an equally prominent figure at a key moment in British theatre history.
As a surprisingly successful, respected, and high-profile playwright in the 1770s and 1780s, Burgoyne collaborated with both David Garrick and Richard Brinsley Sheridan at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane as part of an effort to restore Restoration-style wit to its proper role in English comedy, pushing back against the sentimental form that had dominated the stage for most of the century as a corrective to its predecessor’s licentiousness. Burgoyne achieved such notoriety that Horace Walpole prophesied his sparkling comedies would endure long after his “battles and speeches [are] forgotten” and ultimately displace his tarnished Saratoga legacy. Viewed from this angle, Shaw’s characterization of Burgoyne in The Devil’s Disciple indexes his ambivalent relationship to the tradition of manners comedy, and his weaponizing of a gentleman’s wit in the service of systemic critique rehearses his refinishings of the genre --- from The Philanderer (1893) to Buoyant Billions (1949) --- in intertextual dialogue with the work of its most brilliant purveyors on the modern British stage, St. John Hankin and Noël Coward.
PANEL 3: Shaw and Gender
Tanner Sebastian, "'Goodbye, Home': Queer Domesticity in The Devil's Disciple"
How does queerness affect the space of a home, and how does a queered home affect its occupants? In this paper, I work through these questions while examining Bernard Shaw’s melodrama The Devil’s Disciple. I argue that Richard Dudgeon’s anti-Puritan and anti-British sentiments queer him as a character (queer in the sense of non-normative), and his queerness alters both the Dudgeon and the Anderson households. In both households, female characters find the queering of their space to be liberating by granting them agency to speak and act. Essie, Richard’s illegitimate cousin, finds safety in Richard’s newly acquired home, queered through Richard casting out his Puritanical family and declaring the space a home for the Devil. Richard grants Essie permission to live in his home if she desires and allows her to cry as she desires. Free from the shame the rest of the Dudgeon family forces onto her for her illegitimacy, Essie finds liberation and familial love in Richard’s queer home.
Similarly, Judith Anderson escapes shame to embrace love and agency after Richard queers her home. By pretending to be Judith’s husband in order to save her real husband from arrest, Richard creates a relationship that resembles polyandry between himself, Judith, and her husband Anthony. This faux polyandry gives Judith permission to defy her husband Anthony and to act on her own free will to save Richard. Queer domesticity, then, has liberating potential regarding shame.
Laurie J. Wolf, "Gender Disparity in The Devil's Disciple"
Issues of gender and theatrical space are predominant concerns within the production of nineteenth-century melodrama. Notions of gender and sexuality, and the appropriate spheres within which each existed were embedded in Victorian consciousness, and manifested themselves throughout dramatic texts. Playwrights of nineteenth-century melodrama were concerned with stage pictures, and the specific roles assigned to women and men. At the most fundamental level, particular constructions of ‘womanness’ defined the quality of being a ‘man,’ so that the natural identification of sexuality and desire with the feminine allowed the social and political construction of masculinity. From a relatively early juncture in his career, Bernard Shaw came to be known as something of a champion for women’s rights. Certainly, by Victorian standards, many of his heroines, such as Candida, Saint Joan, Vivie Warren and Ann Whitefield were progressive, and in many cases their ideals and determination seemed to elevate them above their male counterparts. In addition, these characters not only offered actresses an alternative to traditional roles, but they also provided a new role model for thousands of Victorian women. In his ‘The Quintessence of Ibsenism’ in 1891, he wrote: "Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous, I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under the pretense that she likes it ... if we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot because they have never seen one anywhere else." This is a writer who appears to be in touch with the needs and desires of women. He was not a feminist, in the twenty-first century understanding of the term, but he did romanticize (and frequently empathize) with women.
I plan to question Shaw’s intentions for the women (Mrs. Dudgeon, Essie and Judith) in The Devil’s Disciple, using examples from his own oeuvre. For a writer who took pride in disrupting expectations and standards of his day, Shaw remained faithful to the traditional female melodramatic stereotypes. Despite the many subversions that are part of the textual dramaturgy of this play, the three women were constructed by an unyielding patriarchal ideology. Did Mr. Shaw let his characters down?
Wan Jin, "In and Out of the Garden: Gendered Landscapes in Mrs. Warren's Profession"
In a large number of plays, Shaw prescribed detailed information about the settings, especially geographical settings for the directions and performances. J. Ellen Gainor (1991) in Shaw’s Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender exemplified how dressing could be used by Shaw’s heroines to perform singular gender identity. This theory of performative gender identity, together with Tony Stafford’s recent monograph Shaw’s Settings: Gardens and Libraries, invites an understanding of Shaw’s dramatic landscapes through the lens of feminist theory. How does Shaw’s taking female experience as paradigmatic inject more meaning to his landscape descriptions? How do his female characters take advantage of discursive system concerning this gendered landscape to perform and subvert gender identity or to empower themselves? The term “landscape” is used here instead of scenery or setting because landscape has always an intimate bond with theatre in terms of etymology and genealogy. It is a more complex idea that can incorporate the three-dimensional space and the two-dimensional image, the prospect and the refuge.
Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893) repeatedly stages a walled garden against tough and hilled common land. Part of wild natural landscape is tamed as garden which encloses the occurrence of most actions, metaphorizing the taming of middle-class Victorian women. Freedom of mobility between the wild and the tamed landscape, between the tamed landscape and urban landscape gives three females onstage Vivie, Mrs. Warren and Frank’s mother the chance to empower themselves by breaking through the gender spatial distribution. Yet, garden as tamed landscape also is highly embedded with system of conventional Victorian gender discourse, disciplining the manners and actions of either New Woman like Vivie or conventional woman like Mrs. Warren. Women involuntarily or unconsciously endorse or abide by the gendering ethic of civilized garden. Their mobility as Doreen Massey would say was limited as “a critical means of subordination” towards patriarchal structure of society as much as the English landed class deprived the labor of land by enclosure movement and then reorganized, allocated and controlled substantially access to their land for fear of mobility of landless labor.
The contradictory forces between gendering of walled garden, woman’s voluntary endorsement, men’s subordination of woman and their dread of woman’s mobility constituted the tensions in Mrs. Warren’s Profession. The clashes were resolved by the voluntary outing of landed system, of the enclosed landscape into urbanity. Yet it is hard to say if Vivie completely broke the myth of gendered landscapes, as Shaw situated her into an urban landscape of networks of sub-patriarchal relations.
PANEL 4:
Jesse Hellman, "Searching for Agnes in Bernard Shaw's Plays and Life"
We know very little about Bernard Shaw’s sister Elinor Agnes beyond that she died from consumption just shy of twenty-two years of age. Shaw himself revealed so little of his feelings for her — at times disguised by his characteristic humor — that we might even wonder how important Agnes was to him and how her death affected him. Within two years of her death Shaw finished My Dear Dorothea, a “letter” to a five year old girl about to begin school. Beyond that it reflects issues important to him during the years after he left Dublin, My Dear Dorothea offers clues to Shaw’s attachment to Agnes and how he experienced her death. There is more, too, in his 1897 play You Never Can Tell, his 1921 Preface to his 1879 novel, Immaturity, his 1949 Sixteen Self Sketches, and his description of the death of his sister Lucy. Too much is still missing for us to truly understand and appreciate Agnes and how her death impacted Shaw’s plays and life. Despite his humorous deflections in speaking of Agnes our search affirms that a close bond existed between the two siblings, telling us more about him than about her. Yet one question stands out: what led Shaw to so protect himself from the emotional pain he experienced from death and loss?
Jean Reynolds, "Village Wooing: A Play about Reading and Writing"
Village Wooing is a short play by Bernard Shaw that has recently been garnering more critical interest. John Bertolini calls it “a play of reading and writing,” and Peter Gahan describes it as “an encounter between writer and reader.” Those elements in Village Wooing, and its similarity to Pygmalion, suggest that Shaw was thinking about writing another play about language, but with a focus on written rather than spoken words.
If that indeed was his intention, Shaw had a challenging task ahead of him. Reading and writing are silent, solitary activities that don’t lend themselves to the stage. And because Village Wooing has only two speaking parts, there’s little opportunity for a brilliant intellectual discussion.
I believe that Shaw overcame those difficulties when he wrote Village Wooing. The play explores what happens when a travel writer (A) and a shop assistant (Z) have a chance encounter on board the Empress of Patagonia. Z has already read A’s books and fallen in love with his romantic descriptions of faraway places. A relies on “dreaming shop girls” like Z to buy his books and provide him with a steady income. Village Wooing is the story of how their relationship moves from a relationship lived within the covers of a book to a face-to-face relationship that culminates in marriage. Insights from a provocative article by Walter Ong—“The Author’s Audience Is Always a Fiction”—will provide a springboard for examining the complex relationship between an author and a reader.
Sharon Klassen, "Bernard Shaw and Feliks Topolski: Creating the Penguin Illustrated Pygmalion"
The title page of the illustrated Penguin edition of Shaw’s Pygmalion, published in 1941, states that there are “over a hundred drawings by Feliks Topolski.” An examination of many of the original sketches, however, reveals that Topolski completed various drawings that were never published. This paper will discuss some of these sketches, particularly of Eliza, Higgins and Mr. Doolittle, along with Shaw’s written comments and Topolski’s replies, to deepen our understanding of Shaw’s vision of his characters.