Three plays about unpleasant men
13 April 2011

tBernard Shaw excels himself once again. Okay, one might ask what is a Christian doing reading Bernard Shaw. Well, ever since I read Pygmalion I have simply loved his work, and in fact he is one of the best modern playwrights to have ever walked this earth. His plays are well structured, characters very realistic, and themes very topical. The theme that seems to run through most of his plays deals with the rights of a woman. To understand this theme one does need to understand the context in which these plays were written.

tMy Dad had a quick read of one of the prologues to these plays and noticed his comment upon marriage, which immediately confirmed our suspicions that Shaw was not a Christian. However he is not antagonistic towards Christianity, and his Christian characters in the plays are not evil or manipulative. In fact, many of them are very noble characters. However, it is to the theme of marriage which we will look because that is the key to understanding Shaw's attitude towards women.

tSimply put, Shaw considers marriage to be little more than white slavery. Once again we need to understand the cultural context. His plays were written around the turn of the 20th Century in England, and if you were a women in that time you had no rights whatsoever. This is the key to the final play in this book 'Mrs Warren's Profession'. The prologue is an explanation as to the play, because the play itself is about prostitution. As he explains, unless a women were to get married she would either live her life as a pauper or a prostitute. If the woman had money she could not hold onto it - she had to get married, and when she did the rights of all her property would instantly transfer to the husband.

tIt is the male characters in these plays who are unpleasant. The first play, The Widower's House, is about a landlord. Is he dodgy? It is questionable as he defends his actions by saying that if he were to properly maintain his houses then the poor who live in them would not be able to live in them. Therefore he believes that he is providing a community service, albeit a suspicious one. The male in the second play, The Philanderer, is much more unpleasant. The play opens with him sleeping with one woman, and rejecting the advances of a second, and closes with him losing both of them. He only becomes interested in the second woman when she decides she wants to marry another man. At the end of the play we have no sympathy for him - he brought it all upon himself. As he said, he will always be a philanderer (the English definition, not the Greek), and he does not say this with pride, but with regret.

tWhile the theme of two of the Plays Unpleasant are with the treatment of women, the theme of the Widower's House is of the exploitation of the working class. Further, the man who, at the beginning of the play, ends an engagement over dirty money made from a slumlord ends up selling his soul in a business dealing and marrying anyway.

tIt is also noteworthy that despite Shaw's polemic against the institution of marriage, he did end up having a long and happy marriage. I guess it had to do with his desire not to behave like the society that he spent his life criticising,

Plays Unpleasant:-

WIDOWERS' HOUSES: -

In a way this play is a companion of Mrs. Warren's Profession, both about money earned by a parent through unsavoury means of varying questionable repute, of course this one being far more common than the other both in practice and held not so often repugnant by society - rich society that is - but morally no less, in fact in some ways more, reprehensible.

Mrs. Warren's profession is held in n good repute anywhere in the world, but it can be argued that most people in that profession are not in it from choice as much as from either being kidnapped and brought into it or from necessities of survival of a family which often when needed to be provided by a woman she might find little or almost no recourse. When one is safe, moralising about another's circumstance is all very well; it is likely to be another story when it is your own child's survival in question and you have not much of a choice.

This one is about rich people who earn their living by providing housing bordering on slum to the poor and then charging extortion level rents while providing little or no amenities, and evicting those that default at short notice without care about if they could in fact survive.

And yet most rich could hardly stand a scrutiny about the roots of their wealth - if it is not opium or colonial (robbery) it might be something akin to this, or worse - it might be selling things that actually damage those that pay for them. Not just illegal substances, either - often legal substances can be just as bad for health, even lethal, and yet they take time to become known as dangerous or worthless at best. Even today that is true of much that forms multibillion industries, in much misused names of fun or beauty.
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THE PHILANDERER: -

Women - and too, enlightened men - were in favour of womens' education, property and voting rights, enfranchisement, suffragists demanding and chaining themselves. many identified these movements with left for obvious reasons - it seemed against interest of any conservatives to lose any source of free labour, and women just as slaves or colonial possessions were source of it.

But most people also misunderstood womens' liberty and freedom first and foremost in the wrongest possible direction - one that would actually benefit men. Some people saw it coming and they were not all against womens' rights - and Mr. Shaw was one such man.

With women free, and access to women granted freely to any man, those that had no honourable intentions were in heaven. They could play with womens' hearts and discard them - all in name of womens' freedom, since the misunderstanding was, it was about no chaperone watching over to make sure their real important rights were guarded - those related to just such men not destroying hearts and lives.

This is the story of just such a woman who has a heart and would hide it behind talk of freedom, so she can try to attract one playing with her heart, her subsequent - or even, consequent - heartbreak when it is clear he never had any intention that could be then called honourable (now the word has gone out of usage, almost), and the philanderer who nevertheless sees what havoc he has wreaked, with clear eyes.
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MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION: -

Age old dilemma of society - "respectable"vs. the other side, and the need of one for the other. It must have of course been extremely controversial when it was written - and published - but this writer was always more than equal to any criticism and could always argue either side of a debate with reason.

This one is not a comedy, though, and one is presented with Mrs. Warren's side quite reasonably.

Friday, July 9, 2010.

Read this for my romanticism course at university. Really enjoyed the messages of the plays and how Shaw challenged society and their rules/pre-conceptions of marriage and women.

52 books around the year challenge: 15) A book set in the past (more than 100 years ago)

After loving Mrs Warren's Profession, I decided to read Shaw's edition of his three earliest plays plus prefaces. All three are impressive for their bold attack on Victorian hypocrisy. The Philanderer has aged the least well and Mrs Warren's Profession is definitely the strongest of the three dramatically.

Although it's called plays unpleasant, this was a pleasant acquaintance with George Bernard Shaw. The plays are the first in Shaws oeuvre, but they were directly daring and controversial. A style already becomes clear in the text, and it's funny, realistic and pleasant.

Widowers' Houses and Mrs. Warren's Profession are amazing. The Philanderer starts well but wears thin.

Just astounding that two of Shaw's earliest plays are so instantly mesmerizing, and are still so relevant and readable today, while written in the 1880s and 90s. It has to be admitted that these are not Shaw's best prefaces (they are of largely historical interest, might as well be skipped) and that The Philanderer is an awful play, but I'll cut the man some slack for coming out of the gate swinging with Widowers' Houses, which you'd hardly have to update to make it fresh in 2023. A major player in theater announcing himself.

First off, I really don't like reading plays so I had very low expectations. To make matters worse, these plays are over 100 years old. For the most part, I don't understand what's going on or why the characters are so upset and so easily scandalized. Imagine if these people were alive today and getting to hear songs on the radio cussing about bitches and hos. The scandal would kill them. The prefaces weren't much help either in understanding and the preface for Mrs Warren's Profession took longer to read than the play itself! The stories (from what I understood) were somewhat interesting although if I actually watched these plays in a theater it would probably put me to sleep. I do appreciate how he was trying to make a statement about the injustices of society. And these plays were much better than Waiting For Godot. So it wasn't a complete waste of time reading these.

I liked it a lot.

Mrs Warren's Profession [page 213-286]

I read this because it contained Mrs Warren’s Profession, and I’d recently read Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells, in which there were several allusions to it. Then because Mrs Warren’s Profession was so good, I read the other two plays as well: Widowers’ Houses and The Philanderer. I wasn’t very familiar with Shaw. I had the vague idea he was stuffy and didactic, but based on this volume, nothing could be further from the truth. Despite being more than a century old, these plays are startlingly modern: shocking, cynical, funny. There are some great parts for actors, and the brilliant dialogue is highly quotable; as Sir George Crofts, co-investor in a chain of European brothels, remarks to Mrs Warren’s daughter, who has been unknowingly brought up on the proceeds of the business:

As long as you don’t fly openly in the face of society, society doesn’t ask any inconvenient questions; and it makes precious short work of the cads who do. There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

Very, very occasionally there are moments where a present-day director might opt to sidestep the theatricality of Shaw’s choices; for example, in Widowers’ Houses, when Blanche Sartorius, insufficiently gentrified daughter of an unscrupulous rack-renter, physically attacks the family’s doting parlourmaid, the action feels too obvious and melodramatic a demonstration of her ineradicably low nature. Something might also need to be done for the ending of The Philanderer, which peters out in a tableau of the cast surrounding a fainting woman.

Overall though, these plays are tremendous: I especially liked the fact that nobody ‘wicked’ is ever really punished, at least not publicly (since they are behaving in accordance with society's precepts); privately, they may suffer for their decisions after the curtain falls, or then again, they may not. Shaw is criticizing the immorality of society, so it would make no sense to subject his characters to its self-serving notions of justice and morality. He writes in the Preface:

A word as to why I have labelled the three plays in this volume Unpleasant. The reason is pretty obvious: their dramatic power is used to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts. No doubt all plays which deal sincerely with humanity must wound the monstrous conceit which it is the business of romance to flatter.

I preferred 'Plays Pleasant'; however, I recommend this compilation of plays. Once again, I read this book during my first year of acting school.