Bernard Shaw's Theory of Political Theater: Difficulties from the Vantages of Postmodern and Modern Types of the Self

Abstract

"For some time now the idea of 'political theatre' has been in crisis," wrote critic Baz Kershaw in 1997 (255). In 1990 David Ian Rabey noted the failure of his 1986 book, British and Irish Political Drama of the Twentieth Century, which took Shaw as the originator of our century's political theater: "In the early 1980's I wrote a study. . . which intended to pay tribute to an emergent tradition of radical drama and its subversive potential. In the intervening years, history and experience have taught me that this drama was neither radical nor subversive enough" ("Images," 151). While Rabey saw the Shavian tradition as a historical failure, Michael Billington wondered in 1980 (qtd. in Holderness, 1) if political theater was a "dead duck." Similar statements from both the right and left are familiar to scholars of contemporary drama. Eric Bentley wrote in 1947, "Shaw's aim has been to change our minds and save civilization; but we are still in the old ruts and civilization has gone from bad to worse" (Bernard Shaw, 186). Tracy C. Davis concludes not only that Shaw's iconoclastic theater failed (143), but that "it is unlikely that he swayed political opinion. His desire to politicize the theater was real . . . yet ineffective" (142). Shaw himself noted the impotence of his political theater: "I have produced no permanent impression because nobody has ever believed me." Also he claimed, "I have solved practically all the pressing questions of our time, but . . . they keep on being propounded as insoluble just as if I had never existed" (qtd. in Bentley, Bernard Shaw, 186, 189). In 1978 David Hare looked back at British political drama, claiming it had succeeded in its goals but that this success had [End Page 117] achieved nothing: "Consciousness has been raised . . . for a good many years now and we seem further from radical change than at any time. . . . The traditional function of the radical artist . . . has been undermined. We have looked. We have seen. We have known. And we have not changed" (61). Perhaps these writers and artists (among others one could name) are correct about the ineffectiveness of political theater and of Shaw's in particular. But why?

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