George Bernard Shaw was in his 39th year when he wrote Arms and the Man. He already had gathered an impressive list of failures. In Dublin he had failed decisively as an estate agent. "My heart was not in the job," he admitted. At the age of 19 he went to England determined to set himself up as "a professional man of genius".
Though later described by A.E. as "the last saint sent out from Ireland to save the world", Shaw would continue failing spectacularly over the next 20 years, first as a novelist, and then, apparently, as a playwright. Yet he seemed to thrive on this failure, rising above all his family's efforts to discourage him from writing and appearing to float miraculously in a fantastic atmosphere of optimism. It was this surreal condition that may have prompted W.B. Yeats's dream of G.B.S. as a sewing machine that clicked and shone and incredibly "smiled, smiled perpetually".
The sober fact was that there was little to smile about. He had been brought up in an impoverished menage a trois in Dublin and came to suspect that he might be illegitimate. Professionally he was to drop the name George ("Don't George me!") because, being the Christian name both of his alcoholic father who was a Protestant, and of a Catholic musician George Vandeleur Lee whose house in Hatch Street they shared, it symbolised the unhappy doubts about his birth.
When Shaw was in his teens, his mother followed Vandeleur Lee to London, taking her two daughters but leaving her son with his unemployable father. "Sonny", as he was called, loved and admired his mother, but she seems to have thought as little of him as she did of her husband. Out of these lonely years he was to fashion his first play, Widowers' Houses, a devastating expose of slum landlordism which he had learnt about while working in the property business in Dublin.
When one of his sisters suddenly died, he hurried over to London and as it were took her place in their mother's house. From a "ridiculously sensitive child" he grew into a "frightfully shy adolescent" who felt singularly ill-at-ease at Lady Wilde's At Homes at Grosvenor Square.
Over the next 10 years he would develop into a witty and eloquent public speaker and what appeared to be a monster of cheerful self-sufficiency. "I wanted to teach myself," he wrote. He did this through reading books at the British Museum, going to plays, concerts and galleries as a journalist, and joining a left-wing debating and campaigning group, the Fabian Society, with its ideal of revolution without bloodshed.
Between 1879 and 1883 Shaw wrote five novels that were turned down by every publisher he sent them to in Britain and the US. He earned his money from reviewing the novels of other writers, generally romantic and conventional works of fiction without any of his own daring and originality.
Simultaneously, he conducted several other careers, writing unsigned notices of art exhibitions for The World, brilliant pseudonymous music reviews for The Star, and political commentaries and correspondence on all subjects for any newspapers and magazines that would print them. But since many of these pieces were written under extravagant names - G.B.S. Larking, A. Donis, the Rev C.W. Stiggins, Jr - they did not contribute to a single, recognised career.
Shaw seemed fated to be a commentator on other writers' works rather than the creator of his own. His first theatre review - of Henry Irving's production of The Merchant of Venice at the Lyceum - appeared in April 1880. Later in that decade he established himself as the most trenchant of theatre critics, writing regularly in The Saturday Review and irregularly, it seemed, everywhere else. There was an electioneering element to these articles - "every paragraph is provocative", noted G.K.Chesterton. As in his art, literary and music criticism, Shaw championed the new at the expense of the old. He wanted to move the British theatre from the sentimental melodrama of Pinero to the theatre of ideas pioneered by Ibsen and Strindberg in Scandinavia. And who better to accomplish this than Shaw himself?
"I like your superb confidence in the dramatic value of the mere facts of life - I admire the horrible flesh and blood of your creatures," Oscar Wilde wrote to Shaw after reading Widowers' Houses. But the London critics hated the play.
It was, The Times critic told his readers, "a singularly bad piece of work". It was true that the rehearsals in the Mona Hotel had been perfunctory and that the most vocal part, when the play opened at the Royalty Theatre in Soho in December 1892, was that of the prompter. When Shaw, dressed in dazzling Jaeger wool, stepped before the curtain at the end of the performance, he was greeted with hisses. But then, at the second and last performance the following week, there being no critics present, Shaw heard the first rustle of applause. It was enough to spur him on to his second play, The Philanderer.
Widowers' Houses is the Shavian equivalent of Dickens's Little Dorrit, a novel that Shaw believed was more revolutionary than Das Kapital. It is a socialist drama, but also a drama of the passions. It shows how the property world exploits human nature, and uses the aphrodisiac of power and money. It was not at all the sort of play that was shown in British theatres in the 1890s. Shaw's inversion of the conventional Victorian ending, his besmirching of the heroine Blanche in an unholy marriage of capitalism, was, in the words of the American critic, Eric Bentley, "the most revolutionary act in modern English drama".
The Philanderer was written during the spring and early summer of 1893. Shaw was full of plans. He wanted his new play to demolish the antiquated marriage and divorce laws, expose the evils of vivisection, attack fashionable medical ethics, involve feminism and the New Woman. In short, The Philanderer was to be a grand cleaning-up operation, the most ambitious thing he had attempted. He finished it in June 1893 and hungered to see it produced, but J.T. Grein, who had put on Widowers' Houses, rejected it, and the first professional performance was not presented until February 1907.
Less than two months after completing The Philanderer, Shaw began Mrs Warren's Profession, which was a return to the vein of Widowers' Houses. It was to be a problem play, revealing the corruption produced by compromising with society.
As a sign that he himself would not compromise with the commercial West End Theatre, he chose the unspeakable subject of prostitution. It is not promiscuity that Shaw is attacking, but the valuation of woman as property, which he represents as one of the most vicious aspects of capitalism. He finished Mrs Warren's Profession in 10 weeks, but it was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain's Office and not given its first production in Britain for over 30 years.
The history of what he called "this unlucky play of mine" had two immediate effects on Shaw's career. It pitched him into a long, posthumously successful campaign against stage censorship, and it persuaded him to experiment with the "pleasant plays" which he could "sport with human follies, not with crimes".
Arms and the Man is the first of these pleasant plays. The opportunity to write it came from two women. Florence Farr was an amiable actress with semi-circular eyebrows and with whom both Shaw and Yeats were in love. Annie Horniman, the only woman pioneer in theatrical management before the first World War, was soon to be a driving force in the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester and in Dublin's Abbey. Having inherited a fortune on the death of her grandmother, she anonymously gave Florence Farr enough money to promote a season at the Avenue Theatre in London. Farr commissioned both Yeats and Shaw to write plays for her.
"I have made a desperate attempt to begin a real romantic play for F.F. in the style of Victor Hugo," Shaw wrote to Janet Achurch. Nevertheless, he fell behind Farr's expectations. Whenever she reproached him he would take up his pen again and surge forward, writing desperately between showers in the park and speeches for the Fabian Society, at moments between piano duets and in the intervals of other dramatists' plays. But still his comedy was not ready for the opening night of the Avenue Theatre season.
So instead of Shaw's play, Florence Farr used Yeats's The Land Of Heart's Desire as a curtain raiser and staged A Comedy of Sighs by the Irish physician and playwright, John Todhunter, which was booed for two-and-a-half hours.
Next day, a panic-stricken Florence Farr sent for Shaw. After some discussion, he took his new play out on to the Embankment Gardens and, putting his last touches to it, left it to be typewritten.
It went in to rehearsal in the second week of April, three days before A Comedy of Sighs was withdrawn. Shaw's first title had been Alps and Balkans, but he eventually called it after the first line of Dryden's verse translation of Virgil's Aeneid (Arma virumque cano), Arms and the Man.
In addition to directing the play, Shaw helped with its casting. He also selected the firstnight audience, inviting George Moore, Oscar Wilde, Yeats, Edith Nesbit, a Russian admiral and, among many Fabians, Sidney Webb, who might possibly bring a cabinet minister. Having seen Todhunter's unhappy fate, he also hired several bouncers for the night.
Shaw himself arrived towards the end of Yeats's play. The curtain rose and his chocolate cream soldier forced his way into Raina's bedroom in what appeared to be a military melodrama. Then the comedy took over. "I listened to Arms and the Man with admiration and hatred," Yeats later recalled: "I stood aghast before its energy." It was, he decided, the first contest between the old commercial school of theatrical folk and the new artistic school.
With its professional soldiers who carry chocolates instead of cartridges and weep when scolded, its battles waged mostly by paperwork and won through ludicrously fortunate errors, Arms and the Man shows us the adult world of warfare through the eyes of a child. The play was written as a corrective to such works as Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade and in the manner of Cervantes's Don Quixote.
Shaw makes fun of every form of humbug, including the pretentiousness of moral virtue. He is the quintessential playwright - he plays with everything. "The ease with which Shaw regressed to childishness can be regarded as a sign of psychological weakness and emotional immaturity," observed one critic . . . [but] "released within the frame of the play, it is this childishness that constitutes Shaw's genius".
Reactions to the play varied enormously. The Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) was outraged at the violation of military decorum and kept repeating: "The man is mad! The man is mad!" But G.K.Chesterton remembered that Arms and the Man was applauded by "that indescribable element in all of us which rejoices to see the genuine thing prevail against the plausible".
Arms and the Man was Shaw's first sight of success as a playwright. He did what he could to evade it. Stepping out before the curtain at the end of the first performance on April 21st, 1894, he addressed his speech to the solitary man who, in a wildly cheering audience, had uttered a loud Boo! "My dear fellow," he replied, "I quite agree with you, but what are we against so many?"
Later he changed the subtitle from A Romantic Comedy to An Anti-Romantic Comedy. But the public was not fooled. After all, even the prosaic artillery officer, Captain Bluntschli (a figure partly based on Sidney Webb) is revealed by the end of the play to be "incurably romantic".
As with Pygmalion, audiences responded to the romantic subtext of Shaw's comedy, and it is not surprising perhaps that as a precursor to My Fair Lady there was to be a musical based on Arms and the Man: Oscar Strauss's The Chocolate Soldier.
Arms and the Man ran for 50 performances at the Avenue Theatre before going on a provincial tour. This was followed by an acclaimed production in the US which put Shaw to the inconvenience of having to open a bank account. Though he had saved only £20, he suddenly decided to give up his work as a critic and devote himself to plays. "If I cannot make something out of the theatre, I am a ruined man," he told his Dublin friend Matthew McNulty. "I am about to begin the world at last."
This summer Dublin is having the unique opportunity of witnessing a revival of this risky start to Shaw's career as a dramatist with the boldest of his "unpleasant plays", Mrs Warren's Profession, at the Peacock, and one of the most charming of his pleasant plays, Arms and the Man, at the Gate. It is a fitting celebration of his achievement on the stage in this, the 50th anniversary year of his death.
Arms and the Man, directed by Alan Stanford, opens at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, on July 4th, with previews from tonight. Booking: 01-8744045. Mrs Warren's Profession, directed by Brian Brady, runs at The Peacock until July 8th. Booking: 01-8787222.
Front/row has been held over this week, due to pressure of space
