As 'Pygmalion' opens at the Gate, Arminta Wallace explores the ways that George Bernard Shaw continues to enrich the arts
George Bernard Shaw liked to say that the date of his birth, July 26th, 1856, was 50 years too early. If anything he understated his case: many of his most cherished ideas are still trying to make their way into the mainstream. Take vegetarianism. As a penniless young émigré in London Shaw discovered vegetarian restaurants while, as his biographer Michael Holroyd puts it, investigating the art of eating out cheaply. What began as a simple economy measure quickly turned into an ideological crusade; Shaw worked out a theory based partly on his natural sympathy for animals, partly on his reading of the work of Darwin and other scientists who had recently established close connections between humans and the animal world, and partly on the monstrous images of the slaughterhouse.
At a time when the prevailing notion in British society was that vegetarians tended to be somewhat effeminate, he went on to preach vegetarianism as the healthy option, not just for the human digestive system but also for the world economy. "My objection to meat," he wrote, "is that it costs too much and involves the slavery of men and women to edible animals that is undesirable." Just over a century and a half later Shaw has some unlikely allies in the veggie field. The ecofeminist Rosemary Radford Ruether, for one, is still trying to persuade us meat-eaters that "there are compelling moral reasons for a mostly vegetarian diet, particularly for affluent people". The majority of us are, alas, more likely to swayed by mad cow disease than moral considerations.
Another passion close to Shaw's heart was his campaign to reform the British alphabet. He found English spelling ridiculous - offensive, even. The same, he reckoned, went for uppity class-ridden notions about accent. He himself retained a stout Dublin brogue into old age, and he felt so strongly about the subject that he set aside, in his will, a sizeable chunk of money to be devoted to the search for a more logical system of English orthography. Such a system has yet to be devised - although some would say that text messaging has, over the past three years, ushered in a phonetic revolution of a more spontaneous kind.
It was Shaw's passion for the science of phonetics that led him to write the play for which he is most widely celebrated. Pygmalion is, of course, a comic-romantic romp. But it was written partly as a demonstration of the powerful role that phonetic science, properly applied, might play in the destruction of the British class system. Pygmalion attracted packed houses everywhere it opened - and when, in 1964, it was reworked in the film My Fair Lady it earned huge royalties, which, added to the already considerable Shaw estate, turned the writer's multifaceted bequest into a legal cause célèbre.
The story of the protracted court battles that ensued is, as told by Holroyd in his superb four-volume biography of Shaw, extremely entertaining. "It was a typically Shavian will - and a typically Shavian outcome," says Jeremy Crow of the Society of Authors, which is responsible for the administration of Shaw's estate. "The whole business of the alphabet trusts was enormously complicated. Ultimately, what it did was to keep the whole thing in the public eye - which, of course, was exactly what he was attempting to achieve."
The upshot is that there have been three main beneficiaries of Shaw's generosity: the British Museum and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London, and the National Gallery of Ireland.
"The Shaw Fund became an absolute lifeline for us when times were hard and acquisition funds hard to come by," says the gallery's director, Raymond Keaveney. Shaw regarded the gallery as the main source of his education in Ireland, as it provided him with the sort of humanistic introduction to European culture that he felt was singularly lacking in the education system of the time. The money came with no strings attached, but the board decided to use it for acquisitions - until 1990, when it was used to help get the Millennium Wing project underway. "It's a remarkable story," says Keaveney. "In the late 1950s the Shaw Fund put the gallery into the major league: it could go head to head with other national institutions and acquire major works of art by significant names. And the new building programme couldn't have got off the ground without it. The Shaw Fund provided some €2 million: one-third of the seed capital to buy the Clare Street properties we needed for the gallery expansion."
Holroyd's biography lists the paintings, drawings and sculptures purchased by the gallery with Shaw's money between 1959 and 1985. According to figures supplied by the comptroller and auditor general, in the 12 months to March 31st, 1990, the gallery received £164,714 (€246,000) from the Shaw bequest, while the total in investments and at the bank ran to £751,173 (€1.1 million). The numbers seem modest in a world dominated by the kind of sensationalist figures that routinely emerge from art auctions. Taken as a whole, however, the acquisitions form a pretty impressive legacy.
"Two Murillos in one year," says Keaveney. "Jacques-Louis David's The Funeral Of Patroclus is a unique piece. El Mudo's Abraham And The Three Angels, that's a fantastic painting and the artist's masterpiece. The Giovanni di Paolo Crucifix." There's also a Goya, a Fragonard, a Pisarro, a Tintoretto and sculptures by Renoir and Courbet. "It comes to just over 100 pieces altogether - and it will endure, which is the great thing. It continues to enrich our cultural lives."
The gallery has honoured Shaw by naming a large gallery after him, placing in it a bronze statue of the writer that used to stand outside the Merrion Square entrance - and to which tour-bus commentaries still somewhat forlornly refer. "We hold concerts in the Shaw Room, which, given his interest in music, is particularly appropriate," says Keaveney. "Anybody who comes into the building quickly becomes aware that Shaw is one of our great benefactors."
Anybody who attends the Gate Theatre's new production of Pygmalion will, indirectly, be a benefactor as well. "One-third of the royalties from the production will, of course, be paid to the gallery in due course, and the copyright runs for another 20 years," says Crow, of the Society of Authors.
What of the play itself? Isn't it a little cheesy in this day and age? Not in the slightest, says Dawn Bradshaw, who plays the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle in the Gate production, directed by Robin Lefevre. "I think you have to take it with a certain amount of tongue in cheek. But Shaw was very courageous for his time. His view of women, and their role in society, was very forward looking. In fact, to have a woman use the word 'bloody' on stage, as Eliza does, was pretty outrageous and was probably the reason why he had such a huge success with the play after 20 years as a writer."
Pygmalion may begin as a comic romp, she adds, but that's not how it ends. "The second half is a very different play. It's about the gulf between people and the reality of class differences. It's a very sad play as well. I mean, she's struggling to be her own woman and to get on in society."
What Bradshaw finds most fascinating is that the role of Eliza was written for a 50-year-old actress called Stella Campbell, with whom the 60-year-old Shaw - though a successful public figure and supposedly happily married - was madly in love. "She was a very feisty, strong woman who was well able for him. She hated the idea of touring but knew that the American tour of Pygmalion was her pension, basically. So she wrote to Shaw, saying: 'When I was younger I was a tour de force: now that I'm an old woman I'm forced to tour.' I wouldn't be surprised if a few of those lines of razor-sharp dialogue are actually hers."
Part of Bradshaw's preparation for the role has involved taking Cockney lessons from the voice coach Robert Price - although, as she points out, the scene we all think we know, in which Eliza takes lessons in "proper speaking" from Henry Higgins, isn't actually in Pygmalion. It's from My Fair Lady.
Still, the notion of his lead actress studying a Cockney accent in order to play the part of a girl who is trying to escape from one is a beguiling sort of irony that, if it doesn't quite merit the adjective Shavian, would probably have amused the author greatly. Or maybe not. It might have driven him to an excess of fulmination, letter writing to editors - or, almost certainly if he were around these days, text messaging.
A century and a half after his birth we still haven't quite got the measure of George Bernard Shaw.
• Pygmalion opens at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, tonight
