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It is after dinner in January 1906, in the library in Lady Britomart Undershaft's house in Wilton Crescent. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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I had seen the 1940 film version of this story before reading the play, but found myself understanding the longer philosophical speeches better in the written form, so gained new enjoyment from Shaw's(sometimes rather long-winded)writing.
Twenty first century readers should not be put off by the writers Victorian style, there is much food for thought in the underlying messages of this play.
Indeed, Undershaft feels that poverty is the primordial crime from which all other crimes -- burglary, murder -- spring, and that it is better to give a poor man a job so he can afford to live rather than spend public money on methods of punishing him should he violate the law in his efforts to afford to live. Undershaft moralizes when he speaks, but in actuality he scoffs at what he considers ordinary Christian morals of the kind professed by his daughter Barbara, who has joined the Salvation Army in her fervid desire to help the poor and has attained the rank of major. She works at a shelter doling out bread and milk to the downtrodden and trying to find work for the unemployed, but her real goal is to bring them to "salvation" by raising them to a higher state of spirituality. When her fiance, a scholar of Greek named Adolphus Cusins, who by a certain twist of logic happens to be his own cousin, reveals himself to be a foundling, Undershaft decides he's found his heir.
Although the play reflects the perspectives that Shaw, as a Socialist, had on the effects of poverty on morality and society, he doesn't seem to take sides with his characters and instead lets them be funny within the context of their respective social classes. His idle rich characters are lovably comical, like the mentally vapid trio of Undershaft's son Stephen (who wouldn't know what to do with his father's armaments business even if he were qualified to inherit it), daughter Sarah, and her fiance Charles Lomax. His impoverished characters -- those who come to the Salvation Army shelter for handouts -- can be honorably industrious like Peter Shirley or pugnacious and troublesome like Bill Walker. If Undershaft, for all his willingness to feed his fortune by manufacturing items that shed the blood of millions, represents the right way to fix poverty and Barbara the wrong way, why is the play named after her? I think it's possibly because her morality is one with which most theatergoers of the day could identify, while Undershaft's is idiosyncratic to say the least.
So, not much has changed. The world of the play is a complex web of moral ambiguity, hiding the most murderous of crimes. Or, are they really crimes at all? You be the judge.
This is a play worth reading. But if you are interested in the morals, or lack of them, in gun-running, and don't like reading plays, try "Lord of War," the film with Nicholas Cage.
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