Pygmalion and Three Other Plays

THE HIGHER DRAMA PUT OUT OF ACTION

The effect of the war on the London theatres may now be imagined. The beds and the bevies drove every higher form of art out of it. Rents went up to an unprecedented figure. At the same time prices doubled everywhere except at the theatre pay-boxes, and raised the expenses of management to such a degree that unless the houses were quite full every night, profit was impossible. Even bare solvency could not be attained without a very wide popularity. Now what had made serious drama possible to a limited extent before the war was that a play could pay its way even if the theatre were only half full until Saturday and three-quarters full then. A manager who was an enthusiast and a desperately hard worker, with an occasional grant-in-aid from an artistically disposed millionaire, and a due proportion of those rare and happy accidents by which plays of the higher sort turn out to be pot-boilers as well, could hold out for some years, by which time a relay might arrive in the person of another enthusiast. Thus and not otherwise occurred that remarkable revival of the British drama at the begi

Howbeit, the fact that my plays effected a lodgment on the London stage, and were presently followed by the plays of Granville Barker, Gilbert Murray, John Masefield, St. John Han kin, Laurence Housman, Arnold Be

CHURCH AND THEATRE

I do not suppose many people care particularly. We are not brought up to care; and a sense of the national importance of the theatre is not born in mankind: the natural man, like so many of the soldiers at the begi

276

In the person of King Edward VII, who attended Shaw’s play John Bull’s Other Island (1904).

277

J. M. Barrie (see footnote to page 320) and Shaw, who were neighbors and friends.

278

Cathedral.

279

Music-hall turn by the animal imitators the Brothers Griffiths that parodied the French tightrope walker Charles Blondin (1824 — 1897).

280

The decor of the Adelphi Theatre was by Scottish architect Robert Adam (1728-1792).

281

Play by French dramatist Eugene Brieux, adapted into English in 1914 as Damaged Goods, by John Pollock.

282

Reference to English theater manager A. E. F. Horniman (1860-1937), who presented Shaw’s first publicly produced play, Arms and the Man, in 1894.