The Play and Screen
Skinner, R. Dana
December 9, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 133 THE PLAY AND SCREEN By R. DANA SKINNER Shaw's Androcles IT IS almost pathetic to see Bernard Shaw dissect himself in public. He is so unconscious of what...
...Adaptation to screen limitations is apt to be less dangerous than the direct creative effort seeking an outlet in strange surroundings...
...He is so afraid of what the answer might be, and of the terrific consequences it would have in his life, that he takes refuge in ridicule, satire and broad irreverent farce...
...As an organization, it is certainly unhampered by other than professional ethics...
...The movies are still in rompers...
...The Guild is still seeking a blanket endorsement of its judgment in the form of season subscriptions...
...This story is to the movies what the old cheap melodrama was to the stage...
...His trouble is fear—a deep, tremulous fear of facing the truth and the strength of his own intuitive convictions and beliefs...
...It provokes chiefly laughter from an average audience...
...And all the time he is telling you in unmistakable terms just why he has never been more than a clever man, and why the mantle of greatness has always eluded him...
...Hence you will find Mr...
...Afraid to ridicule Christianity, he ridicules Christians...
...The Beautiful City RICHARD BARTHELMESS and Dorothy Gish both ^ have qualities which should make any film in which they appear jointly exhibit a modicum of distinction...
...And if, by any chance, you do not understand the pitiable weakness of the author, and judge only the result of his work without reference to its cause, you have every right to feel that Shaw has committed the unpardonable offense of ridiculing something sacred about which he knows nothing...
...There is one bit of acting, however, that merits real consideration, that of Edward G. Robinson as Caesar...
...You probably know a good many people like him...
...I doubt if an actor has ever caught up in a few inspired moments more of the hollow, pasty imbecility of the degenerating Roman empire...
...Or who can make the gesture of a hand tell as much as a spoken word...
...They will rush gleefully down the avenue of escape that Shaw opens to them...
...He is so unconscious of what he is doing, so certain that he is dissecting everyone but himself, so merciless with his knife of wit because he does not see its double edge...
...Just why the Theatre Guild should make itself a party to this offense is a matter of conjecture...
...To anyone interested in the little theatre movement, or in the possibilities of training local talent, it is worth a trip to New York to see what these Russian trainers have done with their material in so short a space of time...
...But when it comes time to tell you what they really believe, they will throw you aside with a jest, afraid to let you see within them because they are afraid to look there themselves...
...But to anyone who loves bravery and deep conviction, even when expressed in sparkling comedy, Androcles must always seem a mass of insincere and inexcusable drivel, shot through here and there by a self-revealing phrase which shows the nobility of thought from which Shaw mockingly retreats...
...You realize that he would be a great admirer of Saint Francis of Assisi, without his knowing exactly why...
...Shaw drawn irresistibly to the heroic—and promptly reducing heroism to its most ridiculous terms...
...The Guild has done an ungenerous thing in bringing it back to life...
...I noted with considerable interest that the story was "written for the screen...
...It has never shown any interest in the broader question of whether any art can be genuine or worth perpetuating which springs from moral confusion, from questionable taste, or, as in Shaw's case, from the insincerity of cowardice...
...But you also realize that he is unwilling to ask himself the great question whether he himself is a Christian or simply a deist...
...They toy with surface truths...
...He cannot avoid the subject...
...And in exposing his own timorousness, he is dissecting himself far more cruelly than the Christian straw men he sets up and carves open on the stage...
...It has committed itself this year to a sort of sub-season of Shaw repertory, of which Androcles is the second offering...
...No matter what occasional fine flashes the thoughtful person may discover in Androcles—those moments when Shaw betrays his deeper instincts—the tone of it, and its pervading philosophy, make it one of his worst plays...
...But he can and does avoid facing the issue...
...You see that he profoundly disturbed by the more obvious hypocrisies of Christianity as he has watched it practised about him...
...You will find him, in Androcles and the Lion, awed almost to reverence by the faith of the early Christian martyrs, and then reducing it to nothing but an emotional hysteria expressed in half-a-dozen individual forms...
...A Vivid Twelfth Night AN INVALUABLE lesson in what consistent and thorough training can do to enliven the stage awaits anyone fortunate enough to witness Twelfth Night as produced at the little American Laboratory Theatre, where artists of the Moscow theatre have for a year or more been training a group of young American actors...
...You will find him fascinated by a pearl—and then telling you that a pearl is only the absurd defensive secretion of a slimy oyster...
...You see that in a curious way he has a fine contempt for purely emotional religious expression, for the smug and self-satisfied, for the expression that is merely a concealed pride or that thrives on a holier than thou attitude...
...Or who can hold you entranced by the sheer exuberance of their simulated good spirits without the obvious and fatal trick of trying to project their "individual personality" across the lights...
...Which means, for the moment, that there is a certain salutary effect in testing the intrinsic worth of a story in acted or written form before unloading it on a motion picture factory...
...In theory there is no reason why stories should not be written directly for this medium as well as for the stage, for magazines, or for printed volumes...
...It has won a compelling mastery over him...
...But what perverse impulse has led them to make of Shakespeare's quite reverent character of the priest in Twelfth Night a repulsive travesty...
...There are enough people in the world today obsessed by this identical fear or cowardice to insure an audience for Androcles that will pronounce it vastly amusing...
...One can almost hear the Guild management saying that it is a "deucedly clever and amusing play"—and so it is if you think, as the Guild must think, that the faith of the martyrs is the right kind of thing to be clever about—or if your sophisticated worship of Shaw and your desire to be his dafling interpreter in America lead you to an attitude of amused contempt toward those who still hold certain facts of history and faith in reverence and honor...
...The exceptional genius may arise who can work directly and well in "shots" and "continuities" and the demands of pantomime...
...The stage and the written word are as ancient as civilization...
...Consideration for others has its place—even in art...
...Shaw's religious instincts are his most highly developed ones, it follows as a matter of course that in Androcles he violates them with an almost ferocious intensity...
...Goulding's in The Beautiful City...
...Can you imagine the delight of seeing people on the stage who actually know what to do with their hands and feet during pauses...
...The Guild production itself exaggerates the farcing of early —and, as Shaw intends it, modern—Christianity...
...But lest you think that the star system always tends to improve the quality of motion pictures, let me warn you that The Beautiful City is about as bald a piece of trash as I have seen in a considerable period of movie-going...
...In view of its present bootlicking of Shaw, and the total lack of sound judgment that that exhibits, I do not see how anyone believing in enduring standards of art, and of ethics in art, can support the Guild except as individual productions warrant...
...Where the theory breaks down at present is apparently in the lack of training and tradition of the possible screen writers...
...But the experiments of the others are apt for some time to prove as disastrous as Mr...
...As it so happens that Mr...
Vol. 3 • December 1925 • No. 5
