Project Shaw Delves Into John Bull At The Player's Club

By Gwen Orel

Before the economic boom that became known as the Celtic Tiger, it was still not uncommon for literary people to consider Shaw a British writer, not an Irish one.

Like Oscar Wilde, his contemporary, Shaw was a Protestant who lived most of his life far from Ireland. But Shaw's first play to be a major success was his one play that looks at "the Irish question" head on: John Bull's Other Island. Last week, Project Shaw did a reading of the play in their Shaw reading series.

Project Shaw, run by David Staller and presented by his Gingold Theatrical Group, has been going strong since it began in 2006.

Since then, the Project has presented all of Shaw's 60 plays to the public.

They will begin presenting fully produced shows next year, and have started a series called "Press Cutting" which commissions contemporary theatre critics to write plays. Shaw himself worked as a critic.

The staged reading series at the Players Club in Gramercy Park (the 1888 club is full of historical mementoes from famous visitors including Edwin Booth and Mark Twain) always sell out, and the readings, all directed by Staller, are "hosted" by members of the theatrical community.

The reading of John Bull's Other Island was hosted by Michael Riedel of the New York Post, who also hosts the theatrical interview show, Theatre Talk.

Riedel, whom Staller introduced as having sold more tickets through his column than anyone else in New York ("not to The Addams Family!" Riedel quipped), gave the audience the play's historical background: commissioned by Yeats for the opening of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, the Abbey then declined the play (not seen in Ireland until 1916).

The play addresses the question of Home Rule. Prime Minister Arthur Balfour saw the production at the Royal Court four times, and encouraged King Edward VII to go. When he did, he laughed so hard he fell out of his chair.

Shaw then felt inspired to include a note in his playbills instructing audiences to pay attention, and not laugh loudly - which, when Riedel read it, naturally evoked loud laughs.

Riedel described how the play expresses Shaw's complex attitude towards Ireland, how Shaw later in his life asked that no plaque be put on his childhood home in Dublin, saying "I am now an Internationalist."

In the play, Riedel said, Shaw distinguishes between the dreamer and the man of action. "Shw had the feeling that nationalism was getting in the way of real developments" needed in the country.

Certainly, Shaw writes this in his lengthy preface to the play. But anybody familiar with Shaw's work knows you have to take his prefaces in the same spirit with which you take the note warning audiences not to laugh.

Shaw also wrote a stern preface to Pygmalion letting readers know there is no romantic tension between Henry Higgins and Eliza, and that Eliza goes off and marries Freddy. What a glum ending to My Fair Lady that would make.

Shaw often wrote his prefaces about "real life," but his plays have their own world that eludes his after-the-fact instructions.

That is also the case with the protest, reverie John Bull's Other Island. In it, Irishman Larry Doyle (played by Marc Vietor) returns to his native Rosscullen after 18 years, because his partner, Englishman Tom Broadbent (Reg Rogers), has a development scheme for the area.

Doyle has issues with dreaming; he can't say the word without exasperation. One of the very first characters we meet, still in London, is Tom Haffigan (Mark Aldrich), who is the quintessential "stage Irishman" to a T, saying "broth-of-a-boy" and "more-power-to-your-elbow."

Doyle points out "that man was never in Ireland in his life. No Irishman ever talked like that, or ever will."

"There is no "Irish race," Doyle insists, and "an Irishman's heart is nothing but his imagination." It all comes down to the climate where: "Your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather.

"You've no such colors in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh, the dreaming! The dreaming! The torturing, heartscalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!"

Imagination is such a torment that "you cant bear it without whisky."

Nobody could read this and believe Shaw was not affected by the very things he has his character rail against.

Doyle had been away 18 years at the time; Shaw, 28. In the play, Tom Broadbent also zeroes in on the specific thing Doyle fears - seeing Nora again.

Broadbent in contrast seems able to compartmentalize, able to cut to the chase, take action, move forward.

And as soon as we get to Ireland in Act Two, it's a different world - not only does a viola rendition of "She Moves Though the Fair" take us there, a man talking to an unseen grasshopper, who clicks in response (Shaw's creativity in structuring theatrical scenes is really avant garde) lets us know we are in a magical world where imagination matters.

The man, we will learn is the freethinking, fanciful lapsed Father Keegan. We are in Rosscullen - and the play is now about its fate, not Doyle's, not even Broadbent's. Broadbent takes a notion to stand for Parliament, and we watch him speak to the locals - who pretend to be impressed, aren't really, but decide to make use of him anyway. Is the play exposing English greed or Irish manipulation?

Doyle's intense suspicion and wariness against dreaming separates him from his own heart.

In a scene that recalls Lopkhain not asking Varya to marry him at the end of The Cherry Orchard (1904, Shaw almost certainly would have read it) Larry and Nora sit together without declaring themselves - until Larry leaves and Nora cries.

But Shaw, not being Chekhov, can't resist the urge to explain it later, and Larry catches up to Nora - letting her know that marrying Broadbent (who romanticized Nora before meeting her and proposes as soon as her face is seen in the moonlight) is just what he would advise her to do:

"Nora, dear, don't you understand that I'm an Irishman, and he's an Englishman. He wants you; and he grabs you. I want you; and I quarrel with you and have to go on wanting you."

Shaw is on to something here. John Doyle (no relation to the character in the play) told me when I interviewed him for Irish Connections magazine last summer that the poet W.S. Merwin observed, "all these Irish love songs are about yearning."

But the love triangle with Nora (as Riedel suggested during intermission, Shaw, brought up by a woman in a love triangle, often wrote relationships that way) is a small part of the play.

It's one thing for such yearning to live in art and imagination but devastating as a system of government and capital (in fact, Nora's etherealness, Doyle points out, has a lot to do with her not eating enough).

Nora's fate is symbolic of the larger story, not the point of it. Otherwise how to justify the funniest scene in the play, when townsman Barney Doran, played by Alexander Sovronsky, describes Broadbent driving a pig in a car through town?

No doubt this is the scene that had the King break his chair. But it's funny on so many levels - when Broadbent enters he retells the story, taking it seriously. Doyle knows that Broadbent's candidacy is safe:

"He's not an Irishman. He'll never know they're laughing at him; and while they're laughing he'll win the seat... Suppose you had a vote! Which would you rather give it to? The man who told the story of Haffigan's pig Barney Doran's way or Broadbent's way?"

Ultimately, though Doyle rants, Broadbent is the protagonist (you could argue with his well-meaning obtuseness, greed and sentimentality he's a sort of Stage Englishman).

Nationalism is a deception - the Irish small farmer Matt Haffigan argues with Broadbent's servant Hodson and in the end discover rural and urban oppression are equally destructive (when produced in Ireland in 1916, this scene got alternating applause from the dress circle and gallery, taking sides in the argument).

"There's a sense of journey each character takes," Staller told me. "Everybody is making unfamiliar choices. Broadbent's journey is transparent and profound. The people in the village who are insulated and never left are changed when the outsiders come in. Keegan is one of the most provocative, complex characters Shaw ever wrote. His speech at the end is thrilling. I want to hug Shaw and thank him."

Although in the action of the play, Broadbent gets Rosscullen, and he gets Nora, Keegan's speech captures the audience's imagination.

Keegan tells Broadbent and Doyle just what their redevelopment will do, how they would even capitalize on bankruptcy (all too relevant these days) and how the syndicate will be as efficient as any. But in his dreams Ireland:

"... is a country where the State is the Church and the Church the people: three in one and one in three. It is a commonwealth in which work is play and play is life: three in one and one in three. It is a temple in which the priest is the worshipper and the worshipper the worshipped: three in one and one in three. It is a godhead in which all life is human and all humanity divine: three in one and one in three. It is, in short, the dream of a madman."

Keegan is a visionary like St. Joan - or Shaw. His speech reveals a vision of Ireland not far from Yeats' - a place that is holy ground.