“A READING OF TWO PLAYS” Bernard Shaw, The Man of Destiny August Strindberg, Miss Julia Saturday, November 6, [1943] Program notes by Eric Bentley

Mimeograph on off-white paper, 2 pages stapled, printed one side each.

Black Mountain College, Saturday November 6, at 8 p.m. in the College Dining Hall
A READING OF TWO PLAYS
THE MAN OF DESTINY: Being the third or four pleasant plays by BERNARD SHAW
Cast: Guiseppe- Hines; Napoleon- Bentley; Lieutenant- Gifford; Lady-Stone.
THE MAN OF DESTINY (1896) is probably the best play in Bernard Shaw’s amazing first volume. It is also his best one-act play.
Plot: Napoleon Bonaparte, aged 27, has just won a spectacular victory at Lodi in northern Italy. He steps over at an inn, in the village of Tavazzano. He talks with the landlord, Giuseppe; with his lieutenant, a foolish, young aristocrat; and with a mysterious lady.
Theme: The play states Shaw’s view of Napoleon and of statesmanship. At first hearing the play may seem to debunk Napoleon. But it doesn’t. Shaw admires Caesar, Napoleon and Stalin. He does not admire Hitler. What is the difference? That the methods of the first three, in Shaw’s opinion, were devoted to socially useful ends. Their heroism and their useful ends. Their heroism and their ruthlessness were necessary. Shaw regards Napoleon as the instrument of the French Revolution in its fight against the reactionary powers, Austria, Russia, Prussia and England. Above all; England. For Shaw is an Irishman. He has always wished that Napoleon had won the battle of Waterloo.
Napoleon is the Shavain hero, and he differs from the hero of Teutonic Momanticism in lacking Spiritual Grandeur. Thus: an audience may laugh at Shaw’s Napoleon when he strikes poses as The Man of Destiny; but the laugh, as ever in Shaw, is on the audience. For Napoleon really was a Man of Destiny- not by virtue of posing but by virtue of genius.
Art and propaganda:- When Shaw came on the scene, the aesthetes were saying that art was superior to mere instruction. Shaw was not flustered. He said in effect: “Very well, I’ll be content to be a mere instructor. Call me a propogandist.” This is always the right reply to the aesthete, but it did Shaw harm by confirming the notion that he was not a genuine artist, but only a wisecracking preacher. The irony of Shaw’s strategy was missed and to this day audiences laugh in all the wrong places.
The time has come to call attention to the obvious. Shaw is a first-rate artist. The firm sense of fact that leads him to politics and the moral passion that makes him a propagandist- those things to not hinder him as an artist- they help.
The Man of Destiny is a beautifully orchestrated piece. Its structure is not that of a well-made play. But The Man of Destiny has both a dialectic and a music: a music of mood, of rhetoric, and of idea. The aesthetes said: Literature aspires to the condition of music. The music of the aesthetes fell flat. Shaw on the other hand said: I am only a propogandist. And the music of his plays will live.
MISS JULIA: A naturalistic tragedy……by AUGUST STRINDBERG
(The Bjorkman translation by Eric Bentley)
Case: Jean- Bentley; Christine, the cook, his fiancée- Stone; Julia- Pollet
MISS JULIA (1886) seems to me the greatest of all the naturalistic dramas, as Tristan is the greatest of music-dramas and Peer Gynt The greatest of modern poetic dramas. The preface to Miss Julia is the best essay on drama that any dramatist has given us.
Plot: Strindberg puts the lid on the coffin of a whole family and, by implication, of a whole class; the dying aristocracy. Miss Julia’s father in a Swedish count, her mother a neurotic. When the mother sets the house on fire, the count has to borrow money from a brick manufacturer; who turns out to be the mother’s lover. The father’s last resource is the mother’s private fortune, now his according to Swedish law; but to embarrass her husband she has given it to the brick manufacturer. This is Julia’s background.
Taught by her father to hate women and by her mother to hate men, Miss Julia belongs to neither sex; she can throw herself at a man yet she would “like to see the whole male sex swimming in blood.”
The play itself, in classic fashion, tells only the end of Miss Julia’s story. She seduces her father’s valet, Jean, and not only the valet’s fiancée, but the whole neighborhood finds out. The valet as a man of the people is glad to take such a revenge on his social superiors; Miss Julia, retaining the noblemen’s sense of honor, must practice the nobleman’s hardkiri.
Theme:- Life is war. In our time the war takes two forms: Class war and sex war. The battle between Jean and Miss Julia embodies both.
Some of Strindberg’s Comments:-
And what will offend simple brains is that my action cannot be traced back to a single motive, that the view point is not always the same.
Because they are modern characters, living in a period of transition mere hysterically hurried than its immediate predecessor at least, I have made my figures vacillating, out of joint torn between the old and the new.
I have avoided the symmetrical and mathematical construction of the French dialogue and have instead permitted the minds to work irregularly as they do in reality.
I have tried to abolish the division into acts. And I have done so because I have come to feat that our decreasing capacity for illusion might be unfavorably affected by intermissions.
I have resorted to three art forms: The monologue, the pantomime and the dance…I have borrowed from impressionistic painting its symmetry, its quality of abruptness…another novelty well needed would be the abolition of footlights…it would be well to experiment with strong side light on a small stage and with unpainted faces….if we could get rid of boxes with their tittering parties of diners…if first of all and last we could have a small stage and a small house, a new dramatic art might arise.
The naturalist has wiped out the idea of guilt but the cannot wipe out the results of an action: punishment, prison or fear.
E.R. Bentley