Up where my mother has her summer home, a filament-borne, leaf-wolfing swarm of inch worms will hatch out every 12th year or so. Nature couldn’t survive greater frequency than that. And on Broadway, Shaw’s rhetorical infestation, Man and Superman, has returned comet-like, on its wobbly 12-year ellipse (the last New York production was in 1966), to bombast a fresh half-generation of innocents.
Shaw, who would pay for this verbal incontinence by having to live and listen well past the unconscionable age of ninety, had insistent doubts about his status, past-present-future, in Western intellectual history. He felt that great popular éclat would preclude any serious evaluation. Which feeling was correct; and probably fortunate: tousheis Shaw-the-Epigrammatist. Still, Man and Superman has, at solar plexus, 73 minutes (counting laughter) of ersatz Platonic dialogue: his “Don Juan in Hell” scene, famous—as most famous works are—to the degree it has been left unread. Here Don Juan, Lucifer, Doña Ana, and Mozart’s Statue play four-wall handball with 15-month-pregnant ideas: the Symposium wedged into The School for Scandal. Shaw saw himself as philosopher-revolutionist (the play has been subtitled “a comedy and a philosophy”). But Shaw’s genius is comic: and satire (some derivative polemicizing aside) will be his perigee when it comes to any real metaphysical leap. In the matter of revolution, well. . . Fabians were middle-class and polite after all: violence or decisive action seemed uncouth to them. Indeed no man can be revolutionary who has left his native Dublin for Hertfordshire. It takes some courage and certainly some occasional vulgar nerve to remain Irish on a full-time basis.
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