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Shaw Among the Utopians (Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre)

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/shaw.43.2.0294

1529-1480

James Armstrong,

Literature Analysis and Criticism

Siân Adiseshiah’s new book Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre is a welcome addition to utopian studies, rightfully placing Bernard Shaw at the center of a discussion of utopian thought on stage. This analysis of utopian drama—distinct from utopian prose narratives like those of Thomas More or Shaw’s longtime associate H. G. Wells—is perhaps the most extensive one to date, as previous critics have tended to write more about staging dystopias than utopias. Though focused largely on the English-speaking world, the book begins with practitioners of Old Comedy in ancient Athens and continues through to contemporary dramatists still working today. Adiseshiah also includes female writers and playwrights of color in an effort to be more inclusive than past surveys of utopian drama. The resulting work is illuminating both of the genre in general and of Shaw’s unique place in it.After an introductory chapter on the challenges of putting a utopian world on stage, Adiseshiah provides a chapter on Aristophanes and his contemporaries. The Birds of Aristophanes is perhaps the best-known play to stage a utopian society, but the chapter also spends a fair amount of time on the Greek author’s later play The Assemblywomen, which begins with a half-serious attempt at utopia before descending into sex farce (much like his quasi-utopian comedy Lysistrata, which the chapter discusses as well). Few people who are not classics scholars are likely to be familiar with the small fragments of Old Comedy by rivals of Aristophanes, which are also analyzed in this chapter. While none of their plays survive intact, Adiseshiah quotes from some of the tantalizing fragments remaining from plays attributed to Crates and Metagenes, arguing that these passages imply explorations of utopian worlds on stage that might have been similar to the imaginative musings of Aristophanes.The book follows this up with a study of the scripts published by Margaret Cavendish in the seventeenth century. These works have gained increased attention lately, as evidenced by a recent virtual staging by the Red Bull Theater of Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure. Unlike the works discussed in the previous chapter (or in any of the chapters to come), Cavendish’s plays were never staged in the author’s lifetime and might never have been intended for performance at all. Adiseshiah’s contention that closet drama was meant to be read aloud and heard has been contradicted by some theorists of closet drama, including Catherine Burroughs, whose book Closet Stages about the published scripts of Joanna Baillie makes some very different assumptions about authors printing unperformed texts. This doesn’t mean that Adiseshiah is wrong about Cavendish’s intentions, but the book does not fully engage with recent scholarship on closet drama concerning how the form might differ from performance texts clearly written for the stage. The result is a chapter about plays rarely performed (and never in the author’s lifetime) uncomfortably positioned between examinations of two dreadnoughts of the drama of their day: Aristophanes and Shaw.It is the book’s fourth chapter covering the utopian dramas of Shaw that will naturally be of the most interest to readers of this publication. Back to Methuselah is Shaw’s most famous use of utopian drama, but the chapter also addresses the utopian experiments in The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles and Farfetched Fables. Perhaps in the interest of assisting readers unfamiliar with Shaw’s self-described Meta-Biological Pentateuch, the chapter simplifies some of the plot of Methuselah. The long-lived characters in “The Thing Happens” for instance are referred to as “300-year-old characters” (113) when they still have at least a couple more decades before reaching the end of their 300-year life spans. Such minor simplifications will no doubt ease the average reader when navigating Shaw’s plot. More troubling is when Adiseshiah attempts to simplify Shaw’s ideas, referring to his concept of Creative Evolution as “an idiosyncratic application of eugenics” (99).Whatever Shaw’s complicated relationship with the eugenics movement might have been, he firmly asserted that the Life Force had to be allowed to work its own will and could not be manipulated by humans, who are merely its tools. Fortunately, the book points out that Shaw showed Creative Evolution causing a eugenic experiment to fail in The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles. Though she spends less time discussing this piece than the more purely utopian Methuselah and Farfetched Fables, Adiseshiah sees The Simpleton as setting out the preconditions for utopia. That one of those preconditions in this play is the abandonment of a eugenic experiment should serve as a caution to anyone who wishes to reduce Shaw’s notion of Creative Evolution to the narrow confines of twentieth-century eugenic movements. It is difficult to contain all of Shaw’s musings about the Life Force in a single chapter, but the book gives plenty of food for thought on how Shaw’s ideas fit in with other utopian movements.The chapter also applauds Shaw’s engagement with questions of aging by centering the experiences of elders in a utopian society. Adiseshiah sees Shaw’s rejection of gerontophobia as “a rare utopian vision of the value of old age” (128). Shaw’s plays buck other well-worn traditions of the genre as well. As the book observes, his utopian plays do not end with pat conclusions, but with poetic questions about what might come next, what new stage of Creative Evolution might arise after the latest fantastic new world. Far from seeing this as a flaw, the book recognizes Shaw as prefiguring some of the open-ended utopias that emerged later on in the twentieth century.British dramatist Howard Brenton is less famous today than he was during his heyday in the 1980s, but the book dedicates a chapter to him because he staged an open-ended progression toward utopia similar to Shaw’s Methuselah. This chapter examines Brenton’s Sore Throats, Bloody Poetry, and Greenland as a trilogy of trial and error in quest for a better world. In this sense, Brenton’s characters are similar to those of Shaw’s who—moved by the Life Force—sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed. Though the violent, intensely sexualized world of Sore Throats might seem a long way from utopia, the play expresses what Adiseshiah calls “a deep desire for something other than what is” (130). The challenge of creating a better world is taken up by the bohemian artists in Bloody Poetry, including Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Lord Byron. (Brenton’s use of historical figures to exemplify his own philosophy was nothing new, of course, as Shaw had employed this tactic as far back as The Man of Destiny.) Brenton’s trilogy finally depicts a new world in Greenland, which Adiseshiah links to Methuselah in its combination of the futuristic with the primitive and its exploration of advanced forms of communication like telepathy.The book’s final chapter focuses on utopian dramas by three contemporary writers: Claire MacDonald, Mojisola Adebayo, and Cesi Davidson. While none of these dramatists are nearly as well known as the authors previously addressed, Adiseshiah makes the case that they are each expanding the possibilities of what utopian drama can be. In fact, they expand the concept so much that she is forced to reconsider the definition of utopia itself. Adiseshiah admits that these writers “do not dramatize a utopian society, as such” (183). Still, she defends their inclusion since their plays “retain the power of the holistic utopian vision” (184). Even specialists in contemporary drama are unlikely to be familiar with the authors in the final chapter, and only time can tell if future generations will remember them at all, let alone with such heavy hitters as Aristophanes, Cavendish, and Shaw. Adiseshiah does show, however, that these experimental artists continue a tradition engaged in by previous authors of utopian comedy.By placing Shaw at the heart of this particular comic tradition, Utopian Drama helps us to appreciate him not just as a crucial playwright of the twentieth century, but as a link in a long chain stretching from ancient Athens to the avant-garde of our own time. Though Methuselah shows a progression of human beings toward disembodied thought, Adiseshiah makes a strong case that Shaw was actually engaging in body utopia, a type of writing that embraced hedonism, as did the work of Aristophanes and Cavendish. In Greek comedy, body utopia envisioned not just concord among humans, but also peaceful co-existence between humans and animals, an idea embraced by the vegetarian Shaw. Adiseshiah traces this body utopia to the species fluidity explored in the off-off-Broadway plays mounted by Davidson in the twenty-first century. Seeing how Shaw’s ideas resonate in this way right down to the present helps to make Utopian Drama a delightful read for Shavians everywhere.