Man and Superman and Three Other Plays Read Online Free Page B

still a play about costs, but not in the sense of capitalism’s profits and losses. Rather, it teaches the lesson that everything, even reputed social progress, comes at a cost, sometimes at the cost of humanity.
    Shaw’s distinctness as a playwright in Mrs. Warren’s Profession is not exhausted by either his mixture of comic and tragic tones, or his evenhanded, if not downright ambiguous, presentation of both sides of a given issue; his distinctness is also defined by his bold and unsettling (not vulgar or obscene) treatment of sexuality. There is a momentary yet extraordinary sexual tension in the opening of the second act between Mrs. Warren and her daughter’s suitor, Frank, a tension that Shaw presents as arising on the instant and subsiding as quickly and spontaneously as it arose, just as such tensions rise and fall in life, without specific impetus and without furtherance. As Frank helps Mrs. Warren take off her shawl, Shaw’s stage directions indicate that he gives “her shoulders the most delicate possible little caress with hisfingers.” Mrs. Warren, while continuing her idle conversation with him, glances “back at him for an instant from the corner of her eye as she detects the pressure” (p. 47). Interestingly, when Shaw revised the text for a subsequent publication (and after more experience with staging his plays), he changed the stage direction to an action more readily detected by the audience: “gallantly giving her shoulders a very perceptible squeeze.” A camera could easily convey the action and its significance in the earlier version, but on stage the new formulation would be more clear to the audience.
    As the scene progresses, what began as a silent, subtle exchange of sexual signals between Frank and his girlfriend’s mother becomes something more than mere naughtiness. Frank continues to flirt with Mrs. Warren by asking her to take him with her to Vienna, by teasing her with his playacting, and by using his wooing voice on her until finally he makes a cheeky remark that provokes her to pretend “to box his ears.” So far the bantering, though odd, seems not too far beyond the playful and harmless. But then Mrs. Warren looks at his “pretty, upturned face for a moment, tempted. At last she kisses him and immediately turns away, out of patience with herself” (p. 48). What motivates her to do this? Sexual competition with her Cambridge-educated daughter? An aging woman’s impulsive attempt to assert her continuing sexual attractiveness? A momentary surge of sexual appetite? This moment is genuinely Shavian because of its fidelity to the suddenness of human impulse and the mysteriousness of human motivation.
    As rapidly as the impulse arises in Mrs. Warren, it subsides and changes into half-hearted regret: “There! I shouldn’t have done that. I am wicked. Never you mind, my dear: it’s only a motherly kiss.” (The spaced lettering in “a m” was Shaw’s way of telling the actor where the accent should fall in the delivery of the line.) Her self-reproach would be more convincing if she did not quite relish her own misbehavior so much, which relish the emphasis on “am” enacts. But even more Shavian (or ironic) is her use of the word “motherly” here. Her kiss is “motherly” only in the sense that Jocasta’s kisses to Oedipus were “motherly.” And her “motherly” kiss utterly undermines any “motherly” claims she makes upon Vivie in the final scene of the play. Shaw’s characters are complex and contradictory, and he gives them a moment-to-moment life on stage that is as unpredictable and funny and disturbing as that of anyone you are likely to meet on the planet Earth.
    Mrs. Warren’s Profession would be the last play Shaw would write in Ibsen’s mood, meaning a play in which Shaw almost always compresses his humor into irony and allows