Abstracts
Saturday, 17 July
Panel 1: The Devil’s Disciple, Redux
James Armstrong, “Comic and Tragic Adultery in Shaw and O’Neill”
Though Bernard Shaw referred to The Devil's Disciple as a melodrama, the play's stage history confirms it as a comedy. Utilizing the tropes of melodrama, the piece sets up a nearly farcical plot in which a married woman is tempted to commit adultery. Shaw comically subverts marriage itself, implying that Dudgeon could be the heroine's true husband, while her legal marriage might be a lie. O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms essentially uses this same formula, showing a heroine tempted to commit adultery with a man who might be her spiritual husband in spite of her legal marriage. However, O'Neill utilizes this setup for a devastating tragedy rather than the comedy of Shaw. This paper examines how The Devil's Disciple and Desire Under the Elms engage with different stage traditions of adultery. In a comedy like Shaw's, the key to unlocking laughs is portraying the mutability of character. Identity becomes destabilized, and the audience delights in watching one person transform into another's role as easily as exchanging coats. For a tragedy like O'Neill's, though, protagonists must cling to their one authentic identity in spite of death itself. Audiences instead watch in tense anticipation as characters embrace individual passion regardless of societal consequences. Observing the plays in tandem helps to illuminate starkly different strategies for dealing with strikingly similar situations.
Ellen Dolgin, “Can the Sheltering Arms of Elms Unearth Stone? O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms as Tragic Myth Across Time”
Set on a farm in 1850s New England, O’Neill’s 1924 play melds the Greek tragedy of Euripides (Hippolytus), Racine’s adaptation (Phaedra), and the American Dream of self-created identity, prosperity, and the urge to “go west.” The generations of happy family life that accompany this American myth are as absent in this play as they are in the Dudgeon home in Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. The bitterness of Mrs. Dudgeon is more of a pattern to foreground what O’Neill will present about parental power. Despite the farm’s supposed beauty, its 75-year-old patriarch, Ephraim Cabot, has worked his first two wives to death, and alienated his three sons, who hate nothing more than their father. More stones than bucolic beauty comprise the landscape---offset by the elms that drape around the place, wrapped like shawls around women’s arms. The play’s opening scenes with only the sons: two brothers from the first marriage, and one from the second, convey the pain-- both physical and emotional—that lead quickly to the oldest two heading to California’s Gold Rush, and the youngest, Eben, remaining on the land that he knows belonged to his mother and which he determines to retain. Their father returns, with bride #3, forty years younger than he. Clearly, she’s in it for the land. Thus the triad of father/husband, wife, and youngest son will become a triangle of tragedy. This paper examines the setting, the love affair between Eben and Abbie, and the full measure of tragedy that even contemporary productions of this play find “shocking.” While far easier to enumerate the stark contrasts in style between O’Neill’s psychological and Shaw’s social critiques, I will aim also to note the intersections of what these two playwrights press audiences to absorb and learn from dysfunctional family drama.
Brigitte Bogar, “The Operatic Devil, vol. 2: The Opera by Dr. Paul Whear based on Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple”
The Devil's Disciple by Bernard Shaw is also the title of an operatic version from 1976 by Paul Whear. As one of the earliest American operas to be based on The Devil’s Disciple - it begs the question, why it not make it into the general repertoire? Dr. Whear is to this day a great admirer of Shaws plays, especially the The Devil's Disciple and Saint Joan. However as an opera The Devil’s Disciple was one of his disappointments. While dr. Whear was very excited about writing it, it was never produced, and the opera never finished due to lack of funding. There is just the one act completed, though there may be sketches of the other acts. The opera was planned to be in 2 acts. This paper will examine the struggles of converting Shaw’ plays into an opera. It will also examines the existing parts of Whear’s score to The Devil’s Disciple and the libretto by Joan Mead. In addition, it will draw on an interview with the composer conducted by James Goode in September 2020.
Panel 2: Shaw &
Mary Christian, “Growing Up Like Romola: Shaw’s Assessment of George Eliot”
In an apparently casual throw-off line in Major Barbara, the Salvation Army shelter guest Rummy Mitchens explains that her nickname is “Short for Romola. . . . It was out of a new book. Somebody me mother wanted me to grow up like” (Bodley Head III, 97). Rummy, I suggest, is one of several characters through which Shaw’s plays echo or parody George Eliot’s novels. Eliot, one of the leading literary voices of the generation preceding Shaw’s, provoked controversy in the mid-nineteenth century for championing then-iconoclastic ideas such as evolution and secularism—ideas that had entered mainstream discourse by the time Shaw began writing. Hence, in Shaw’s early plays, Eliot’s name is synonymous with formerly bold ideas grown obsolete. Despite his expressed disdain, however, Shaw remains concerned with problems that are central to Eliot’s fiction, though their solutions differ markedly. Both authors depict transitional historical moments in which characters find their beliefs challenged and must strive toward new understandings of reality. Eliot primarily draws attention to the ways such transitions impact individuals, shaping their actions and experience. An evolving world, her writings suggest, offers few certainties except the continued need for human fellowship. Shaw, more concerned with collective life, distrusts such prescriptions of individual empathy. While compassion might be one necessary ingredient for effective societies, in Rummy Mitchens’s world it can be rendered ineffective by faulty social structures. Individual efforts at fellowship, Shaw concludes, can ultimately accomplish little without socialist reform and continued evolution driven by the Life Force.
Oscar Giner, “Enemies of God: Revolution in Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple and Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna”
This essay compares/contrasts Lope de Vega’s comedia and Bernard Shaw’s melodrama. Both plays narrate stories of peasant revolts against established religious and political orders. Both works reveal a parallel development of artists/philosophers who arrive—across the span of centuries—to the same dramatic formula of “two trestles, four boards, and a passion” for the purposes of play-going and religious conversion. In Lope’s play, the figure of the Comendador is based on the dramatic character of Lucifer from religious drama, whose main agency is to destroy the honra (divine grace) safeguarded by the institutions and traditions of the people of Fuenteovejuna. In Shaw’s drama, the Devil figure (Dudgeon) is in the throes of the Life Force, and becomes the heroic saint of a New Order by opposing the empty forms and outdated rituals of 18th century American Puritan institutions.[1] Honra sustains the peasant revolt in Lope’s Fuenteovejuna; the Shavian Life Force animates the American Revolution and the revolt of The Devil’s Disciple in Shaw’s melodrama.
Jean Reynolds, "Milton in the Margins: Language Issues in Pygmalion"
If we follow Jacques Derrida’s advice about paying attention to the marginal elements in a written work, we will discover a number of intriguing marginal figures in Pygmalion: Galatea, Pygmalion, and Cinderella, for example, along with the ghosts of Mrs Warren and Candida, who help shape Eliza's story even though we never see them. And there's one more—the most formidable marginal personage in the play: English poet John Milton (1608 to 1674), author of Paradise Lost and one of Henry Higgins’s literary heroes. Although Milton is one of the most important literary figures in English literature, he did most of his prose writing in Latin. Milton was the victim of a language fallacy—the widespread belief that Latin was a more precise language than English could ever be. Shaw’s formal education was organized around that fallacy, which lingered well into the twentieth century. Today we no longer believe that some languages are better than others. But what about people who never master the basic grammatical principles of a language? There’s a widespread assumption that correct grammar is essential for intellectual development. Some Shaw critics claim that Eliza Doolittle doesn’t attain full human status until she masters Standard English. My presentation will use examples from Pygmalion to challenge this myth (and others) about the English language.
Sunday, 18 July
Panel 3: Shaw and Ireland: “My Motto is an Ireland for All”
Leah Benson, "Shaw and the National Gallery of Ireland: A Priceless Education"
In his last will and testament, completed just before his 94th birthday, Bernard Shaw chose to bequeath the posthumous royalties from his estate to three cultural institutions which, he said, had helped him enormously in his formative years. True to this intention, when he died in November 1950, he left a third of his royalties to the National Gallery of Ireland. He called it the “cherished asylum of my boyhood”, as he had spent many happy hours wandering through the gallery’s rooms as a young man, having left school at just 14 years of age. He later said that he was leaving the funds to the gallery as it was the place “to which I owe much of the only real education I ever got as a boy in Eire”. To mark 70 years since the death of GBS as well as the expiration of his copyright in 2020 the National Gallery curated an exhibition looking at the way in which the life of George Bernard Shaw connected with the institution. This talk will look at Shaw’s relationship with the NGI as told by the archive collections and also the impact of his remarkable gift to the Irish nation.
Susanne Colleary, "O'Flaherty V.C.: Satire as a Shavian Agenda"
Colleary discusses how Shaw wields the comic weapon of satire in O’Flaherty VC, employing both character trope and text to critique the patriotic and nationalist fervour of the period. He portrays the women in O’Flaherty V.C. as comic, and at times, ironic stereotypes representative of Ireland’s insularity. Chapter 8 investigates that insularity that stymies Irish progress and keeps the women tied to the petty jealousies of town land politics and perpetuating penurious states. It argues that Shaw’s creation of the women’s stock-in-trade performances highlight the chasm between the idealized perception of Mother Ireland and the reality of the harsh poverty of daily life that permeated these ‘flesh and blood’ women’s lives.
Audrey McNamara, "The Devil's Disciple Wearing Green"
McNamara suggests an analysis that focuses on the burgeoning Irish undertones of the play especially in the third and final act. Written in 1896 during a decade that was to prove instrumental in changing the course of Irish history, The Devil’s Disciple deals with the American War of Independence and the opposition to British rule within America. Set in New England in the year of 1777, it is no accident that the themes of the play mirror the growing political and social unrest in Ireland at the last decade of the nineteenth century. Shaw said of the play ‘that there never was a play more certain to be written than The Devil’s Disciple at the end of the nineteenth century. The age was visibly pregnant with it.’ (Shaw, PFP 26) Shaw implied that in setting the action during the American Revolution in The Devils’ Disciple, it made it culturally equivalent to modern Ireland. (Holroyd 222)
Panel 4: Shaw’s International Reception
Rosalie Rahal Haddad, “The Círculo de Atores and Bernard Shaw in Brazil”
The Círculo de Atores [Circle of Actors] was created in 2013 by actor and producer Sergio Mastropasqua in São Paulo, aiming to spread Bernard Shaw’s ideas and works in twenty-first-century Brazil. In 2018 I became the independent producer of this group in an attempt to make Bernard Shaw a household name among theater professionals in Brazil. In 2018 and 2019 I produced Mrs. Warren’s Profession and The Millionairess in São Paulo. In honor of the seventieth anniversary of Shaw’s death, the Círculo de Atores promoted a season with both plays under the name 2 X SHAW. For the first time in Brazil, two plays by that author were staged in the same program every other day in August and September 2019. This presentation intends to describe and highlight the efforts of a theatrical team in promoting Shaw in Brazil.
Michael O’Hara, “The Devil’s Disciple – Reception in North America”
This presentation traces the reception of The Devil's Disciple in North America, beginning with Richard Mansfield’s early success up through the 21st century, with special attention given to the one early (Mansfield), one mid-century (the five productions by the Federal Theatre Project in five cities across the United States: Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Newark, and New Orleans), and one late 20th/early 21st century example with the hope of suggesting how the play’s position in Shaw’s oeuvre may have changed.
Vania Papanikolaou, “The Spirit of a Devil in the Modern Greek Theatre: Political and Satirical Versions of The Devil’s Disciple”
The Devil’s Disciple is well-known in Greek theatre under the title The Man of the Devil. Of the thirteen plays by Shaw that were staged in Greece between 1907 and 1974, the “satirical melodrama,” as characterized -- for the very first time -- by the press, was staged only three times. In 1934, it was first staged on the Central Scene of the National Theatre, directed by Fotos Politis; then in 1946, by the theatrical company “Aulaia” (“Curtain”), directed by Takis Mouzenidis. Finally, eight years later, in 1954, it was once again performed at the National Theatre of Greece, under Alexis Solomos’s direction. Based on the study of unpublished translated manuscript of the National Theatre, the theatrical reviews of periodical and daily press and the pictorial material of the productions, the paper aims to investigate the three aforementioned different directorial approaches of Shaw’s play over three decades. Did the stage directors approach The Devil's Disciple as a groundbreaking political play or as a conventional realistic drama? By extension, did they confront Shaw as a socialist rebel or as a philosopher with a weird sense of humor?
Yulia Skalnaya, “‘Satan’s Apostle’”: First Russian Translations and Performance of Shaw’s Devil’s Disciple”
This paper concentrates on the early presence of The Devil’s Disciple (1897) on Russian literary and theatrical stage. The aim of this research is to consider the first three translations of the play made by I. Danilov, N. Efros (journalist, dramatist, and theatre critic), and A. Deytch (one of the main Shavian scholars and translators in the USSR) highlighting the differences in translators’ approaches, the use of connotative power of words to create a more detailed image of the characters, as well as certain cuts, adjustments and even additions introduced in the latest version of the text. The main focus of analysis is going to be the first translation of the play made by I. Danilov and edited by K. Chukovsky. This was Chukovsky’s first introduction to Shaw’s oeuvre and later resulted in a series articles dedicated to Shaw’s works and their influence on Russian theatre. Moreover, issued in 1908, that translation allowed the revolutionary mood of Shaw’s play to resonate within Russian society after the events of 1905–1907 known as the First Russian Revolution. And it was immediately used for a stage production by P. Gaideburov, the founder of the Itinerant Theatre in Saint Petersburg. Special attention is paid to Gaideburov’s artistic programme, the reasons behind choosing Shaw’s play for staging and the production itself.
Panel 1: The Devil’s Disciple, Redux
James Armstrong, “Comic and Tragic Adultery in Shaw and O’Neill”
Though Bernard Shaw referred to The Devil's Disciple as a melodrama, the play's stage history confirms it as a comedy. Utilizing the tropes of melodrama, the piece sets up a nearly farcical plot in which a married woman is tempted to commit adultery. Shaw comically subverts marriage itself, implying that Dudgeon could be the heroine's true husband, while her legal marriage might be a lie. O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms essentially uses this same formula, showing a heroine tempted to commit adultery with a man who might be her spiritual husband in spite of her legal marriage. However, O'Neill utilizes this setup for a devastating tragedy rather than the comedy of Shaw. This paper examines how The Devil's Disciple and Desire Under the Elms engage with different stage traditions of adultery. In a comedy like Shaw's, the key to unlocking laughs is portraying the mutability of character. Identity becomes destabilized, and the audience delights in watching one person transform into another's role as easily as exchanging coats. For a tragedy like O'Neill's, though, protagonists must cling to their one authentic identity in spite of death itself. Audiences instead watch in tense anticipation as characters embrace individual passion regardless of societal consequences. Observing the plays in tandem helps to illuminate starkly different strategies for dealing with strikingly similar situations.
Ellen Dolgin, “Can the Sheltering Arms of Elms Unearth Stone? O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms as Tragic Myth Across Time”
Set on a farm in 1850s New England, O’Neill’s 1924 play melds the Greek tragedy of Euripides (Hippolytus), Racine’s adaptation (Phaedra), and the American Dream of self-created identity, prosperity, and the urge to “go west.” The generations of happy family life that accompany this American myth are as absent in this play as they are in the Dudgeon home in Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. The bitterness of Mrs. Dudgeon is more of a pattern to foreground what O’Neill will present about parental power. Despite the farm’s supposed beauty, its 75-year-old patriarch, Ephraim Cabot, has worked his first two wives to death, and alienated his three sons, who hate nothing more than their father. More stones than bucolic beauty comprise the landscape---offset by the elms that drape around the place, wrapped like shawls around women’s arms. The play’s opening scenes with only the sons: two brothers from the first marriage, and one from the second, convey the pain-- both physical and emotional—that lead quickly to the oldest two heading to California’s Gold Rush, and the youngest, Eben, remaining on the land that he knows belonged to his mother and which he determines to retain. Their father returns, with bride #3, forty years younger than he. Clearly, she’s in it for the land. Thus the triad of father/husband, wife, and youngest son will become a triangle of tragedy. This paper examines the setting, the love affair between Eben and Abbie, and the full measure of tragedy that even contemporary productions of this play find “shocking.” While far easier to enumerate the stark contrasts in style between O’Neill’s psychological and Shaw’s social critiques, I will aim also to note the intersections of what these two playwrights press audiences to absorb and learn from dysfunctional family drama.
Brigitte Bogar, “The Operatic Devil, vol. 2: The Opera by Dr. Paul Whear based on Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple”
The Devil's Disciple by Bernard Shaw is also the title of an operatic version from 1976 by Paul Whear. As one of the earliest American operas to be based on The Devil’s Disciple - it begs the question, why it not make it into the general repertoire? Dr. Whear is to this day a great admirer of Shaws plays, especially the The Devil's Disciple and Saint Joan. However as an opera The Devil’s Disciple was one of his disappointments. While dr. Whear was very excited about writing it, it was never produced, and the opera never finished due to lack of funding. There is just the one act completed, though there may be sketches of the other acts. The opera was planned to be in 2 acts. This paper will examine the struggles of converting Shaw’ plays into an opera. It will also examines the existing parts of Whear’s score to The Devil’s Disciple and the libretto by Joan Mead. In addition, it will draw on an interview with the composer conducted by James Goode in September 2020.
Panel 2: Shaw &
Mary Christian, “Growing Up Like Romola: Shaw’s Assessment of George Eliot”
In an apparently casual throw-off line in Major Barbara, the Salvation Army shelter guest Rummy Mitchens explains that her nickname is “Short for Romola. . . . It was out of a new book. Somebody me mother wanted me to grow up like” (Bodley Head III, 97). Rummy, I suggest, is one of several characters through which Shaw’s plays echo or parody George Eliot’s novels. Eliot, one of the leading literary voices of the generation preceding Shaw’s, provoked controversy in the mid-nineteenth century for championing then-iconoclastic ideas such as evolution and secularism—ideas that had entered mainstream discourse by the time Shaw began writing. Hence, in Shaw’s early plays, Eliot’s name is synonymous with formerly bold ideas grown obsolete. Despite his expressed disdain, however, Shaw remains concerned with problems that are central to Eliot’s fiction, though their solutions differ markedly. Both authors depict transitional historical moments in which characters find their beliefs challenged and must strive toward new understandings of reality. Eliot primarily draws attention to the ways such transitions impact individuals, shaping their actions and experience. An evolving world, her writings suggest, offers few certainties except the continued need for human fellowship. Shaw, more concerned with collective life, distrusts such prescriptions of individual empathy. While compassion might be one necessary ingredient for effective societies, in Rummy Mitchens’s world it can be rendered ineffective by faulty social structures. Individual efforts at fellowship, Shaw concludes, can ultimately accomplish little without socialist reform and continued evolution driven by the Life Force.
Oscar Giner, “Enemies of God: Revolution in Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple and Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna”
This essay compares/contrasts Lope de Vega’s comedia and Bernard Shaw’s melodrama. Both plays narrate stories of peasant revolts against established religious and political orders. Both works reveal a parallel development of artists/philosophers who arrive—across the span of centuries—to the same dramatic formula of “two trestles, four boards, and a passion” for the purposes of play-going and religious conversion. In Lope’s play, the figure of the Comendador is based on the dramatic character of Lucifer from religious drama, whose main agency is to destroy the honra (divine grace) safeguarded by the institutions and traditions of the people of Fuenteovejuna. In Shaw’s drama, the Devil figure (Dudgeon) is in the throes of the Life Force, and becomes the heroic saint of a New Order by opposing the empty forms and outdated rituals of 18th century American Puritan institutions.[1] Honra sustains the peasant revolt in Lope’s Fuenteovejuna; the Shavian Life Force animates the American Revolution and the revolt of The Devil’s Disciple in Shaw’s melodrama.
Jean Reynolds, "Milton in the Margins: Language Issues in Pygmalion"
If we follow Jacques Derrida’s advice about paying attention to the marginal elements in a written work, we will discover a number of intriguing marginal figures in Pygmalion: Galatea, Pygmalion, and Cinderella, for example, along with the ghosts of Mrs Warren and Candida, who help shape Eliza's story even though we never see them. And there's one more—the most formidable marginal personage in the play: English poet John Milton (1608 to 1674), author of Paradise Lost and one of Henry Higgins’s literary heroes. Although Milton is one of the most important literary figures in English literature, he did most of his prose writing in Latin. Milton was the victim of a language fallacy—the widespread belief that Latin was a more precise language than English could ever be. Shaw’s formal education was organized around that fallacy, which lingered well into the twentieth century. Today we no longer believe that some languages are better than others. But what about people who never master the basic grammatical principles of a language? There’s a widespread assumption that correct grammar is essential for intellectual development. Some Shaw critics claim that Eliza Doolittle doesn’t attain full human status until she masters Standard English. My presentation will use examples from Pygmalion to challenge this myth (and others) about the English language.
Sunday, 18 July
Panel 3: Shaw and Ireland: “My Motto is an Ireland for All”
Leah Benson, "Shaw and the National Gallery of Ireland: A Priceless Education"
In his last will and testament, completed just before his 94th birthday, Bernard Shaw chose to bequeath the posthumous royalties from his estate to three cultural institutions which, he said, had helped him enormously in his formative years. True to this intention, when he died in November 1950, he left a third of his royalties to the National Gallery of Ireland. He called it the “cherished asylum of my boyhood”, as he had spent many happy hours wandering through the gallery’s rooms as a young man, having left school at just 14 years of age. He later said that he was leaving the funds to the gallery as it was the place “to which I owe much of the only real education I ever got as a boy in Eire”. To mark 70 years since the death of GBS as well as the expiration of his copyright in 2020 the National Gallery curated an exhibition looking at the way in which the life of George Bernard Shaw connected with the institution. This talk will look at Shaw’s relationship with the NGI as told by the archive collections and also the impact of his remarkable gift to the Irish nation.
Susanne Colleary, "O'Flaherty V.C.: Satire as a Shavian Agenda"
Colleary discusses how Shaw wields the comic weapon of satire in O’Flaherty VC, employing both character trope and text to critique the patriotic and nationalist fervour of the period. He portrays the women in O’Flaherty V.C. as comic, and at times, ironic stereotypes representative of Ireland’s insularity. Chapter 8 investigates that insularity that stymies Irish progress and keeps the women tied to the petty jealousies of town land politics and perpetuating penurious states. It argues that Shaw’s creation of the women’s stock-in-trade performances highlight the chasm between the idealized perception of Mother Ireland and the reality of the harsh poverty of daily life that permeated these ‘flesh and blood’ women’s lives.
Audrey McNamara, "The Devil's Disciple Wearing Green"
McNamara suggests an analysis that focuses on the burgeoning Irish undertones of the play especially in the third and final act. Written in 1896 during a decade that was to prove instrumental in changing the course of Irish history, The Devil’s Disciple deals with the American War of Independence and the opposition to British rule within America. Set in New England in the year of 1777, it is no accident that the themes of the play mirror the growing political and social unrest in Ireland at the last decade of the nineteenth century. Shaw said of the play ‘that there never was a play more certain to be written than The Devil’s Disciple at the end of the nineteenth century. The age was visibly pregnant with it.’ (Shaw, PFP 26) Shaw implied that in setting the action during the American Revolution in The Devils’ Disciple, it made it culturally equivalent to modern Ireland. (Holroyd 222)
Panel 4: Shaw’s International Reception
Rosalie Rahal Haddad, “The Círculo de Atores and Bernard Shaw in Brazil”
The Círculo de Atores [Circle of Actors] was created in 2013 by actor and producer Sergio Mastropasqua in São Paulo, aiming to spread Bernard Shaw’s ideas and works in twenty-first-century Brazil. In 2018 I became the independent producer of this group in an attempt to make Bernard Shaw a household name among theater professionals in Brazil. In 2018 and 2019 I produced Mrs. Warren’s Profession and The Millionairess in São Paulo. In honor of the seventieth anniversary of Shaw’s death, the Círculo de Atores promoted a season with both plays under the name 2 X SHAW. For the first time in Brazil, two plays by that author were staged in the same program every other day in August and September 2019. This presentation intends to describe and highlight the efforts of a theatrical team in promoting Shaw in Brazil.
Michael O’Hara, “The Devil’s Disciple – Reception in North America”
This presentation traces the reception of The Devil's Disciple in North America, beginning with Richard Mansfield’s early success up through the 21st century, with special attention given to the one early (Mansfield), one mid-century (the five productions by the Federal Theatre Project in five cities across the United States: Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Newark, and New Orleans), and one late 20th/early 21st century example with the hope of suggesting how the play’s position in Shaw’s oeuvre may have changed.
Vania Papanikolaou, “The Spirit of a Devil in the Modern Greek Theatre: Political and Satirical Versions of The Devil’s Disciple”
The Devil’s Disciple is well-known in Greek theatre under the title The Man of the Devil. Of the thirteen plays by Shaw that were staged in Greece between 1907 and 1974, the “satirical melodrama,” as characterized -- for the very first time -- by the press, was staged only three times. In 1934, it was first staged on the Central Scene of the National Theatre, directed by Fotos Politis; then in 1946, by the theatrical company “Aulaia” (“Curtain”), directed by Takis Mouzenidis. Finally, eight years later, in 1954, it was once again performed at the National Theatre of Greece, under Alexis Solomos’s direction. Based on the study of unpublished translated manuscript of the National Theatre, the theatrical reviews of periodical and daily press and the pictorial material of the productions, the paper aims to investigate the three aforementioned different directorial approaches of Shaw’s play over three decades. Did the stage directors approach The Devil's Disciple as a groundbreaking political play or as a conventional realistic drama? By extension, did they confront Shaw as a socialist rebel or as a philosopher with a weird sense of humor?
Yulia Skalnaya, “‘Satan’s Apostle’”: First Russian Translations and Performance of Shaw’s Devil’s Disciple”
This paper concentrates on the early presence of The Devil’s Disciple (1897) on Russian literary and theatrical stage. The aim of this research is to consider the first three translations of the play made by I. Danilov, N. Efros (journalist, dramatist, and theatre critic), and A. Deytch (one of the main Shavian scholars and translators in the USSR) highlighting the differences in translators’ approaches, the use of connotative power of words to create a more detailed image of the characters, as well as certain cuts, adjustments and even additions introduced in the latest version of the text. The main focus of analysis is going to be the first translation of the play made by I. Danilov and edited by K. Chukovsky. This was Chukovsky’s first introduction to Shaw’s oeuvre and later resulted in a series articles dedicated to Shaw’s works and their influence on Russian theatre. Moreover, issued in 1908, that translation allowed the revolutionary mood of Shaw’s play to resonate within Russian society after the events of 1905–1907 known as the First Russian Revolution. And it was immediately used for a stage production by P. Gaideburov, the founder of the Itinerant Theatre in Saint Petersburg. Special attention is paid to Gaideburov’s artistic programme, the reasons behind choosing Shaw’s play for staging and the production itself.
Resources
| Reynolds_Wil English Survive.pdf |
| Oxford World's Classics_GBS Collection Flyer.pdf |
