Back to Methusela 1

Methuselah at Birmingham by Sir Cedric Hardwicke (who appeared in the Birmingham and two subsequent productions at the Royal Court)

In the Spring of 1923 Shaw went to Birmingham to see a matinee of Heartbreak House. While he waited for the train to take him back to London, writes J. C. Trewin in his history of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Barry Jackson asked him suddenly whether he would allow the theatre to present Back to Methuselah. ‘Is your family provided for?’ GBS asked. Jackson reassured him. The rest can be told in Shaw’s own words:

‘I had written and republished a play, or rather a cycle of five plays . . . in which I had discarded all thought of production until perhaps fifty years after my death in a theatre like the Festival Playhouse which made Wagner’s Ring playable at Bayreuth, should such a one be established in England. Meanwhile I was induced, on some pretext, to attend a performance at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Here, at the end of the performance, I was accosted by a strange young man who seemed to have some grudge against me which good manners were obliging him to conceal. He said he was Barry Jackson. I had never heard of Barry Jackson, and possibly betrayed that fact unguardedly. I found out afterwards that he had been producing my plays for years . . . only to see that distinction ascribed to others in my published records. My secretary had arranged all these exploits as a matter of routine without calling my attention to them. ‘I felt my way cautiously, gathering that he had built the theatre and owned it, until he said that he wanted to produce Methesulah. I asked him was he mad. He intimated that, though not sane enough to keep out of theatre management, he could manage more or less lucidly. I demanded further whether he wished his wife and children die in the workhouse. He replied that he was not married. I began to scent a patron. “How much a year are you out of pocket by this culture theatre of yours?” I said. He named an annual sum that wold have sufficed to support fifty labourers and their families. I remarked that this was not more than it would cost him to keep a thousand-ton steam yacht. He said a theatre was better fun than a steam yacht, but said it in a tone of a man who could afford a steam yacht. That settled the matter. The impossible had become possible.’

GBS At Rehearsal       What most concerned us was that Shaw was returning to Birmingham for rehearsals. We flayed ourselves by remembering everything we had heard about the biting remarks he made about actors and his alleged habit of reducing leading ladies to tears . . .       He turned up at the theatre, in the timeless Jaeger suit, and inspected us assembled on the stage with feelings that were sinking with apprehension through the floorboards. None of us had any idea that he walked with difficulty and in pain, after having cracked some ribs a few days earlier, clambering over rocks on a visit to Ireland. He immediately showed himself to be the most sympathetic and genial of men, an inspiring director, and no mean actor himself.
      His rehearsal manners were impeccable. Where Tree and others had left in the middle of a scene with no thought for the interruption they were causing, Shaw was all eyes and ears and sustained concentration, devoted to the task of ‘making the audience believe that real things are happening to real people’ . . .       Shaw’s rehearsal methods were founded on experience and developed by the cold logic of his mind. With his manuscript beside him, he had worked out in advance all important state business, so that he knew not only what he wanted every speech to convey, but also precisely where it was to be spoken . . . Any director who attempts to stage a Shaw play without following his stage directions finds himself in trouble. They cannot be improved upon. I know, because I have tried the experiment as a director myself.
      None of this is to imply that he was guilty of what is known as ‘bracket acting,’ which is one of the misfortunes an actor suffers all too frequently at the hands of modern playwrights. They pepper their scripts with such stultifying instructions as (turning pink) in an effort to add some tenuous literary quality to their work.
      The published plays of Shaw contain their share of what on the face of it is bracket acting. He refused to allow any actor to take such instructions seriously. ‘The trouble is,’ he once explained to me, ‘that you are trying to follow those directions of mine. They are meant for the general reader, not for the performer’ . . . As the day of our opening approached, people began arriving in smoky Birmingham from all over Britain to join in what I can only describe as a pilgrimage. The city was packed, too, with reporters bent on the eve of this momentous event, described in our advertising as The Shaw Cycle.
      The only discordant note was sounded by one of our regular subscribers, an old woman who complained at the box office about the idea of presenting a variety bill. ‘I hate any kind of acrobats,’ she sniffed, ‘especially those trick cyclists.’ I feel sure that if Shaw had heard about it, with his passion for both bicycles and jokes, he might have been tempted to realize her fears by appearing in person on our stage, balancing on the handlebars of a circus unicycle.       Our five performances were concluded on October 12, and when the final curtain descended there was an awe-inspiring silence, followed by a storm of applause such as I have never heard equaled in my career. Shaw had lost the habit of taking curtain calls . . . But the cheers in Birmingham that night brought him to our stage to make a speech celebrating what he acknowledged as ‘the most extraordinary experience of my life.’       While the curtain still hid him from the audience, he danced around like a schoolboy. The moment it began to rise, it was exactly as though someone had run a ramrod down his spine, and he was suddenly GBS, the veteran platform speaker . . .
      ‘I know my place as an author, and the place of the author is not on the stage. That belongs really to the artists who give life to the creations of the author and are the real life of the play. I have had the luxury of seeing my own play, which only existed until they took it and made it live . . .’
      When the final round of cheering had died away, and the curtain was finally down, Bernard Shaw, aged sixty-seven, took off on another exuberant Irish fling around the stage.

A Stage History by Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson

      The five plays were written over a period between 1918 and 1920 simultaneously with the completion of Heartbreak House in 1919 (itself written at intervals since 1913). All five plays received their first production by the New York Theatre Guild at the Garrick Theatre, New York, in the spring of 1922. They had eight performances each, originally, and then forty-eight performances in various orders. Philip Muller was the director and Lee Simonson the designer.
      The first English production was at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in October, 1923. Four complete cycles were given under the direction of H. K. Ayliff with designs by Paul Shelving. The production—with some changes of cast—was seen in London at the Royal Court in February, 1924: again, four complete cycles were performed.   Sir Barry Jackson revived the Garden of Eden section at the Royal Court in 1924 and 1926 and the complete cycle in 1928.
      The whole play was given two performances by the Macdona Players at the Lyceum, Edinburgh, in August 1930. In the Beginning ha been revived at various times, both in London and the provinces, but the only other complete professional performance of the entire play was at the Arts Theatre Club in 1947. A severely edited version was produced in one evening in New York in 1958.
      Shaw had little hope of the play ever being a financial success. He told the Theatre Guild of New York that a contract for the play was unnecessary as ‘no other lunatics will want to produce it.’ In 1932 when Shaw was searching for material to complete the limited and standard edition of his works, he discovered the discarded manuscript of A Glimpse of the Domesticity of Franklyn Barnabas, and ‘being much at a loss for padding’ his volume of short stories, he decided to make use of it. In this way the discarded fragment intended to be included in the second section of Methuselah came to be included in Short Stories, Scraps and Shavings (1932). It was broadcast by the BBC in July, 1958, on the Third Programme and was first performed on the stage by the Shaw Society of America at the Grolier Club, New York, in March, 1960.       When the play was published by the Oxford University Press in the World’s Classics series in 1945, in a postscript written for the occasion, Shaw concluded: ‘Back to Methuselah is a World Classic or it is nothing.’