In general, one can say that a play that deals with issues of its time has a very short life span. This is one of the greatest problems for a playwright like Bernard Shaw. In two of his most significant plays, Major Barbara (1905) and Pygmalion (1912), the issues examined seem to be essentially Edwardian; what then is there of intrinsic interest for today's audiences? ¹ This essay considers the problem from different points of view and attempts to reinterpret the two plays as if they were written for a future audience, while never losing sight of the biographical Shaw and his characteristic way of examining the world. Such changes in emphases will, perhaps, suggest other kinds of staging that incorporate this new angle of interpretation.

Why Major Barbara and Pygmalion? The two plays have apparently little in common apart from their Edwardian time frame. But taken as projections of future history from Edwardian starting points, they begin to reveal much that would engage a contemporary audience. One can view them as limited to problems of time and location or, more dynamically, as prophetic representations of the continuing evolution of socioeconomic realities. Seen through the latter perspective, the plays become ideal candidates for radical reinterpretation.

An earlier example of Shaw elucidating future trends in society can be found in Mrs Warren's Profession (1902). Taken schematically, this work explores the Marxist theme of the amorality of capitalism by exemplifying the usually small-scale (and brutal) operation of prostitution and transforming it into an international enterprise. Shaw continually reminds his audience of economic realities. Crofts tells Vivie: "Your mother has a genius for managing such things. We've got two [brothels] in Brussels, one in Ostend, one in Vienna, and two in Budapest. Of course there are others besides ourselves in it: but we hold most of the capital." ² Vivie's reaction to learning about the source of the funding for her university education is not melodramatic—as is Pip's to the realization that Magwitch is his patron—though her mother responds in a conventionally histrionic manner. ³ But [End Page 143] even so, a twenty-first-century audience, brought up to believe that capitalism has superseded conventional attitudes, might find Vivie's contempt for her mother's unprincipled attitude to money far less easy to identify with. While Vivie's moral indignation reflects a Victorian sensibility still in transformation, an audience in 2006, representative of the more jaded sophistication of our times, might be a great deal more impressed by how social relations and economic forces become entangled in the play.

Nevertheless, a classic critique of the capitalist system would no longer hold a modern audience's attention. The entire history of the defunct Soviet Union has now made a straightforwardly anticapitalist art deeply unfashionable. Yet in Major Barbara and Pygmalion, the crucial issue of the use or misuse of technology might provoke a modern audience's interest and apprehensions. Scientific progress, as it was before the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, provides one of the keys to unveiling other meanings in Major Barbara and Pygmalion, and this essay's burden of proof will be to demonstrate that Shaw was actually creating dramatic situations that depend on the underlying presence of technology. The characters of these two plays, notably the two principals, Barbara Undershaft and Eliza Doolittle, are there for the audience to identify with, albeit objectively; the goal is no narrowly-conceived empathy, for these characters represent the younger generation coming to terms with a new world.

This essay will deploy not only the Marxist approach of earlier generations but also the postmodernist perspectives of semiology, coloniality, and gender studies. There is no need to engage in the kind of "misunderstanding" recommended by Jorge Luis Borges to his readers. ⁴ The kind of subjective reading that Borges implies is not suitable to a reinterpretation of Shaw's drama. The knowledge and preoccupations of the biographical Shaw are sufficient as material from which to make reasonable assumptions about how far one can take a reinterpretation of Shaw's drama without leaving Shaw and his ideas out of the equation. What will be required is that the narrative sequences of the two plays be taken as a series of discrete segments, which emphasize for the audience certain specific events and patterns from its own recent history. Insight into the process of these historical happenings occurs through the mediation of Shaw's characters. The emphasis placed on certain segments of the two plays would further stimulate the imagination of the audience to find new meanings. To facilitate this imaginative leap, a wider commentary transcending the particularity of the Edwardian context will need to be established. Once the historical time frame has been broken up, a more extensive historical reference—which allows for the audience's imagination to play forward and backward across the spectrum of the twentieth century—would begin to come into play. It should be emphasized that selected scenes will be reimagined but not the entirety of the two plays we are discussing: Shaw's [End Page 144] original intentions not only should be deferred to but should be illuminated in such a way as to clarify the underlying historical trends he was delineating.

But first Shaw's drama needs to be wrenched away from his own prescriptions. He has been his own worst enemy with respect to the prefaces. Their greatest drawback is that they have been responsible for the kind of interpretation that freezes his drama into one phase of the historical process. For example, Shaw's thundering against the crime of poverty in his preface to Major Barbara does serious disservice to the multifaceted structure of significances the play contains. The plays themselves are quite resistant to any single interpretation. The ending of Mrs Warren's Profession is open. What will Vivie be able to achieve beyond personal success? Similarly, Major Barbara and Pygmalion have an ambiguity of ending that makes easy interpretation unsatisfactory. Neither play can be said to be more than a description of historical beginnings. No claim is made overtly as to the future progress of Barbara Undershaft or Eliza Doolittle. It is also inhibiting of interpretation to accept that Shaw was concerned only with the issues of feminism, the economic realities of society, and the decline of conventional religion, however much these issues are in evidence. Shaw the artist would not necessarily listen to the social and economic analyst within himself.

A caveat must surely be made here. Drama is not a species of historiography; nor is it very successful as propaganda. Yet in the hands of Shaw the forensic observer of human behavior, history is refracted through his characters and represented in terms of idealism, ambition, and personal decision making. In the moments when his characters' ambivalence is at its most acute, the dynamic of history is revealed.

The two plays—as will be argued—are simulations of future trends. The characters are Edwardian, but the consequences of their actions are by no means so circumscribed. Just how farseeing Shaw could be tends to be obscured by the period costume, role, and stage identity. The facade of these stage conventions needs to be penetrated by the imagination. Without that critical imagination, the modern audience is left with an Edwardian reality that lacks the immediacy to awaken the audience to what lies beneath the plays' conventional surfaces. In Major Barbara, Undershaft, Barbara, and Cusins are to be viewed as stewards of a radical change from Edwardian present to hypothetical future. Pygmalion—this deliberately theatrical creation—needs to be rescued from its unfortunate tendency to draw the spotlight away from Shaw's Pygmalion-scientist to his heroine of decided melodramatic provenance. Not for nothing is the play named for "Pygmalion," and Henry Higgins merits close examination to discover the implications of his scientific work. What Higgins represents is often so obscured behind his actor-manager persona that his significance as agent of future change is lost. [End Page 145]

If this foregoing argument seems far-fetched, then Shaw's interest in the artist as visionary should be considered. Shaw's seminal discussions of Ibsen and Wagner embody the sense that these two revolutionary figures had brought a new vision of the world into the theater. ⁵ But a modern prophet, in Shaw's terms, relies on hard information and is not empowered by any form of inspiration, divine or otherwise. In the case of Wagner and Marx, he warns that any assumption made without full understanding will too easily lead to dubious conclusions:

[A]lthough the Ring may, like the famous Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, be an inspired guess at the historic laws and predestined end of our capitalistic-theocratic epoch, yet Wagner, like Marx, was too inexperienced in technical government and administration and too melodramatic in his hero-contra-villain conception of the class struggle, to foresee the actual process by which his generalization would work out, or the part to be played in it by the classes involved. ⁶

Shaw's other great essay, "A Dramatic Realist to his Critics" (1894), insists that factuality in his drama is nonnegotiable. ⁷ Shaw appears to be the ultimate empiricist; his writing of Fabian tracts in the blue book tradition of nineteenth-century reformist politics further supports this view. Similarly, his critique of Wagner and Marx is in keeping with his background in the political realities of his adopted London. And yet there is in his handling of the revolutionary new arms plant in Major Barbara and the nascent technology used in Pygmalion a degree of prescience that is quite as much a leap in the dark as those his two heroes, Wagner and Marx, had attempted. As has been suggested earlier, Shaw the artist was very much at odds with the empiricist role he had taken as the Fabian, and no doubt Marx's grand scheme of history—influenced as it was by the Hegelian model—must have struck a deeply repressed chord within Shaw in the writing of these two plays.

This line of argument takes as a primary assumption that Shaw was writing about an Edwardian present that harbored within it the potential for enormous and quite unpredictable change. The key factor in this sense of moving toward a radically different society is the presence of new technological means. The corollary of technology is, of course, the existence of specialized knowledge—which in Pygmalion becomes the new discussion point.

Even in traditional interpretations of Major Barbara, the hope for the future is seen to reside in the Undershaft arms plant. Thus, in any restaging of Major Barbara the predominating significance of the arms plant must be signaled directly to the audience by some means: perhaps by a large [End Page 146] backdrop or actual stage construction in front of which the characters are displayed. There seems to be no reason why Shaw's ultraprescriptive stage directions, which detail the stage scenery down to the last item, should be followed. Shaw was doing no more than any stage director of the period might have done in re-creating the salubrious living areas of the upper middle classes. For technology to assume a special importance in the interpretation of Major Barbara and Pygmalion, a concentration on the thematic elements should be clearly emphasized. This means a minimalist set rather than any compromise with stage naturalism.

According to Shaw's stage direction, the second act of Pygmalion opens with the instruments of acoustic phonetics, indicating the profession of the scientist, on display:

[In the corner of Higgins's laboratory] stands a flat writing-table, on which are a phonograph, a laryngoscope, a row of tiny organ pipes with a bellows, a set of lamp chimneys for singing flames with burners attached to a gas plug in the wall by an indiarubber tube, several tuning-forks of different sizes, a life-size image of half a human head, shewing in section the vocal organs, and a box containing a supply of wax cylinders for the phonograph.

(33)

The "props," which re-create an Edwardian amateur scientist's study-cum-leisure room, must be reduced to the absolute minimum. The historicity of the play is signaled by the costumes of the actors. The audience must maintain its focus on these museum piece instruments of acoustic phonetics; for in keeping with the melodramatic elements of the Pygmalion story, there has to be material evidence of the ordeal that Eliza will undergo.

Common sense says that technology itself cannot be "the villain of the piece." Technology depends on who is using it—and for what purpose. The debate on technology and society in the writings of contemporary scholars like Andrew Feenberg and others draws on an earlier generation of European philosophers, from Marx to Marcuse and Habermas. ⁸ Shaw himself seems to be arguing for broader, more democratic control over technology. With a necessary degree of irony felt by the audience, Marx's theory of alienation can be inferred from the complacency of the wellcared-for workers at the Undershaft arms plant. But it is the cynical use of weapon technology (which Shaw makes plain), not the actual management of the plant itself, that should be in the dock. Stephen Vogel points out that Marcuse, from a Marxist-libertarian perspective, sees technology's "neutrality" as its essential problem because "its apparent indifference to the political or social purposes to which it is put, serves at a deeper level . . . to tie it to a society in which substantial critical discourse is systematically prevented." ⁹ Shaw's strategy is to make more than a simple [End Page 147] moral condemnation: Undershaft's speeches, ironically deconstructed, furnish the audience with a view of technology that warns of its possible implications.

It is difficult to place Shaw precisely within the greater philosophical debate on this issue. His line of argument is probably closer to Habermas's position that true scientific progress can be made only when the work itself is the proper expression of an interaction of equal parties. ¹⁰ In both Major Barbara and Pygmalion, what is missing is an equality of interest. Such is the Shavian reality—seen in the workers and management in the arms plant of Major Barbara, the street-seller Eliza and the wealthy Professor Higgins in Pygmalion—that there is no possibility of democratic endeavor. The social relations of the historical Edwardian body politic were so distorted as to guarantee that any form of knowledge tended to benefit one group rather than another. Nevertheless, Shaw realized that even the working class, as depicted in the Undershaft arms plant, might actually become the beneficiaries of technology in the greatly expanded capitalist enterprises of the future.

The argument takes a new direction in Pygmalion. The critique of how knowledge is used in Pygmalion, though never stated explicitly, lies in Eliza's decision to leave Higgins and use what she has learned for her own purposes. Knowledge acquires a quite different character when in the possession of a newly emancipated representative of the "proletariat."

The artistic problem lies in how to prepare the audience for this envisioning of the future. In Major Barbara Shaw's line of approach begins with the culturally determining set of attitudes that maintained upper-class Edwardian society. The opening scene is (as Shaw's stage directions would have it) very much a cliché of English stage naturalism. Yet we can imagine a very different production, one that focuses the audience on the historicity of arms manufacturing and its implications for both the Undershaft family and the society beyond the walls of their home. All the accoutrements of that living room have been stripped away. The stage is almost bare, except for a few sticks of furniture. In the background, perhaps barely visible, is the looming industrial structure of the arms plant. ¹¹ The irony is that the characters are unaware of what is behind them. The first act will establish what takes place as documentary evidence. Lukacs's description of this kind of play as "the drama of the milieu" is exemplified in the social conventionality of the discourse between the family members. ¹² This expository first act is primarily concerned with the preservation of this inward-looking social grouping. The topic is marriage and to whom. At the same time, these culturally determined attitudes define the situation of the romantic comedy (the play's ostensible genre).

Shaw is quite obviously intent on detaching his audience from the make-believe of the romantic comedy and turning them toward the reality of the [End Page 148] world outside the theater. Two characters are at odds with the faux social comedy aspect: Barbara and her father, Undershaft. Again, in light of Lukacs's discussion of bourgeois realism in the theater, Barbara might be seen as the heroic figure who wishes to leave behind this realm of domestic fantasy. ¹³ Undershaft, whose arguments are antipathetic to Barbara's Christian idealism, represents the outer reality for the audience. He serves as the raisonneur for everything that could never be discussed in Lady Britomart's household: a world of no fixed morality, of money, and, ultimately, of survival. The shelter scene that follows seems to justify the Undershaft argument and foreshadows what Heartbreak House (1921) will attempt later, in pointing the accusing finger at the failure of this upper-class elite to take responsibility for the dual problem of mass unemployment and poverty.

The documentary character of the play is reinforced by the Salvation Army shelter scene. Here, with a minimal dressing of the stage with emblems of institutional charity, the audience witnesses the Victorian answer to poverty. The scene works as a vox populi, with the shelter figures giving vent to the whole range of complaints, frustration, and self-hatred that institutional charity tends to induce. A better emphasis on the general condition of the Edwardian unemployed might be achieved if the shelter figures were seen as a social grouping and not as individual characters. John Galsworthy, who briefly collaborated with Shaw in the theater, generalized his social imagery in this manner by not giving names to minor characters in his play Justice (1910).

The shelter scene plays like a sociological study and avoids sentimentalizing poverty (as Luke Fildes does in his genre paintings of the Victorian poor). ¹⁴ For historical authenticity Shaw chose the Salvation Army as an example of Victorian evangelism; but if the coming technological society is taken as within the purview of the play, the argument becomes one aimed at the failure of religion to come to terms with this new society and its unprecedented problems. Therefore the idealism of Major Barbara Undershaft is misdirected into a false response based on the chronic failure to understand industrialized society: the belief that piecemeal reform of any kind (religious or secular) is adequate to the task of alleviating the problems of a mass social body. Thus, despite the modernity of a female evangelical army officer, she is out of step with what will occur in the future. Unless her "vitalism" is in conformity with the progress of history, that essential energy will be lost. The shelter scene ends with the vanquishing of Barbara's Salvationist position; the unemployed figures are now dependent on what her father's technological imperative will provide. Peter Shirley, the idealist among the shelter group, becomes the somewhat incongruous linking figure who joins the Undershaft workforce. In terms of Marxist dialectic, the play takes the audience to the second position: the "antithesis." It is for the audience to create the "synthesis." [End Page 149]

The three main characters of Major Barbara—Undershaft, Barbara, and Cusins—can be perceived as emissaries of this new society. In terms of artistic strategy, the audience is meant to identify with the gradually developing attitudes of Barbara and Cusins to the arms plant itself. This connection encourages a sense of greater responsibility toward Shaw's hypothesis. The audience members should feel that they have a proxy on stage through whom they can follow the whole process of decision-making right to the point when Barbara and Cusins make their commitment to the arms plant.

In Cusins, for example, Shaw gives us the representative of an intellectual class. Cusins's allegiance to the older civilization of Europe carries with it the Platonic ideal of the perfectly organized society. This position to some degree corresponds to the prerevolutionary sentiments of the early communists. It is also fatally idealistic and romantic. His anecdote (in the third act) about the revolver given to his most gifted student to fight for the Greeks against the Turks shows his premeditated commitment to violence as the agent of change. Its semiology is obvious. The arms plant becomes the object of Cusins's story; and the arms plant itself seems to reflect back his classical education in providing glimpses of Plato's Republic. In this way, the audience is shown the process of ideation leading to Cusins's decision to commit to this corporatist structure.

The ultimate semiological clue is the play's title, with its androgynous associations. The sexual ambiguity of "Major Barbara" establishes a centrality and linking function in envisioning the century ahead. The play's difficulty for the audience is that the argument does not develop in the second act but, rather, happens all at once. The audience is presented with a whole range of future indications. Shaw's coup is to synthesize all the dialectical elements—poverty, religion, and social organization—into one complex dramatic image: a woman in uniform. Aside from Salvationism and the incongruity of a music hall cross-dressing act, that image must have carried the sense of a new order for the Edwardian audiences. The argument of this essay places great importance on Barbara's Salvationist costume. Although associated with Victorian evangelism, it provides an image of women that is modern and futuristic. A new kind of social organization is suggested by Barbara's Salvationist costume: it evokes a more caring society but carries with it the contrary impulse of militarism. The idealism of the young, seen in Barbara's youthful determination, is yet another significant visual clue.

The imminence of war (of which the arms plant constantly reminds the audience) is thus linked with the younger generation's demand for a better society. The historical background to Major Barbara was the buildup to the most mechanized and destructive warfare the world had then known. The armaments race had already begun with the laying down of the "dreadnought" class of battleship, and the entente cordiale between [End Page 150] Britain and France in 1904 had constructed one of the major alliances of World War I. The third act of Major Barbara provides ample demonstration of what an armaments industry does and of the brutal objectivity that drives it. But the real prescience of Shaw's play lies in the implications of a society mobilized for war. The linkage between youthful idealism and mass movements of people is eerily foreshadowed in the marching Salvationists with the arms manufacturer and his future successor at the rear.

The politics of a mass society began to emerge during the late Victorian/Edwardian era. The jingoistic crowds in London during the Boer War were probably the inspiration for Galsworthy's prewar play The Mob (1914), which has as its final moment the senseless killing of the play's politician-hero by a group of young people, many dressed in a uniform resembling that of Baden Powell's scouts. As for Major Barbara, conformity is one of the play's underlying themes. Barbara's uniform is associated with evangelical militancy; by contrast, her appearance in the third act in conventional female dress marks the increasing dependence on her mother, Cusins, and the arms plant. The signal point is that Barbara can only derive strength by association with the Undershaft organization.

The Dionysian aspect of the latter part of the second act, with Undershaft and Cusins joining in with the Salvationists' marching band, has implications that need to be drawn out. To a later generation of audiences for Major Barbara, the carnival of uniformed marchers, the rhythmic beat of the bass drum, and the collective mind all carry echoes of the fascist spectaculars of the interwar years. The theatrical appeal of fascism has been examined in Susan Sontag's lucid essay "Fascinating Fascism" (1974), and we are now better able to understand its extraordinary combination of sexuality, costume, and self-denial. ¹⁵ Moreover, we find in Major Barbara another social phenomenon of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the rise of new forms of religion, where conformity of dress is frequently an ingredient of the admixture of enforced socialization and the exclusiveness of the cult. Of course, Victorian Salvationism is not the problem in Major Barbara: the real problem lies in the exploitation of such a movement by the cynical mind of an Undershaft. Beating his big bass drum, Cusins creates the hypnotic rhythm of the march that carries the crowd (and the audience) forward to the new religion of Andrew Undershaft. Brahman and Kshatriya, priest and warrior, are now as one.

The Undershaft empire is invested with a religiosity of its own while allowing the older forms of churchgoing to continue as mere leisure activity. (Shaw is satirizing conventional religion for its lack of function in a highly industrialized society.) This empire is reminiscent of a city-state based on military might—where the gods are appeased, as in Sparta, but secular rule is supreme. This neopagan religion will take itself as the object of veneration for its role of provider of food and shelter for its workers. It [End Page 151] is not a socialist utopia: the society of the Undershaft empire is hierarchical, but cleverly so. Discipline is maintained by the ranking system, which, as is common to the modern meritocracy, suffices to exploit the human drives of ambition and greed as instruments of control.

Shaw's account of this state-within-a-state compares with the corporatist entity of fascist Italy. ¹⁶ Though Shaw was not of the war generation, there is in his account the undisguised attraction to industrial modernity one finds in futurist art and writings. The film version of Major Barbara, made in 1941, the year of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, carries (perhaps unintended) echoes of Soviet propaganda films. It looks toward the future and a new society, as the last sequence of the film makes clear—a scene that might also represent the hopes for a reconstructed Britain after the war. But the linking of industry and the welfare of children, as the camera views it in the final sequence, is an unambiguous salute to the faith in industrial progress.

In the dialogue between Undershaft and his son Stephen, Undershaft explains how the modern state operates: with government as no more than a cipher in the hands of the huge industrial conglomerate. Shaw has turned Marx on his head in postulating an alternative causation for the withering away of the state. And in another reversal of political hypothesis, the Orwellian lie machinery of the state has been preempted by the capitalist-owned press:

STEPHEN: . . . I am an Englishman and I will not hear the Government of my country insulted.

UNDERSHAFT: The government of your country! I am the government of your country: I, and Lazarus. Do you suppose that you and half a dozen amateurs like you . . . can govern Lazarus and Undershaft? No, my friend: you will do what pays us. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn't. You will find out that trade requires certain measures when we have decided on those measures. When I want to keep my dividends up, you will discover that my want is national need. When other people want something to keep my dividends down, you will call out the police and the military. And in return you shall have the support and applause of my newspapers, and the delight of imagining that you are a great statesman. . . .

(123–24)

Shaw is demonstrating what happens when a government concedes its prerogative to capitalist enterprise. In the example of Undershaft the tacit permission to sell arms to whoever wants them would take a democratic society back into a kind of industrial feudalism. Shaw shows even greater prescience when one considers the exponential growth of capitalist [End Page 152] enterprise and how it removes national barriers of operation and employment. The new global market has effectively marginalized the economic policy of individual states (as is the implication of Undershaft's triumphalism).

Again, a problem with staging needs to be interjected here. Shaw's own presentation of his ideas requires some rethinking. For Major Barbara to have the maximum impact on a modern audience, some editing of the text might point up the arguments more succinctly. The outstanding example is the shelter scene, which could be usefully shortened. (Quoting theatrical precedent, the innovative director Peter Brook has dared to streamline Shakespeare to get at the essence of Hamlet.) The modern audience, accustomed to instant access to knowledge, can be impatient with a protracted rhetorical presentation. In Major Barbara, Undershaft's rhetoric contains the essential ironic wisdom of the play and its claim on a twenty-first-century audience's attention. Choices regarding cuts are of necessity more educational than artistic. Scenes in which the comedy between the family representatives becomes disconnected from Shaw's exposition of arms manufacturing, as in the third act, could usefully be trimmed. But what should be retained is, for instance, the scene where Lomax tries to light a cigarette in the high explosives shed. This little scene integrates character with the historical object lesson with maximum economy and effect.

What is striking about Major Barbara is Shaw's projection of the globalization of trade. He refers to different races and creeds as all drawn within the sphere of trading. But it is a morbidly cynical view because it correlates these different peoples and beliefs with an antiethos that cares nothing for principle. It is certainly not any kind of multiculturalist dream for the future:

CUSINS: What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer?

UNDERSHAFT: To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to all sorts and all conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes. . . .

(138)

Moving forward in history to the postcolonial period, after World War II, yields other insights into Shaw's scenario. The spectacle of warring nations or fragments of a national polity setting about arming themselves at weapons fairs in Western countries is foreseen by the speech above.

The play's note of warning can be understood by imagining a performance of Major Barbara opening in a theater in Lagos. If Shaw's view of the world is to have any significance in the global society of today, what he [End Page 153] portrays must find a response in a non-Western audience. The postcolonial West African state of Nigeria saw the terrible consequences of a civil war fought to preserve the boundary lines arbitrarily drawn by the former colonial government of Britain when Biafra, a Nigerian province, attempted secession. Members of this hypothetical Lagos audience could not, surely, help but remember the carnage brought about by weapons made in Western factories. One of the facts of economic life is that the skilled workforce in the Western arms plant is frequently dependent for its reasonably high standard of living on being the indirect agent of chaos in another part of the world. These Edwardian characters, patronized by the collaborative laughter of a London West End audience for their quaintness and folly, might receive a very different response elsewhere. Comedic elements would take on a satirical, even harshly ironical tone.

The ending of Major Barbara provides the greatest difficulty for any audience—as we know it did for Shaw. The abrupt transformation of Barbara from an independent actor in her own life to a childish dependent creature is one of the most problematic scenes Shaw ever wrote:

BARBARA: Mamma! Mamma! [. . .] I want Mamma.

UNDERSHAFT: She is taking off her list slippers, dear. [He passes on to Cusins]. Well? What does she say?

CUSINS: She has gone right up to the skies.

LADY BRITOMART: [coming from the shed and stopping on the steps, obstructing Sarah, who follows with Lomax. Barbara clutches like a baby at her mother's skirt]. Barbara: when will you learn to be independent and to act and think for yourself? (153) ¹⁷

Of course, she has made a decision for herself. And that decision to embrace the future is psychologically very difficult for the audience. This regression to dependency is not to be taken ironically, but its very strangeness reflects the severity of what she has done. A twenty-first century director might well view this concluding scene as belonging in spirit to the theater of Edward Bond, where the characters are alienated from their own consciences. The agonized decision of this idealistic young woman describes for us, with a force of truth so much greater than Cusins's self-serving rationalization, exactly what that compromise with a world out of our control is really like.

Pygmalion needs to be imbued with a greater sense of history and a concern for the consequences to future generations of a science without humanity. The characterization of Eliza merits a more objective—meaning historical—role in Shaw's intellectual paradigm. Otherwise the play will simply be Trilby [End Page 154] revisited, an innocuous play with limited references. ¹⁸ Eliza as the cockney Galatea with attitude needs to be doing more than rehearsing a modern fable. The issue for today is the price society pays for specialized knowledge and the amount of power the specialists wield.

Pygmalion contains all of Shaw's treasury of popular theater forms and representations of the Victorian period and turns them back on the audience in a series of questions. The impact of the curtain-dropping question that concerns Eliza's choice of Freddy Eynsford-Hill over her mentor Higgins is vitiated by Shaw's apparent loss of nerve in writing a thoroughly unnecessary sequel. This all-important question was, in any event, nullified by Herbert Beerbohm Tree in the first London production by the bouquet-throwing "business" with Mrs. Patrick Campbell. ¹⁹ Yet the question still stands in the play's text. Eliza has made this surprising choice—consciously. The quirkily feminist aspect of the play demands that Eliza be perceived as an independent operator whose choice of marriage partner would be someone who would not interfere with her autonomy. By that antiromantic gesture, the character grows beyond her generic confinement.

The play gains its effects by a self-conscious theatricality, not as a simple matter of style but as a means by which Shaw may point to the play's underlying symbolism. The way Higgins is introduced to the audience suggests the melodramatic penchant for suspense and disguise: "Pedestrians running for shelter into the portico of St. Paul's Church . . . among them a lady and her daughter in evening dress. All are peering out gloomily at the rain, except one man with his back turned to the rest, wholly preoccupied with a notebook in which he is writing" (13). The church of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, completes the symbolism, as it is the church in London where actors are commemorated. The referent is established and then embellished in having the now revealed Professor Higgins perform a well-known music hall act: the mind reader who can tell the assembled crowd where they come from according to their accent. The key to this knowledge—the scientific study of phonetics—establishes Higgins as the major player (reinforced by the secondary role of Colonel Pickering). Playing against him is Eliza herself. Eliza is parodically represented: the flower girl has as many stage aliases as Higgins does. She plays the pathetic figure of the poor street girl always seen in ironic asymmetry with the rich man about town. Shaw exploits the ambiguity of her presence in Covent Garden for social commentary:

THE GENTLEMAN: . . . Stop: heres three hapence, if thats any use to you [he retreats to the other pillar].

THE FLOWER GIRL: [disappointed, but thinking three halfpence better than nothing] Thank you, sir. [End Page 155]

THE BYSTANDER: [to the girl] You be careful: give him a flower for it. Theres a bloke here behind taking down every blessed word youre saying. [All turn to the man who is taking notes].

THE FLOWER GIRL: [springing up terrified] I aint done nothing wrong by speaking to the gentleman. I've a right to sell flowers if I keep off the kerb. [Hysterically] I'm a respectable girl. . . .

(19)

The insinuation that Eliza is a prostitute and that Higgins is spying on her brings the audience to its first indication of the authoritarian potential of his work. As the Sarcastic Bystander says to the others, "There! I knowed he was a plainclothes copper!" (25). Higgins's true occupation is unclear to the audience at first; there is even a suggestion, probably closer to the surface of a modern audience's consciousness, of voyeurism or pornography. Higgins is a blank sheet on which audiences can write his motivations.

Higgins as a stage type is deceptive. He is the actor-manager in manner and the gentleman-amateur in learning: theatricality disguises content. After all, the play is about Pygmalion—and exactly who is he? We learn much more about Eliza than we do about Higgins. Shaw's portrait of Higgins must be inferred. His dominant psychological characteristic is that he has the emotional development of a child. This lack of maturity makes Shaw's critique of this pioneer social scientist that much more telling. Higgins (and the same might be said of Pickering) stands for male exclusiveness and intellectual detachment—and the abstractions of science become for Higgins a substitute for more human (and humane) values. When considering what underlies the play, the character of Higgins is the point at which understanding begins.

Every profession has its theatrical property, and, as we have seen earlier, the curtain to the second act rises on the phonograph, the laryngoscope, the model of a human head used in explaining how sounds are made: all the tools of the scientist. Technology is here on display, and how it is used is the central issue of this act. Eliza arrives and becomes the subject of Higgins's experimentation. The phonograph—which records and analyzes Eliza's vowel sounds and then cruelly mimics her efforts—comes to resemble what Shaw could not allow his Higgins to be: a melodramatic device that leeches Eliza of her humanity. She is reduced to a set of sounds by this protocol.

There is no direct discussion of science and the power of knowledge in Pygmalion. The matter is pursued obliquely through the relationship of Higgins and Eliza. Tangentially, the importance of the actor-manager role of Higgins has been crucial in deciding the persona of the Higgins of the past, and actors as diverse as Beerbohm Tree and Rex Harrison have adopted this interpretation. There is a plausible subtext in Shaw agreeing to Beerbohm Tree as his first London Higgins. As a symbol of the power of the actor-manager, Tree was ideally suited to this flamboyantly theatrical [End Page 156] role. It is as though the world of Henry Higgins were that of the theater: Galatea comes alive in his play and, moreover, speaks with his voice.

The metaphor of the theater explains much of the subtextual power play. The music hall reference and the Derby Day and Ball scenes (the settings vary in the dramatic and musical film incarnations) are replete with theatrical imagery—the ultimate theatrical frisson for the audience is whether or not Higgins's former student can spot the actress (Eliza) who steals the show at the ball. Enigma, mask, and stage identity: all are exploited by Shaw. But what is most telling is the actress's voice itself. We are asked to consider what has produced this voice. In one sense, the voice is alien to its user. It has gone through a process of reification and seems disembodied from the actress herself, now that she has lost her native accent. Higgins has substituted a voice that belongs to his theater. One can think in terms of those artificially created accents that British actors assumed after drama training several generations ago. The voice brings to the play a political texture: it produces the diction, tone, and phonology that are acceptable to Higgins and his social background. Shaw's correct English contains a distinctive class trademark. Paradoxically, Eliza's ticket to independence lies in that acquired speaking voice.

The emancipation of Eliza lies at the heart of Pygmalion. But who is Cinderella, now that she is a princess? The transformation owes as much to what has happened to her during the training with the acoustic instruments as to herself. But she alone can make the transformation from dependent child to independent adult (a Barbara Undershaft in reverse). Quite obviously Eliza's outburst in Higgins's rooms after the ball has long-term implications far beyond the histrionics. Here Eliza is seen alone by the audience fighting with her emotions (portions of dialogue have been omitted to emphasize Eliza's acute sense of identity crisis):

Finally she gives way and flings herself furiously on the floor, raging.

HIGGINS: [in despairing wrath outside] What the devil have I done with my slippers? [He appears at the door].

LIZA: [snatching up the slippers, and hurling them at him one after the other with all her force] There are your slippers. And there. Take your slippers; and may you never have a day's luck with them!

I've won your bet for you havn't I? That's enough for you. I don't matter, I suppose. . . . Why didn't you leave me where you picked me out of—the gutter? . . . Whats to become of me? Whats to become of me?

HIGGINS: How the devil do I know whats to become of you? What does it matter what becomes of you?

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The desperate tone of Eliza's appeal is to the world and not to Higgins. The audience has to supply the needful compassion since, as is represented by Higgins's complete abrogation of responsibility, the scientific response is one of indifference. Eliza's breaking away from Higgins is the one form of revolution that can be counted on because it means that at last the individual has taken responsibility for herself. But like all revolutions it reflects the very diverse ambitions of many kinds of people.

For the play's thematic structure to be complete, her liberation must take Eliza beyond the narrowly conceived world of Higgins. Her release from the spell of Higgins (in the fairy-tale template) is personal: what happens next is universal. The knowledge she has acquired enters its most creative stage, and the audience's imagination should be strained to the limits.

Theories of coloniality can usefully be applied to Eliza's story. Her independence from Higgins—after she successfully passes as an upper-class woman at the ball—is only a theatrical statement; it is no more than a virtual transformation. The very nature of "passing" oneself as someone else is strongly suggestive of a preferred racial identity. Eliza has been made into a member of the ruling elite by a simple trick of the laboratory and, without her being aware, has forsaken her cultural identity. She is, therefore, totally bereft as a human being. Her revolt against Higgins is therefore crucial as an existential paradigm in redefining herself via language and learning to shape her own world. In this interpretation, the play begins to look, in a very contemporary way, at what happens when language and culture are transferred to immigrant second-language learners, who then become the new citizens of advanced technological societies. Eliza's electing to teach the language she has acquired evokes a language that has been freed of its associations—with Higgins, specifically, and by extension, with the rigidly stratified society he represents. In the sequel, which Shaw never wrote, Eliza's language comes to stand for the more truthful conveyance of an open society.

Shaw can be credited with the kind of critique that follows from Wittgenstein. Words are formulated into power relationships, and the mastery of language supplies the key not only to the acquisition of knowledge but also to its ownership. Enlightenment as to the nature of this task comes in a special way from the postcolonial tradition of writing. Frantz Fanon, from the French Antilles, used his experiences as a doctor in colonial Algeria to articulate the theatrical imagery of the mask: the black player has to assume a white mask until he or she can discard it. ²⁰ Steven Connor's comment on Fanon has an obvious reference to the story of Eliza and so many others like her in the developing world: ". . . [T]he end-point is the desire to be able to speak on his own terms and not as the ventriloqual echo of another." ²¹ Thus, a performance emphasizing Eliza's independence from Higgins might allow Pygmalion to speak to African, Caribbean, and Filipino [End Page 158] audiences (the examples go right round the world) without Edwardian London interfering with the self-referential aspects of the play.

One final observation needs to be made—and it is one that a modern audience might better appreciate. The authoritarian potential of Higgins's work lies in its preference for abstraction over human concerns. This is never discussed in the play but is there nonetheless. There is something rather worrying about Higgins's note-taking, his reduction of the sounds of the human voice into abstract symbols, the reduction of a very human Eliza into a set of data. Not simply the early social scientist but the whole modern obsession with information and statistics is reductive of humanity. Technology—pace Marcuse and the 1960s techno-optimists—has not yet become an unqualified boon. And whose fault is that?

These plays, two of Shaw's most important, clearly merit reimagining on the stage. Otherwise, they will remain a species of fossil, classified by period and standard interpretation. Major Barbara is not simply about remedying poverty; Pygmalion is not just a sociolinguistic commentary reworked into an old melodrama plot. These readings terribly underestimate the artist in Shaw, who wrote these two plays at the height of his intellectual and visionary powers. The contention is that, in Major Barbara, Shaw is examining the possibility of a new politics developing as a result of the transnational enterprises expanding in response to the enormous demand for weaponry before 1914. On the eve of that world war, Pygmalion provides, in the form of a cautionary tale, a very timely critique of the possible consequences of new technology on society.