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by Rhoda Nathan
Critics often call Major Barbara Shaw’s greatest play. Inspired by two historical figures, the master playwright blended comedy with serious issues about workers’ rights and social redemption.
Look closely at Major Barbara, George Bernard Shaw's masterwork, and you’ll find echoes of history as well as comedy and philosophy. The munitions maker Friedrich Alfred Krupp, son of and heir to the founder of the Krupp Works, a German munitions empire, is widely credited as being the real-life inspiration for the character of Andrew Undershaft, the arms merchant in Major Barbara. The similarities are too numerous and accurate to be mere coincidence: Krupp died in 1902, just three years before the play’s first performance. The son of the original founder of the Krupp Works, he extended the workers’ welfare program, with its model villages at Essen, its schools and many social benefits. His daughter Bertha later took on the role of director of the company and its more than 40,000 employees. She married a Dr. Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, who then changed his name to Krupp — as Adolphus Cusins changes his name to Undershaft in the play — when he became its manager in 1906, the year after the publication of Major Barbara. He thus fulfilled the role of Cusins rather than inspiring it. At about the same time the American candy manufacturer Milton Hershey opened his famous chocolate factory, concentrating on building a complete town near the factory, including stores, schools and recreational facilities, subsequently adding a trade school for orphan boys and other workers’ benefits.
There is little doubt that Shaw knew the Krupp legend, and, because he was so closely attuned to issues of workers’ benefits, the Hershey saga as well. One of the central themes of Major Barbara is the struggle to improve the human condition through the opposing agencies of salvationism and capitalism; Krupp and Hershey’s respective philosophies could very well have served as the playwright’s model. And Shaw was ripe for this debate.
There’s an old European saying (recently quoted in the New York Times) that "anyone who is not a socialist before he is 30 has no heart; anyone who is still a socialist after he is 30 has no head." Shaw had certainly been a socialist before he was 30, as well as an active member of the Fabian Society, which preached a civilized gradual redistribution of wealth and whose hero was Karl Marx. In Major Barbara, which he wrote when he was well over the age of 30, Shaw began to see the merits of enlightened capitalism, and created a self-made hero who was devoted both to making money and to improving the lot of the worker. The character’s name was Andrew Undershaft, and his motto was "Unashamed," although he muses that it could just as well have been the slogan of his rival soul-saving organization, the Salvation Army (whose logo bore the inscription "Blood and Fire.")
Considering the variety of themes in the play, Major Barbara is seamless in construction, integrating its serious ideas about reform with genial mockery of the idle upper classes in a light-hearted comedy of ideas.
Major Barbara has something for everybody. For fans of Oscar Wilde’s brand of drawing-room comedy, there is a resident company of dandies in the personages of "Cholly" Lomax and Barbara’s post-deb sister Sarah. They are under the close supervision of the imperious Lady Britomart, a worthy successor to Wilde’s dragon of Mayfair, Lady Augusta Bracknell of The Importance of Being Earnest (a play which, incidentally, Shaw did not care for). For realists in the audience there is the deadly serious Ibsenesque theme of poverty, deemed by Shaw to be the most heinous crime of civilized society. For enthusiasts of psychological drama there is the parallel theme of the struggle for the soul of Barbara herself, a conflict that scholars of the medieval morality play called a "psychomachia." And for playgoers enchanted by sheer wit, endless plot twists, and a variety of character types, the play has no equal. Only a magician could put in the same script the hilarious exchange (between the analytical Undershaft and his arrogant son Stephen) about significant career choices for a young man who is clearly a twit, on one hand, but also the heart-wrenching scene in which a disillusioned Barbara utters Christ’s lament on the cross before His crucifixion. Shaw handles the shifts in mood and tone with such dexterity that the entire play’s rhythm and intention are never disrupted. The settings are also contrapuntal; they make concrete the polarities of the fashionable Mayfair mansion and the grimy soup kitchen of a handout society.
Especially considering the variety of themes in the play—from the battle between salvationism and benevolent capitalism to the heroine’s powerful inner struggle for self-realization—Major Barbara is seamless in construction, integrating its serious ideas about reform with genial mockery of the idle upper classes in a light-hearted (but substantially provocative) comedy of ideas. In this sense the play is reminiscent of other Shaw plays presented by Roundabout in past seasons. For example Misalliance (staged in 1996-97), one of Shaw’s most radical statements on feminism, puts its credo into the mouth of an aviatrix with an unpronounceable name who is capable of picking up a male leading man and twirling him about like a top. Candida (1992-93) gives us a serious look at the dynamics of a seemingly male-dominated marriage, but offers the sly underside of its real structure, while at the same time giving us a glimpse of a latter-day Shelley trapped in an inhospitable modern environment. Arms and the Man, presented last season, is a deadly serious attack on war, but so frothy and Gilbertian in its execution that the audience laughs its way towards enlightenment. Even the scandalous issue of prostitution in Mrs. Warren’s Profession (staged in 1985-86) is leavened by a cast of reprobate characters who supply the comic leavening to what would be only a grim investigation of social ills in less skilled hands. Major Barbara, though, contains all the elements of Shaw’s great plays: moments of sheer farce, scenes of drawing-room frivolity, serious issues arising naturally from the opposing forces of a two-tiered society, and the sparkle of dialogue engendered by nose-to-nose confrontation between embattled forces in opposition.
Rhoda Nathan is President of the Bernard Shaw Society and Professor Emerita of English at Hofstra University.
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