Shaw: v. 8

The newest volume of SHAW captures the variety and range of Bernard Shaw's multifarious activities over a long and crowded lifetime. We see G.B.S. as an anonymous reporter covering Queen Victoria's opening of the Royal Institution in London; as an unknown book reviewer of a volume about doctors, anticipating his play; as a Mozart-saturated former music critic putting his version of Don Giovanni into his own opera-without-music, Don Juan in HelI; and as an early aviator including an encounter with a daring lady parachutist in Misalliance. And we see Shaw inserting his ideas of Ireland into John Bull's Other Island; propagandizing for a young French playwright because the new ideas eclipsed, for him, Eugene Brieux's turgid dramaturgy; and engaging in half-a-century of exasperated mutual admiration with an Englishman whose ideas he detested but whose personality overwhelmed ideology Winston Churchill. Finally, a post-Shaw actor, and one of the ornaments of the contemporary London stage, Daniel Massey, explains how to perform the Master's lines today."