Moral Dilemmas III: Ends, Means and Irony; the Examples of Shaw, Dürrenmatt, Steiner and Sartre

Abstract

The history of the theatre, especially in the nineteenth century, offers nothing comparable to the progression which leads in the novel from Fielding to Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope, and then through Conrad, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and Orwell to Salman Rushdie or Toni Morrison. The great innovation in the theatrical experience of the nineteenth century was in the operas of Richard Wagner, and one only has to look at the plot and dialogue in cold print to realise why they needed the music. The pastiche of Wagner’s Rhine Maidens in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe is a reminder of the fact that the only English playwright of the nineteenth century whose words are still recognised by modern readers is W. S. Gilbert; a man who, by an odd quirk of fate, was tone deaf.

Arthur Miller and ethics, Bernard Shaw and Orwell on money; an illustration from Rupert Brook of the problem of irony; Shaw a writer whose political views expressed outside his plays make him benefit from Barthes’s distinction between the author who writes and the man who lives.