'Androcles' Rounds Out Stratford Season

STRATFORD, CONN.--Yes, Androcles and not Pericles. For the forty-seventh production in the history of the American Shakespeare Festival, the powers-that-be have for the fourth time gone outside the Shakespearean canon. The first departure, in 1963, was Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra; and this year we once again have Shaw. In between, the Festival gave us Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and Anouilh's Antigone.

I wonder whether it was accidental that the last three offerings outside the canon have been plays about religion. At any rate, Shaw was always fascinated by the religious mentality; and, although he often touched on religion elsewhere, he examined it in detail on the stage three times in his career. The first result was The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), a religious tract in the form of a romantic melodrama laid in our own Wild West. The third was Saint Joan (1923), not only Shaw's greatest play but also one of the consummate creative achievements of the twentieth century.

Between the two came Androcles and the Lion (1911-12). For this, Shaw took his basic plot from an ancient tale related by the second-century Latin author Aulus Gellius. Shaw changed Gellius' Androclus, who was a Roman and a slave, into Androcles, who was a Greek, a tailor, and a Christian.

Shaw had a more recent stimulus, too. J.M. Barrie had in 1904 written Peter Pan, whose unbounded popularity infuriated Shaw. So Shaw set out to show how one ought to write for young people, and fashioned his Androcles as "a fable for children." The play was denounced by the critics and the religious press, who were outraged by someone's writing a funny play about religion. But Shaw claimed the work was not a comedy--an absurd assertion. It is a fable; it is a fantasy; and it is just as surely a comedy. Yet, like all the best comedy, it has a serious core. And although the play was aimed at children--and with unerring skill, it should be stated--he could not, being Shaw, avoid infusing it with plenty of substantial meat for the adult populace. Consequently, Androcles belongs to that select body of works to which that overused slogan "wonderful entertainment for the entire family" really does apply.

Since Shaw geared the play to children, it is relatively short--a Prologue and two acts. In Nikos Psacharopoulos' current production the show is divided into two 45-minute halves that should not tax the attention-span of any child, especially since the director has emphasized visual fun and spectacle.

Will Steven Armstrong has designed the settings so that simple maneuvering can quickly shift the locations from jungle to crossroads, from the exterior of the Coliseum to the amphi-theatre inside. And Arthur (not Artur) Rubinstein has provided clever incidental music that makes periodic and parodic references to jazz, Ravel, and Respighi.

At the outset, Androcles' name in Greek-alphabet capitals hovers over the stage. A yellow scrim hangs in front, with sunflowers traced on it. As Tharon Musser's lighting changes, suggestions of a lion's head appear; and shortly some slinky jazz with a perky clarinet over a tonic-dominant ostinato ushers in the Lion (Ted Graeber) with a lioness (Jane Farnol). The two animals perform a semidance pantomime, until the Lion gets rid of his partner. Shaw's script calls for no lioness, but this seems a quite acceptable bit of directorial padding. When alone, the Lion does some pushups, indulges in a few boxing-ring victory gestures, and comically assumes a Charlie Chaplin cross-legged stance.

Androcles (Gene Troobnick) and his wife Megaera (Jan Miner) enter and prove well cast indeed. Miss Miner's role is a short one, but she is properly attractive, ample, and shrewish. Curly headed Troobnick, imported by the Festival just for this role, fits to perfection Shaw's prescription of "a small, thin, ridiculous little man." He has no trouble convincing us of his great love of animals, and is wholly at home in Shaw's amusing baby-talk (such as "Did um get an awful thorn into um's tootsums wootsums?"). The extraction of the thorn from the Lion's paw is nicely handled, after which Androcles and the Lion perform a waltz that starts in the minor and shifts to major as they dance off into the distance and leave the henpecking Megaera behind. I think I am correct in recalling that, for some reason, Megaera's final triple taunt of "Coward!" has been omitted.

Without benefit of voice or grimace, Ted Graeber's Lion, here and later in the play, is a remarkably adept and communicative mime. And Troobnick too manages to maintain his appealing level of performance.

But, despite the play's title, Androcles and the Lion are not the chief characters. In this respect, the work is like, say, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, Clymbeline, and Henry IV. Although not appearing until after the Prologue, Lavinia is Shaw's leading character and spokesman. In his Postscript, Shaw calls her "a clever and fearless freethinker." She is one of his huge gallery of extraordinary women--a group unsurpassed by any other twentieth-century dramatist. Lavinia falls into the category of those persons passionately driven by con-science and commitment--like his Saint Joan, his Major Barbara, his Vivie (in Mrs. Warren's Profession), and his Lina (in Misalliance).

Herein lies the Startford production's main shortcoming. Kathleen Dabney is attractive enough in her blue toga streaked with green, but she just doesn't give evidence of meriting her position as a leader of the Christian prisoners. Her Lavinia lacks fervor and intensity; and some of her lines don't ring true.

After Lavinia, the most important character is the Roman Captain. Wheeled in at his imposing first entrance, and decked out in armor with a raspberry cape, Josef Sommer makes him a formidable figure indeed. He is handsome, superior, intelligent, obviously used to command, and able to fall in love with another as forcefully as he is in love with himself.

Sommer brings to the part the kind of imperious and clean elocution that we tend to think of as typically Shavian. It will be a wholly admirable performance when someone tells him that the word 'applicable' is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable and not the second.

The Captain and Lavinia carry on the play's most important discourse about religion, and it is too bad that the two are not more evenly matched here. It is in the course of their disputation that Shaw makes his chief point:

Lavinia: I have now no doubt at all that I must die for something greater than dreams or stories. . . . If it were for anything small enough to know, it would be too small to die for. I think I'm going to die for God. Nothing else is real enough to die for.

Captain: What is God?

Lavinia: When we know that, Captain, we shall be gods ourselves.

Shaw took care that his Christians were not carbon copies of each other. As he commented, "All my articulate Christians have different enthusiasms." And in the case of Ferrovius he allowed a would-be martyr to fail at the moment of trial by committing wholesale slaughter. In a striking change from his other roles for the Festival, Charles Cioffi gives Ferrovius a low, gruff voice and makes him a quick-tempered powerhouse, an ogre. Later, when he returns from the arena brandishing a bloody sword, he makes a wonderful effect not by howling, "Cut off this right hand," but by whispering it in self-horror. The director has undercut one of Shaw's points by having Ferrovius toss a coin to the Roman Centurion rather than to the prescribed old beggar.

As the debauched Christian, Spintho, Richard Mathews does carry a wine pouch, but makes the character much too hale and hearty. He is supposed to have "gone helplessly to the bad," and complains, "I'm full of disease. I've drunk all my nerves away," but our eyes tell us that it just isn't so.

On the Roman side, the young courtiers Lentulus (Anthony Mainionis) and Metellus (Michael Parish) are insufficiently differentiated. Ken Parker is an amusingly scared Menagerie Keeper. Rex Everhart, wielding a billy-club, is the Editor in charge of all the gladiators, of whom the near-naked Retiarius (Harold Miller) and armored Secutor (DeVeren Bookwalter) go through their paces commendably, and lend color to the spectacle (an excess of color is provided by Jane Greenwood's costumes for many of the Christians, which are far too gaudy and even psychedelic).

Rex Robbins plays the Emperor to the hilarious hilt; and he comes over somewhat too ludicrous and undignified for my taste, though this is certainly one way to play him. It is undeniable that everyone will be grossly entertained by the prodigious and protracted cat-and-mouse chase with which the Emperor and the Lion climax the second act. It is inventive, fast, furious, and so athletic that, at the opening performance, the Emperor's august knee not surprisingly got skinned and began to bleed. When at last the Emperor brags, "I have subdued the beast," the supine Lion himself places the Emperor's phonily victorious foot on the vanquished leonine belly instead of letting the Emperor do it of his own accord as Shaw prescribes--a delightfully inspired touch.

Although Shaw wrote Androcles as a children's fable, he intended it to have allegorical significance. "My martyrs," he said, "are the martyrs of all time, and my persecutors the persecutors of all time." When he came to add his Postscript in 1915, he stated: "The most striking aspect of the play at this moment is the terrible topicality given it by the war.... We see that even among men who make a profession of religion the great majority are as Martian as the majority of their congregations." Comedy or no, Androcles would once again, I think, have had for Shaw a "terrible topicality" in the 1960's.

The play itself and its current production aside, there are two further matters that may be of interest. it is well known that Shaw was fond of supplying prose prefaces to his plays. Even though Androcles was a short play aimed at children, Shaw considered it important enough to merit the longest preface he ever wrote, running to a hundred pages.

In this Preface, "On the Prospects of Christianity," Shaw divides what is on his mind into some 83 short sections. He devotes a good many of these to a careful analysis and comparison of the four Gospels, showing how they give widely different pictures of Jesus' life, character, and teachings--sometimes to the point of absolute irreconcilability.

He discusses whether or not Jesus was a coward, a martyr, a proselytist, a bigot, a communist, an economist, a biologist, and other things. he argues his view of the apostle Paul as "a man of genius" but "violently anti-Christian." He presents discussions of free will, marriage, sex, celibacy, miracles, baptism, immortality, and hell. And he winds up with his reasons for believing that Jesus was "a thorough-going ant-Clerical."

As he did so often, Shaw hoped to shake his readers up, and succeeded brilliantly. The Preface is witty, and it is blunt; moreover, it is utterly serious in content. And it has lost none of its punch in a half century. Anyone interested in religion can profit from trying to match his mind against Shaw's here.

The second matter involves certain provisions of Shaw's will. Shaw left the largest fortune of any dramatist in history. Having long been vitally interested in language, pronunciation, and script, he specified that most of his estate be used to seek out and promote a more efficient British alphabet of at least 40 letters; and that, when such an alphabet was found, a parallel edition of Androcles and the Lion be published with the traditional and the new, phonetic alphabet on opposite pages.

Shaw was branded a raving lunatic, and in fact his provisions were ruled invalid in law. An appeal from the court's decision elicited a compromise agreement from the three residuary legatees, and a public competition was announced. Of the 467 entries, four were judged worthy of sharing the prize money. The design finally adopted, however--an ingeniously logical and space-saving system of 48 characters--was largely that of Kingsley Read. And the bi-alphabetic edition of Androcles was duly published in 1962. Whether the Shaw Alphabet achieves widespread use remains to be seen.

(A regular edition complete with Preface and Postscript and the Shaw Alphabet edition are both available in paperback, published by Penguin Books.)The inflated Roman Emperor (REX ROBBINS) who will eventually be deflated.