AMERICAN SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL: III 'Devil's Disciple' Is Bright and Brassy Show

STRATFORD, Conn.-It would be folly to claim that The Devil's Disciple is one of Bernard Shaw's best plays, but he had a whale of a lot of fun writing it. A cast can have a great deal of fun playing it-as the Stratfordians are obviously doing this summer. And an audience can have a great deal of fun watching it-as I did.

Choosing to subtitle the play "a melodrama," Shaw appropriated and satirized all the traditional features of this genre. Like other melodramas, it pretty much plays itself, it lacks plausibility and subtlety, and it makes no demands whatever on its onlookers. But under Cyril Ritchard's direction, the present production has emerged bright and brassy.

Rather untypically for Shaw, the play is filled with incidents that come thick and fast, and that incorporate a lot of energetic physical action. Its three acts are rather short (adding up to a running-time of only an hour and three-quarters in this performance); and if in the writing they couldn't be equally good, it was lucky that the second act came our better than the first, and the third better than the second-rather than the other way around.

Shaw took for his basic premise the situation of a young man's willingness to be executed in another person's place-very likely suggested by the end of Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities, where Sidney Carton goes to the guillotine in the stead of his friend Charles Marnay. Ironically, death did not, however, remain a matter of stage make-believe. Shaw wrote the play in 1896-97 at the request of the famous actor of melodrama Wiliam ("Breezy Bill") Terriss; but, before Terriss ever essaved the title role, he was murdered by a madman outside London's Adelphi Theatre.

The playwright, however, fashioned his leading character partly with the celebrated American actor Richard Mansfield in mind. Mansfield was the first man to introduce Shaw to American audiences, through his appearance in 1894 as Bluntschli in Arms and the Man, which lasted only a couple of weeks. Nothing daunted, however, Mansfield starred in The Devil's Disciple as soon as it was finished. If Shaw enjoyed writing the play, he doubly enjoyed having written the play-for Mansfield's production turned out to be Shaw's first theatrical success anywhere in the world. It gave him financial security sufficient to let him take on a wife in his forties and rid himself of his job as a drama critic for a magazine.

Part of the play's initial success in the United States was doubtless due to the fact that Shaw placed it in 1777, during the American Revolution, in a New Hampshire town, and proceeded to aim a lot of barbs at the bumbling British. King George's soldiers are moving from town to town, hanging well-known citizens as examples they hoped would deter Americans from further rebellion. When Dick Dudgeon, a reckless reprobate, is mistaken for a Presbyterian minister, he prevents the minister's wife from disabusing the arresting soldiers and marches off to his supposed death.

Shaw followed up his "melodrama" with "a history," Caesar and Cleopatra, and "an adventure," Captain Brassbound's Conversion -and put them all together under the heading "Three Plays for Puritans." The second work is far and away the finest, and the American Shakespeare Festival chose it as its first departure from Shakespeare, in 1963.

Not only has Cyril Ritchard directed the first play in the trilogy but he has also assigned to himself the delectable role of the actual historical General "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne. Normally I am constitutionally opposed to anyone's functioning as director and performer in the same production: but in this instance at least, Burgoyne does not enter until well into the last act.

Or so Shaw planned. Ritchard, however, has decided to offer us an enticing appetizer. We hear from one direction a B-flat fanfare for solo trumpet-rather lonely and Coplan-desque in effect-answered from elsewhere by woodwinds. Then, accompanied by some drummers. Ritchard in full general's regalia strides in and delivers a short prologue extracted from Shaw's lengthy opening stage direction. There is no objection to this, for Shaw was characteristically unable to keep from putting some of his best work-often quite irrelevant-into his prefaces, stage directions, and notes.

The play proper introduces us first to Mrs. Dudgeon, the one thoroughly unplesasant and unsympathetic person Shaw ever fashioned. Through her Shaw was attacking what he viewed as the worst aspects of organized religion. In this production the role is in the capable hands of Margaret Hamilton, making her Festival debut (she played the same role a dozen years ago in Philadelphia). Those to whom this name means nothing will more easily recognize her as the Wicked Witch of the West in the famous movie The Wizard of Oz. My own most admiring recollection of her comes from seeing her play, many years ago, the leading role of the altruistic murderess Ellen Creed in Percy and Denham's Ladies in Retirement that classic of psychological suspense thrillers. It is good to see her in the flesh once again after so long an interval.

Miss Hamilton gives a fine portrayal of the newly-widowed Mrs. Dudgcon. Not only is she cruel and bigoted and flamboyantly ascetic, but she is made to appear hypocritical too, as Miss Hamilton quickly pulls out a handkerchief when the minister enters. And she knows how to put over a remark like, "Well, I am Richard's mother. If I am against him who has any right to be for him?" Shaw has also allowed her to be unintentionally funny, as when she dismisses her brother's bastard daughter Essic with the comment, "Your history isn't fit for your own ears to hear." Mary Wright is appealing as the orphaned Essic, a rose among thorns whom the heretical Dick comes to cherish.

Dick himself comes across with all the brio one could ask for, thanks to David Selby. He is properly imprudent, a maelstrom of activity; and he is young and indecently handsome, as befits the romantic hero of a melodrama. Shaw has carefully built up suspense for Dick's first entrance, Heis talked about at some length; and the Dudgeon family, all dressed in black mourning outfits, are waiting for the conventional reading-of-the-will episode. Dick finally bounds in irreverently, wearing light blue and brown-the embodiment of defiance.

Selby deftly handles a protracted episode of comic business with a plate of toast in the second act. But there are a few tiny points he should be more careful about. For instance, he slightly anticipates being stopped by the minister, when he ought not react until he actually feels the hand on his arm.

Jill Clayburgh is lovely as the minister's young wife Judith. She is particularly skilful in the long scene in which she is first left alone with Dick. Her gradual progression from flustered fear to the threshold of adultery is a delight to watch. (After the performance I caught, an unfortunote accident obliged her to leave the cast; I hope she will be back in harness again shortly.)

Lee Richardson plays the Kev. Anderson, who, though some twenty years his wife's senior, is vigorous and by no means in a rut Particularly admirable are the subtle vocal inflections that Richardson brings to his role. It is into the clergyman's mouth that Shaw-leaving nothing to the audience-puts the play's message, albeit one hardly characteristic of a sermonizing minister: "This foolish young man boasted himself the Devil's Disciple; but when the hour of trial came to him, he found that it was his destiny to suffer and be faithful to the death. I thought myself a decent minister of the gospel of peace; but when the hour of trial came to me, I found that it was my destiny to be a man of action, and that my place was amid the thunder of the captains and the shouting." With typically Shavian irony, the playwright has turned things topsy-turvy in this work.

Wyman Pendleton contributes a deft cameo as a lawyer who revels in hair-splitting; similarly with the paunchy Cockney sergeant of John Tillinger. Joseph Maher gets considerable mileage out of Major Swindon, who-echoing the Queen of Hearts' exclamation in Alice in Wonderland: "Sentence first-verdict afterwards"-proclaims, "We have arranged [the hanging] for 12 o'clock. Nothing remains to be done except to try him." At one point Shaw has him say, "You insolent-," breaking off after the adjective. Here Maher provides the noun "bastard"-which Shaw likely had in mind but could not have got by the stage censor in the 1890's.

The court-martial scene is, in fact, by far the choicest in the play, and it affords Shaw plenty of opportunity to poke fun at a good many targets, and to pit the witty intelligences of Dick and Gen. Burgoyne against each other. Shaw gives Burgoyne the wittiest lines in the play, and Cyril Ritchard is the ideal man to deliver them with all the Wildean elegance and aristocratic punctilio they deserve. Ritchard's comic timing is superb, and when he gets all his lines learned he will be unsurpassable in the part.

The minor members of the Dudgeon family (notably James Cromwell as Dick's nasal and stupid brother Christy), the officer and soldiers, and the Indians all lend welcome color to the production. And where Shaw has called for the offstage sound of the Dead March from Handel's Saul, Ritchard has brought a real costumed band of piccolos, brass and drums right on stage. And he has appended a musical epilogue to Shaw's wildly cheering townspeople. After a performance of "Yankee Doodle," a group launches into William Billings' patriotic hymn "Chester"-a most fitting choice, for Billings was a Bostonian who had written the piece around the date of the play's incidents and incorporated into its verses specific references to New England and General Burgoyne.

Although the Festival stage is not really designed for conventional box sets, the play demands them, and William Ritman has made the best of a difficult situation, so arranging the parts of the Dudgcon's main room that they can easily be shuffled about to become the main room of the Anderson household. John Gleason's lighting could be improved. When Judith arrives at the Dudgeon farm-house, it is morning; yet when the door is opened, we look through it into pitch darkness. And I find the too obvious use of follow-spotlights somewhat irritating. But such tiny blemishes cannot seriously mar what is from start to finish a thoroughly enjoyable show. The Festival is giving us a major production of a minor work.