Fleecing the Bulgarians

IT IS A BEASTLY wet day in Folkestone, England, eighty years ago and George Bernard Shaw is snivelling in his hotel room about the opening performance of Arms and the Man the night before. "I had the curious experience of witnessing an apparently insane success," he laments in a letter to Henry Arthur Jones, "with the actors and actresses almost losing their heads with the intoxication of laugh after laugh, and of going before the curtain to tremendous applause, the only person in the theatre who knew that the whole affair was a ghastly failure." Poor Shaw was to tussle, with benighted audiences and thick critics for some time over the amusing play. His was a serious drama about the nature of love and heroism--albeit swaddled in dramatic bathos--and all he heard were guffaws from the gallery. Surely this was a farce, with its soldier hero who carries chocolates instead of cartridges, its recently-civilized Bulgarians who wash their hands "nearly every day"--something worthy of the satirist W. S. Gilbert. In oppressive Folkestone Shaw is trembling with literary indignation. Gilbertian! Hhmmph.

Agreed: the hero, Captain Bluntschli, does load his revolver with chocolates and does flee the battlefield when the Bulgarian army mounts a charge, but this is not comedy, this is the natural response of a reasoning man to the horrors of war. How opposed to the flatulent conceits of the Bulgarians, for whom heroism is embodied by bewhiskered Sergei Saranoff leading the harebrained charge, and for whom "higher love" is typified by the couple that coos and clutches effusively. Yet in spite of the laughter still echoing in the theater--for this is a funny play--Bluntschli wins out soberly with a perfect Shavian love affair with a heroine he has never kissed.

Unfortunately, no profound love affair elevates the entertaining production of Arms and the Man that was launched at the Loeb main stage last week. Director Evangeline Morphos takes care of that early in the first act when, in a neat libidinization of the bloodless original stage directions, she contrives that our heroine, Raina Petkoff, must sit on Bluntschli's revolver after the fugitive Servian captain has clambered through her window and taken refuge in her boudoir. Hoo-ha! What's more, H. Rodney Clark's Bluntschli is such a card, and Anne K. Ames's Raina such a flighty creature, that the Shavian prospect of sincere and kindly intercourse never dares rear its gentle graying cranium on stage during the next 90 minutes. What does appear is a shallow but lively confrontation between the bombastic Bulgarians and an unflappable Bluntschli, the production packaged appropriately in Scott Joplin ragtime and stage directions that divest the original of any subtlety of humor.

THE ACTION TAKES place in Bulgaria in the mid-1880s where the countrymen are defending themselves against the Servians. A Swiss mercenary who is employed by the Servians, Bluntschli, becomes for Raina her "chocolate cream soldier" by virtue of the moonlight encounter in which he reveals his fondness for food over bullets. Her fiance Sergius, Raina figures, is much braver than the smooth-talking Swiss, but only in the last five minutes of the play does the better man win.

Sergius is an awesome assertion of a man with an uncompromising attachment to his heroic and romantic fustian. Rather than concede that his "higher love" for Raina is just or that his battlefield maneuvers are empty-headed, the idealist Sergius breaks down and crows cynically that the world is a hollow sham and life a farce. As Sergius, Timothy Cunningham and his perpetual scowl of a face execute the finest performance in the Loeb production. Cunningham brings to the role a pair of eyes that the properties manager could only have obtained from a ping-pong table, and as the part is laden with lugubrious, breast-beating lines, the eyes spend the better share of the last two acts bulging ludicrously from their sockets.

Life is not a farce for the chocolate cream soldier, the enlightened man who leads life "sensibly," or as Raina says at first, "with a low, shop-keeping mind," without staking itself to any lofty principle. Fifteen years of experience in war has taught Bluntschli that the most important principle is to save one's skin, and when the mortally offended Sergius ("Our romance is shattered") demands to meet him at sundown with his sabre, the Swiss submits bluntly that he will bring a machine gun. Clark plays the chocolate cream soldier competently if monotonously, as a debonair impostor. He is forever raising his eyebrows to convince the audience of his nonchalance, and if he really had to incorporate the cigarette as a prop, he might have learned to inhale the harsh Bulgarian blend. The director fails in this production to show that the decisions Bluntschli makes are sincere responses to real crises--the love affair here has been reduced to a flirtation and the specter of war that is supposed to haunt the play has been revamped as a slap-stick--yet Clark struggles to portray a modern Shavian hero.

ANOTHER SHAVIAN hero here is the shrewd servant Louka (played convincingly by Roberta Dahlberg) who without pondering irrelevantly about higher love, cashes in on Sergius's moral earnestness to gain a betrothal. Stephen Kolzak turns in a priggish performance as the servile servant Nicola. The casting that sets the tone for the production, however, is that of hulking Tom Shea and lisping Lois Pike as Raina's parents. They are real bulls in the china shop.

The china shop in this production, by the way, is a stark and handsome accumulation of steel scaffolding that is only employed in the first act's elevated bedroom scene. The rest of the night it just sits there, and the producers could have turned quite a profit if they had only sold air-rights to the structure for the last two acts.

Which is not to say that this is a bad production. The actors seem to relate to each other superbly, and the performance moves quickly and comically with no lulls. That Arms and the Man withstands such a shallow rendering is quite a testimony to Shaw's wit. For even if the production does not broach the significant themes of war and romance that exist in the play, it does execute a nice variation on the old country mouse/city mouse story. Bluntschli, you see, is the unscrupulous and urbane businessman (in the course of the play, he inherits the proprietorship of six hotels) who displays his acumen by fleecing the Bulgarians during war treaty negotiations, of 50 prisoners of war for 200 flea-ridden horses. This is Bluntschli the mobile mercenary, the modern and disinterested man who, like Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara, sells his services to the highest bidder.

The Bulgarian Petkoffs, on the other hand, display fierce and stupid loyalty, and despite their new money and active quest for culture, they have not managed to refine their boorish manners. (These unflattering references to the Bulgarian character, incidentally, prompted a riot by Bulgarian students when the play was put on in Vienna in 1921.)

The Loeb performance succeeds winningly when contrasting the Bulgarians' demeanor to Bluntschli's, and would seem to be intended to go off on this level. The message of the production, then, is that if you never bathe you will, according to Major Petkoff, probably live to be 98, but you will certainly not get the girl.