New Shaw Play

"At the age of 73, Shaw has nothing new to say. The forces which he has created have moved beyond him. He is no longer a prophet but a rather pathetic figure, unconscious of the changes which he has wrought."

So wrote Critic Hannen Swaffer of the London Daily Express after witnessing, last week in Malvern, the English premiere of The Apple Cart, George Bernard Shaw's first play in six years.*

It was an impressive occasion. At the theatre, garbed in a belted shooting jacket which he said had been made in 1904 and in what one observer called "an indescribably peaked Tartar cap," Shaw greeted his guests with gusto and much pleased tugging at his flaring, white beard. He left, however, before the final curtain.

The play takes three and one-half hours. The time is the unspecified future. The hero is the King of England. In the first act, the King resists the attempts of his Cabinet to deprive him of the right of veto. In the second, he talks tediously with his mistress. In the third, he is approached by the U. S. Ambassador and informed that the U. S. wishes to return to the British Empire--to absorb it. Shaw eventually postulates his thesis, which is a criticism of democracy most succinctly expressed in the somewhat muddled Shavianism spoken by King Magnus to his Queen: "America is a nation of wops talking about the Pilgrim Fathers ... it is a world of wops." The consensus of Malvern audiences was that the second act was a bore, the first and third amusing.

*Earlier performances of The Apple Cart were given in Polish at Warsaw last spring.