Old Play in Manhattan

Misalliance (by George Bernard Shaw) has long had a reputation for being virtually unplayable. Very likely this rumor got around because for years few people ever saw it played. Performed on Broadway last week for the first time since 1917, it pranced and hallooed and came hilariously to life, giving further reason for saluting Shaw's ghost with: "This was the noblest showman of them all."

Showman in Misalliance Shaw certainly was -- far more, indeed, than dramatist. He is armed with a text of sorts -- family life in all possible aspects. But far from expounding it from a pulpit, he scatters it bit by bit in a wild game of hare & hounds. Its chief bit is parents & children, a theme for which Shaw had perfect Shavian qualifications: he was never a parent and quite possibly never a child. He effortlessly makes mincemeat of the two distinguished fathers in his play, and little monsters of their daughters & sons. The war between the generations ticked off. he turns to the war between the sexes. Misalliance offers some of G.B.S.'s most triumphantly predatory females, whether as elderly housewives, outrageous hussies, or fantastic high-wire artists.

In Misalliance Shaw was even more unbridled than his characters : grown men claw the carpet in temper fits, airplanes fall out of the sky, pistols are cocked, china is smashed, women are chased through heather and hall. If family life has seldom been so discredited, it has seldom possessed such genuine if turbulent charm. Misalliance has, to be sure, its limitations. It could stand cutting; and though its method conquers the audience, in the end it defeats itself. The play can mean so many things that it really means nothing at all.

The current production is so alive largely because Director Cyril Ritchard makes no effort to give it meaning, but plays it entirely for farce. With the help of Barry Jones. Tamara Geva, Dorothy Sands and others, what seems when read a forebreath of Shaw's imposing Heartbreak House seems on the stage to prefigure You Can't Take It With You.

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