Ancient Moderns

Shaw and Ibsen were iconoclasts who became icons. Two of their plays, revived off-Broadway last week, show the kind of dust they can still kick up and the kind that has settled upon them.

In Misalliance, first produced in 1910, St. George Bernard Shaw goes forth to slay the dragon of family life with his own jawbone. The two renowned fathers in the play are exposed as shameless old rips, their sons and daughters as scamps with serpents' teeth. The emancipated heroine, Hypatia Tarleton, says, "I just don't want to be bothered about either good or bad. I want to be an active verb.'' Actually, she and the others are passive wordlings caught in a brilliant, bottomless Edwardian conversation pit. But if the people are stationary, the props are animated. Crockery smashes, airplanes crash, cocked pistols emerge from portable Turkish baths.

The comedy is buoyantly performed, a happy tour de farce. Donald Moffat, in the role of John Tarleton, the self-taught underwear tycoon, is the image of Shaw's young old man, the drawing-room atheist who quotes his chosen gospels: "Read Ibsen. Read Dickens. Read Whatshisname." As his daughter Hypatia, Frances Sternhagen seems to have been born with a riding crop in hand and the conviction that the pursuit of a mate is the most exciting form of fox hunt. James Greene is cringingly comic as a socialist underdog who yearns to bite the hand that feeds him.

Shaw is all talk, but he is not just talk. Much of what he said half a century ago on education, art, democracy and parenthood is still pertinent. On the other hand, the New Woman that G.B.S. gleefully released from his inkwell has become the disenchanted genie of the modern home. The play ends up with too many points of view to make a point. Yet the canny showman salvages the sage, and the plot --girl meets boy, girl chases boy, girl gets boy--is as good as it always has been.

Ghosts, written 80 years ago by Henrik Ibsen, is what might have happened to Nora if she had never left A Doll's House.

Wedded to all the Victorian proprieties, the widowed Mrs. Alving keeps her son ignorant of the drunken and dissolute life of his captain father. She stifles her longstanding passion for her minister, Pastor Manders. She never tells her maid that the girl is the illegitimate daughter of Captain Alving. Gradually, the fagade of respectability is stripped away--most cruelly by seeing her son in the last ravages of inherited syphilis. In belated, horrifying self-recognition, Mrs. Alving realizes that to save her face she has lost her soul.

Ghosts is haunted by a successful past. The plight of the playwright as social reformer is to turn one generation's problem into the next generation's platitude. When Ibsen took syphilis as a topic in 1881, the subject was novel, courageous and scandalous. In the era of antibiotics, it will scarcely lift an eyebrow, let alone carry a play. Other Ibsen shockers also qualify as placid truisms today: that a pastor can be a sanctimonious fraud; that mothers sometimes love their sons not wisely but too well; that in Paris, artists and models sometimes live together unwed. What is far from dated is Ibsen's meticulous craftsmanship, his gift for probing character in depth, his passion for a morality that is more than a residue of conventions. The unexamined life, as Ibsen saw it, was an immoral life.

This credit balance of Ibsen's is some what dissipated by David Ross's Manhattan production. In the first play of Ross's current Ibsen cycle, Anne Meacham made a formidable Hedda Gabler; Leueen MacGrath is a lightweight Mrs. Alving. Ibsen's Mrs. Alving is scoured to self-knowledge by the harsh uses of life; Actress MacGrath's Mrs. Alving is so much the sophisticated skeptic that events merely seem to confirm her suspicions. Modernity also mars Staats Cotsworth's Pastor Manders. He plays the hypocrite, but he is not, as Ibsen intended, a pious hypocrite.

Like antiques, classics can be honestly restored, but they cannot honestly be improved.

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