Shavings

CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND'S CONVERSION

by GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Somewhat in the manner of royalty, Ingrid Bergman deigns to make an infrequent city-to-city tour before her oohing and aahing subjects. Lovely to look at, graciously regal in bearing, exotically foreign in accent, she does not remotely intend for any playwright to steal the spotlight. An assiduous search through a trunkful of lesser Shaw has provided the perfect vehicle in Captain

Brassbound's Conversion, a D-minus play for a C-plus actress. It is now parked briefly on Broadway before wheezing into the hinterlands.

Despite the fact that Shaw wrote juicy roles for women, there is not a sensuous, genuinely appealing or thoroughly believable female character in all of his plays. Shaw simply used women tactically in order to make fun of the ideas, authority, and personalities of men with whom he happened to disagree. He conferred on women the mask of reason, but behind that cover lay the clever, arrogant, self-absorbed mind of G.B.S. Lady Cicely Waynflete (Bergman) is one of Shaw's perennial Little Miss Super-Fix-Its. She just happens to be among the brigands and bedouins of North Africa rather than in the drawing rooms of Mayfair or on the battlements of Orleans.

The targets are routinely Shavian --English justice, hypocrisy and prudery. The comic fall guys are Arab princes. The British exploited them for empire; Shaw does it for cheap and wilted laughs. The hero is an anti-Establishment mouthpiece, a humorless pirate chief (Pernell Roberts) too tame to make the chorus line in Gilbert and Sullivan.

Time has eroded the social basis of Shaw's comedies. He loved to taunt imperial power, but it is pretty lame satire to twist a lion's tail when there is no longer a lion attached. He loved to tease the middle class, but in a welfare state, the middle class has lost both the hopes of fortune and the fears of penury upon which Shaw played. He loved to poke fun at lower-class blighters who dropped their H's, and today--irony of ironies--the sons of those blighters, and not he or his disciples, are the ruling dramatists of the English stage. -T.E.K.

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