Left-wing playwrights at the Shaw Festival (comment on The Little Foxes)

Four plays down for Emsworth so far in the 2008 season of the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), and each one the work of a deeply committed leftist! Consider:

J. B. PRIESTLEY, playwright for An Inspector Calls. (See the Emsworth review in this post.) One of England’s leading radical socialists from the 1930s through the 1950s, a politician as well as a writer. A founder of the socialist Common Wealth Party. Favored permanent wage controls, nationalization of industry, and public ownership of land.

LILLIAN HELLMAN, playwright for The Little Foxes. (See the Emsworth review in this post.) More than a mere “fellow traveler.” Openly admired Stalin and his methods; indifferent to the efficient brutality with which he eliminated opponents; approved the Soviet occupations of Finland and Poland. Traveled to Russia in the late 1930s while Stalin was intentionally starving millions of Ukranians; found nothing in the U.S.S.R. to criticize and much to admire.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, playwright for Getting Married. (See the Emsworth review in this post.) Britain’s leading socialist thinker from 1890 until his death in 1950. Admired Lenin, Stalin, and Mussolini; praised the U.S.S.R. Opposed Britain’s involvement in both world wars. Not only promoted radical socialism, but used his plays to attack the cultural and economic institutions that held England together: the Christian religion, the institution of marriage, private ownership of property, the free enterprise system.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN, composer for Wonderful Town. The epitome of ‘60s radical chic. Notorious as an uncritical supporter of left-wing causes during the 1960s; his high-society parties to raise money for the Black Panthers were lampooned by Tom Wolfe in his essay “These Radical Chic Evenings.”

Bernstein gets a pass, since the script and the lyrics to the songs in Wonderful Town were written by others, since the music is glorious, and since it’s hard to find anything ideological in this wonderful American musical (the Shaw’s production of which I enthusiastically recommend; see my review).

But the Priestley, Hellman, and Shaw plays positively burst with leftist cant. And Shaw’s anti-capitalist Mrs. Warren’s Profession is yet to come in the Shaw Festival’s 2008 season!

If I took account of a playwright’s principles in deciding whether to see a play, I might have given The Little Foxes a pass. But the play had a high reputation, and we had enjoyed Hellman’s The Autumn Garden at the Shaw a couple of years ago.

But my, how that woman hated our country! The Little Foxes is disguised as a character study in greed and selfishness and a portrait of a dysfunctional family; in fact, it is a rant against American capitalism and a barely disguised call for violent revolution.

In The Little Foxes, the already wealthy Hubbard family (Southern merchants and bankers) are trying to round up capital to build a cotton mill in their town.

But the Hubbard brothers and their sister, we learn, are every bit as rapacious and corrupt as the French aristocracy before the French Revolution, or the Russian nobility before the October Revolution of 1917. Hellman wants us to feel that the Hubbards, and the world of American business and finance for which they stand in the play, deserve the same fates as those French and Russian aristocrats.

Consider all the sins and vices Hellman inflicts upon the characters in her play:

The Hubbards were the children of slave-owners, just as many of the Russian aristocracy murdered by the communists in 1917 had owned Russian serfs. Hellman has Ben Hubbard make the offensive comment that he’d put his aging cook out to pasture “if we hadn’t owned her mother.”

The Hubbard brothers got rich by cheating black people on staple goods and by charging them usurious interest. The Hubbards plan to use their political muscle, probably through bribes, to get water rights for the new mill for practically nothing.

Illustrating the Marxist propaganda point that capitalists grind the faces of the poor by turning them against each other, the Hubbard brothers brag that they’ll be able to keep wages low at a new cotton mill by playing the poor whites off against the poor blacks. They assure their new business partner from Chicago that no labor union will ever be allowed to get a foothold in a cotton mill in their town.

An exquisite touch borrowed from Les Miserables: Just as the French aristocrats famously used to put mantraps in their forests to maim peasants who hunted small game to feed their starving families, Oscar Hubbard goes out hunting every morning in his large, privately owned spread and leaves his dead game to rot, even though malnourished townspeople haven’t had meat in months. He promises to have the law against trespassers.

Reinforcing the link to the doomed French and Russian monarchy, Hellman names the sister “Regina.” Preoccupied with fashion and spending money, like Marie Antoinette, she is both the strongest-willed and the most heartless of the siblings. Regina doesn’t hesitate to blackmail her own brothers to get a larger interest in the new cotton mill.

In one of the play’s crudest scenes, Oscar Hubbard encourages his own son, Leo, to steal a packet of valuable bonds from a safe deposit box.

Reminding us again of those inbred monarchical families: the Hubbard brothers and Regina connive to marry Leo to his 17-year-old first cousin, Alexandra. Fortunately, Alexandra despises Leo because of his cruelty to animals, among other reasons.

When Oscar’s wife, Birdie, warns the girl of the matchmaking plot (“don’t you see, they’ll make you marry him, Zan”), Oscar strikes his wife – perhaps the most shocking moment in the play.

Who would defend such people? Wife-beaters, corrupters of children, animal-abusers, cheats, thieves, swindlers, and usurers, bribers, blackmailers, oppressors of the poor, enemies of the working man!

True to Marxist stereotype, Hellman takes care that the only characters in the play with any moral sense are the “oppressed” characters. Oscar’s ill-usage of his wife Birdie has beaten her down and driven her to drink, but she still has enough spirit to become indignant over the way her in-laws “made their money charging awful interest to poor ignorant n***s and cheating them on what they bought.” The Hubbards’ black servant Addie lays out the moral justification for a class-based revolution:

Well , there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand and watch them do it.

At the end of Hellman’s play, the spunky Alexandra remembers Addie’s remark, flexes her youthful muscles, and sets off to mount the barricades:

Addie said there were people who ate the earth and other people who stood around and watched them do it. And Uncle Ben said the same thing. (Tensely) Well, tell him for me, Mama, I’m not going to stand around and watch you do it. Tell him I’ll fighting as hard as he’ll be fighting some place where people don’t just stand around and watch.

Hellman wants us to understand that the Hubbards are not just small-town characters, but are cut out of the same cloth as the wealthy, despised industrialist tycoons of the day. Driving home the connection, she has Ben Hubbard invoke Henry Frick, the steel magnate (also a noted art collector), in a toast to the success of the cotton mill venture:

It was Henry Frick who said, “Railroads are the Rembrandts of investments.” Well, I say, “Southern cotton mills will be the Rembrandts of investment.”

The Little Foxes lacks integrity. There has always been sharp practice in business, but merchants succeed in the main by being honest, by living up to their contracts, and by giving customers what they promise. The industries founded by Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick, and Henry Ford dramatically improved the lives of all Americans, and as philanthropists they gave much of their fortunes back to the public – which can still view Henry Frick’s Rembrandts, Vermeers, and Van Dycks at the art museum (The Frick Collection) he built on Fifth Avenue.

Hellman could have given us an fair picture of a representative slice of the business world, even a sour slice (we think of Harley Granville Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance, produced at the Shaw a few years ago, among many examples). But that never would have served her purpose. She knew that revolution would never come in America unless Americans came to view all capitalists, from Andrew Mellon down to the local cotton merchant, as useless leeches, irredeemably corrupt. She wanted us as fellow revolutionaries.

In The Little Foxes, the Hubbards never get their just deserts; in Hellman’s worldview, justice is not possible in a capitalist society. Her play ends, instead, with the little foxes still on the loose. She leaves the task of bringing them to bay, and setting on the dogs to tear them to pieces, to us.

An Inspector Calls at the Shaw Festival (a review)

The Inspector Calls, playing through October at the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), is an ingeniously plotted classic mystery play, full of well-timed twists and turns, a sure bet for an evening’s entertainment. (I rant about this play’s strong ideological content in a separate post.) The Shaw Festival’s presentation is done well, but is not, to our mind, fully satisfying.

Emsworth previews the shows on the 2009 Shaw Festival playbill at this post.

In The Inspector Calls, the well-to-do Birling family has gathered for a dinner party to celebrate the engagement of Arthur Birling’s daughter, Sheila, to Gerald Croft. But the party is interrupted by the arrival of a man who identifies himself as Inspector Goole, and who tells the family he has just come from the morgue to ask them questions about a poor young woman who had just taken her own life.

The Birlings (Peter Hutt and Mary Haney) and Croft (Graeme Somerville) indignantly disclaim any knowledge of the girl. But as the Inspector questions them (moralizing as he goes), it becames apparent to the smug, well-to-do Birlings that they have more to do with the fate of the late Eva Smith than they thought.

Revelations follow upon revelations, and playwright J. B. Priestley feeds us just enough clues to let us guess what will unfold next. In fact, at the performance we attended, we could hear elderly, hard-of-hearing theater-goers behind us loudly whispering “I’ll bet it was really him that . . .” to their spouses during pregnant pauses in the action. At intermission, the conversation on the sidewalks outside the Festival Theater buzzed with speculation as to how it would all turn out.

It is a pleasure, year after year, to see Benedict Campbell at the Shaw Festival. What an outstanding, versatile actor! Six years ago, he was superb as Lear’s loyal follower, the Earl of Kent, at the Stratford Festival (playing with Christopher Plummer as Lear). Since then, happily, he has been at the Shaw, where, two years ago, we were genuinely moved at his and Kelli Fox’s portrayal of the the complex relationship between John and Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible. Last year, we were astonished to see him singing and dancing up a storm in Mack and Mabel, in which, energetically and single-handedly, he set the tone for a fabulous production. We had no idea!

This year, Campbell is the Inspector in Priestley’s thriller, and he has just the solid heft and authoritative presence that the role requires. He is, in fact, so convincing as an English police detective that many in our audience seemed to have difficulty accepting the possibility that he might be something else altogether. As to that, Priestley gives the audience plenty of clues, beginning with the Inspector’s name, “Goole.” Even so, I think many left the Festival Theater genuinely baffled as to just who had been visiting the Birling family.

The set for An Inspector Calls features a large platform that rotates imperceptibly by 180 degrees during the course of the play, moving the actors and the props with it. We are to understand, I supposed, that just as the self-satisfied Birling family come to see themselves in different ways, so we the audience are also to see them from different perspectives. (As noted in my earlier post, Priestley’s objective in this play is as much to indoctrinate as it is to entertain.)

All said and done, however, the “thrill” was missing from this thriller. The revelatory moment in the last act when chills should have run up and down our spines came and went without chills. We never made any sense of a mysterious light that flitted randomly along the edges of the set. A female figure (who had no lines) appeared hazily on stage between scene changes for no apparent reason. As the Birlings, two of our very favorite actors, Peter Hutt and Mary Haney, were not permitted to demonstrate their dramatic range and left us flat.

The Shaw Festival’s artistic director, Jackie Maxwell, seems to be following the practice of her predecessor, Christopher Newton, in allocating at least one slot in a season’s playbill to something in the nature of a mystery or thriller, plays like Laura, Sorry Wrong Number, and adaptations of Agatha Christie. Here we are reminded that our very worst experience at the Shaw Festival involved a play in this slot, 2006′s disastrous The Invisible Man. The sets and the costumes were gorgeous, the special effects superb, and the acting unobjectionable. But what mediocre material the cast had to work with! This “suspense” play, in which invisible parts of Griffin’s body were revealed during the opening scene, was about as suspenseful as the slasher movies in which teenagers start getting axed in the first five minutes. Nothing built up to anything, and the Invisible Man himself was a whining johnny-one-note. We never got to know any characters well enough to care about them, and the playwright failed to introduce two important characters, Dr. Kemp and his wife, until the play was mostly over. This year’s An Inspector Calls is more like it.

Interested in reading more about J. B. Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls? See my post An Inspector Calls and old-fashioned propaganda at the Shaw Festival.

The Shaw Festival’s 2008 production of Terence Rattigan’s outstanding 1939 play After the Dance is reviewed in this post.

An Inspector Calls and old-fashioned propaganda at the Shaw Festival

On their face, how could two plays be more different than An Inspector Calls and The Little Foxes?  (Both are in repertory at the Shaw Festival throughout its 2008 season; I review An Inspector Calls in this post and The Little Foxes in this post)  In one play, a police detective explores the life and untimely death of a young woman in an English industrial town; the other deals with greed and infighting in an Alabama family.

Yet these plays — a British mystery classic and a classic American drama — were cut from the same cloth. They have parallel plots, parallel themes, even parallel characters.

Two capitalist families

In The Little Foxes, Lillian Hellman gives us the Hubbards, a family of Alabama cotton merchants whose money has still not given them a unsatisfactory social position.

In An Inspector Calls, written only six years later, J. B. Priestley gives us the Hubbards’ English counterparts, the Birlings, a family of manufacturers in an English industrial town. The Birlings’ money has still not given them a unsatisfactory social position.

Two unholy business alliances

Each play begins with a dinner party. In The Little Foxes, the Hubbards are toasting a proposed business alliance with an industrialist from Chicago. The new partners count on avoiding the labor agitation that plagues industry in the north by building a cotton mill in the Hubbards’ southern town.

At the dinner party in An Inspector Calls, the Birlings are also celebrating a business alliance, the engagement of their daughter Sheila to Gerald Croft, the son of their principal business competitor. Arthur Birling and Croft expect the marriage alliance to lead to business understandings that will yield higher prices and suppression of labor agitation.

Two lead characters motivated by social ambition

In The Little Foxes, Regina Hubbard intends to leverage her new business relationship into a prominent social position in Chicago society.

Similarly, An Inspector Calls finds Arthur Birling angling for a knighthood.  With a title and a connection with the socially superior Crofts, he hopes to vault into the upper echelons of English society.

Two sons

Each family has a dissolute son in his early twenties. Leo Hubbard works in his uncle Horace’s bank and embezzles. Eric Birling works in his father’s office, drinks, and embezzles. Both young men patronize brothels.

Two daughters

Each family has a daughter in her late teens. The Hubbards plan to marry Alexandra off to her wastrel cousin Leo to keep all the money in the family.  Alexandra is the only member of the family with a moral or social conscience (her aunt Birdie has strong humane instincts, but she is one of the Hubbards’ victims, not properly a family member).

The Birlings plan to marry Sheila Birling off to the son of a competitor to consolidate their financial and social standing. Sheila is the only one of the Birlings with much of a conscience; she sees that her father’s factory workers “aren’t cheap labour — they’re people.”

Two indictments

Each of these two plays indicts a capitalist family on multiple counts of crimes both personal and social.

By the end of The Little Foxes, we know that the Hubbards strike their women, teach their sons to steal, hunt for sport while the poor go hungry, beat their horses, keep mistresses, blackmail one another, cheat black folk, charge usury, corrupt public officials, and beat down attempts by working people to organize. (I complain about Lillian Hellman’s use of the Hubbards as whipping boys for American capitalism in this post.)

Initially, the Birlings seem far less dreadful. We learn, however (as do the characters themselves), that they are guilty of the same sorts of crimes.  Arthur Birling has discharged and blackballed a factory employee for having the temerity to ask for two shillings more per week (think Oliver Twist) and trying to organize a strike. Sheila Birling gets the same unfortunate girl discharged from a job as a shopgirl for looking at her the wrong way. Crofts, the future son-in-law, finds the girl unemployed and hungry, makes her his mistress, then abandons her.  Then the Birlings’ wastrel son meets her, now a prostitute, uses her, and gets her pregnant.  At the end of her rope, the girl seeks charity from a private aid society controlled by Mrs. Birling, who turns her away.

Two soap boxes

Each playwright divides the world neatly into those who take and those who are taken from.  In The Little Foxes:

Addie: “Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it.

In An Inspector Calls:

Birling: “If you don’t come down sharply on some of these people, they’d soon be asking for the earth.”

The Inspector: “They might. But after all it’s better to ask for the earth than to take it.”

Putting out somebody’s talking points

In an otherwise excellent essay in the program for the Shaw Festival‘s production of An Inspector Calls, Professor John Baxendale softpedals the play’s political implications.  Far from implicitly condoning violent Soviet-style revolution, he says, Priestley was not even promoting his political party’s radical legislative agenda.  The essay maintains that Priestley was merely seeking to foster feelings of mutual responsibility among his countrymen.

The play is not about social reform [says Professor Baxendale], better health care or full employment, important though these things are, but about a vision of how life could be different if we acknowledge the truth that we are all members of one another.

Indeed, at first blush that seems to be what the Inspector is saying when he deliveres his grand, melodramatic, climactic speech:

One Eva Smith has gone — but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their hopes and fears, their suffering, and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, with what we think and say and do. We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.

But warm fuzzy communal feelings and private charity were not what either J. B. Priestley or Lillian Hellman were about.  Nor did they have in mind the Biblical admonition to “love thy neighbor”; nothing could have been further from Priestley’s mind than the Christian communalism of the second chapter of Acts.

His message, instead, was that if Britain and America refused to accept socialism, bloody times were ahead, and mercy could not be expected.  And so Priestley ended the Inspector’s grand lecture with exactly such a grim warning:

We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.

Professor Baxendale asserts that the Inspector’s “fire and blood” language refers to the two world wars, rather than to revolutionary violence, but this is not a fair reading.  Priestley made no attempt in this play to disguise his admiration for Soviet socialism.  In explaining the methods of the Inspector to her family, Priestley has Sheila Birling allude explicitly to Lenin’s famous boast about capitalist rope when she says, “No, he’s giving us rope — so that we’ll hang ourselves.”

One can almost believe that these two extraordinarily talented dramatists, Hellman and Priestley, were working from a list of Marxist “talking points” for their plays:

* Portray all capitalists as instinctive monopolists and enemies of organized labor
*Caricature capitalists as holding extreme, selfish, individualist points of view
*Portray them as willing to pimp their own daughters for gain
*Portray their sons as thieves and as sexually ravenous
*Portray private charitable institutions (like Mrs. Birling’s) as corrupt and degrading
*Portray private ownership of land as unjust
*Show the world as divided into “us” (the worker class) versus “them” (the capitalist class)

Little wonder that An Inspector Calls and The Little Foxes turned out to be practically the same play!

Priestley preached the party line that capitalists were on the wrong side of history and that Soviet-style socialism represented the best hope for mankind.  Early in An Inspector Calls, set in 1912, he has Arthur Birling complacently telling his family how nicely the world is shaping up.  There’s no war coming, he says, just “a few scaremongers here making a fuss about nothing.” Look at the new aeroplanes, look at the automobiles, “bigger and faster all the time,” look at the huge new ocean liner set to sail the next week, the Titanic. In thirty years, Birling assures his family, labor troubles will be a thing of the past, and the world will have forgotten “all these silly little war scares.”

Writing in 1945, Priestley expected his audience to smile sadly at Birling’s unfilled prophecies. How short-sighted Birling and the capitalists were, we are to think!  And not only that: Birling was predicting “peace and prosperity and rapid progress everywhere — except of course in Russia, which will always be behindhand, naturally.”  Wrong about the Titanic, wrong about Russia!

In fact, Priestley was worse than a poor prophet; he failed to see what was before his own eyes. Like so many other fellow travelers, Priestley believed that the great socialist experiment in the U.S.S.R. had already succeeded; in fact, the blood of millions in eastern Europe had been shed only to sustain a brutal Soviet regime in which the tyrannical old bosses had been replaced by murderous new bosses.

In his preface to Mrs. Warren’s Profession (also part of the Shaw Festival’s 2008 season, but not scheduled to open till early July), Shaw was forthright about what he intended to accomplish in his plays: “I am convinced that fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective means of moral propagandism in the world . . . .”  In An Inspector Calls, J. B. Priestley proved himself Shaw’s staunch disciple.

See my review of the Shaw Festival’s production of An Inspector Calls in this post.

See my review of the Shaw Festival’s production of The Little Foxes in this post.