Bernard F. Dukore – författare

‘You see madam,’ Bernard Shaw once wrote, ‘I am not a dreamer who doesn’t understand the practical exigencies of the stage. …’ The remark was an understatement: Shaw not only understood the practical aspects of play production; he had a great deal of experience with them as well. For thirty years following the 1894 production of Arms and the Man, which he directed, Shaw staged virtually every production of his own plays in London. Directing plays, he consistently maintained, is as crucial a part of a playwright’s profession as writing them, and the author, he believed, is the most desirable director of his own play.

Originally published in 1971, this first full-length treatment of Shaw as director is important for several reasons: first, because Shaw was one of the few major playwrights who frequently directed his own works; second, because he was a good director; and third, because he is an early example of the modern idea of the director as guiding artist in the production of a play.

After an initial chapter examining Shaw’s background and experiences in the theatre before he began to direct plays, Dukore explores various aspects of Shavian directorial theory and practice. He shows that, while Shaw’s basic concern was with the actor, he was also involved in all the minute considerations that make up a successful production, including pre-rehearsal planning, casting, cutting and changing the script (though Shaw forbade other directors to cut his plays, he himself did so), conducting rehearsals, acting, scenery, lighting, and costuming. Throughout his analysis, the author makes use of previously unpublished material, particularly Shaw’s rehearsal notes, written in the auditorium when he staged his plays, and letters to actors.

This is a readable book, essential for anyone interested in Bernard Shaw’s plays.

Bernards Shaw’s plays have delighted and stimulated audiences since their first appearances. Their author’s satiric view of conventions, institutions, and behavior continues unfailingly to amuse while it provokes doubts about the honesty of the social and political attitudes that underlie them.

Originally published in 1973, Dukore discusses the theory of drama that is the basis of Shaw’s comedies, which present his views of mores and follies. That Shaw’s theory was coherent and comprehensive Dukore shows in Part One of this book, with supportive references to Shaw’s critical works, letters, speeches, and plays.

In Part Two, using such familiar works as Candida, Pygmalion, and Back to Methuselah as well as less-known plays like “In Good King Charles’s Golden Days” to reinforce his points, Dukore analyses the discussion play – according to Shaw, the watershed of the “new drama.” Androcles and the Lion and Saint Joan, along with other plays, illustrate Shaw’s use of the prologue or prologuelike first act to create the play’s social and psychological foundations. Man and Superman and The Apple Cart are among those which exemplify the play whose frame is both detachable from its centerpiece and also functionally integrated with it. Dukore also considers at length Shaw’s reworking of other men’s plays – Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Trebitsch’s Frau Gittas Sühne – as well as his own Major Barbara. These revisions bring into sharp focus Shaw’s perception of human nature and his principles of dramaturgy.

Among others of Shaw’s plays, Dukore presents Too True To Be Good and Heartbreak House as examples of his protoexistentialism – his apprehension of the absurd and the existential as forces in life. Throughout Shaw’s plays – major and minor – Dukore sees the influence of the playwright’s socialism and supports this observation with precise examples from the works.

In sum, Dukore proposes fresh perspectives from which to regard Shaw’s works for the theatre – works that were arrestingly relevant and immediate to the time.

‘You see madam,’ Bernard Shaw once wrote, ‘I am not a dreamer who doesn’t understand the practical exigencies of the stage. …’ The remark was an understatement: Shaw not only understood the practical aspects of play production; he had a great deal of experience with them as well. For thirty years following the 1894 production of Arms and the Man, which he directed, Shaw staged virtually every production of his own plays in London. Directing plays, he consistently maintained, is as crucial a part of a playwright’s profession as writing them, and the author, he believed, is the most desirable director of his own play.

Originally published in 1971, this first full-length treatment of Shaw as director is important for several reasons: first, because Shaw was one of the few major playwrights who frequently directed his own works; second, because he was a good director; and third, because he is an early example of the modern idea of the director as guiding artist in the production of a play.

After an initial chapter examining Shaw’s background and experiences in the theatre before he began to direct plays, Dukore explores various aspects of Shavian directorial theory and practice. He shows that, while Shaw’s basic concern was with the actor, he was also involved in all the minute considerations that make up a successful production, including pre-rehearsal planning, casting, cutting and changing the script (though Shaw forbade other directors to cut his plays, he himself did so), conducting rehearsals, acting, scenery, lighting, and costuming. Throughout his analysis, the author makes use of previously unpublished material, particularly Shaw’s rehearsal notes, written in the auditorium when he staged his plays, and letters to actors.

This is a readable book, essential for anyone interested in Bernard Shaw’s plays.

Bernards Shaw’s plays have delighted and stimulated audiences since their first appearances. Their author’s satiric view of conventions, institutions, and behavior continues unfailingly to amuse while it provokes doubts about the honesty of the social and political attitudes that underlie them.

Originally published in 1973, Dukore discusses the theory of drama that is the basis of Shaw’s comedies, which present his views of mores and follies. That Shaw’s theory was coherent and comprehensive Dukore shows in Part One of this book, with supportive references to Shaw’s critical works, letters, speeches, and plays.

In Part Two, using such familiar works as Candida, Pygmalion, and Back to Methuselah as well as less-known plays like “In Good King Charles’s Golden Days” to reinforce his points, Dukore analyses the discussion play – according to Shaw, the watershed of the “new drama.” Androcles and the Lion and Saint Joan, along with other plays, illustrate Shaw’s use of the prologue or prologuelike first act to create the play’s social and psychological foundations. Man and Superman and The Apple Cart are among those which exemplify the play whose frame is both detachable from its centerpiece and also functionally integrated with it. Dukore also considers at length Shaw’s reworking of other men’s plays – Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Trebitsch’s Frau Gittas Sühne – as well as his own Major Barbara. These revisions bring into sharp focus Shaw’s perception of human nature and his principles of dramaturgy.

Among others of Shaw’s plays, Dukore presents Too True To Be Good and Heartbreak House as examples of his protoexistentialism – his apprehension of the absurd and the existential as forces in life. Throughout Shaw’s plays – major and minor – Dukore sees the influence of the playwright’s socialism and supports this observation with precise examples from the works.

In sum, Dukore proposes fresh perspectives from which to regard Shaw’s works for the theatre – works that were arrestingly relevant and immediate to the time.

“Dukore’s style is fluid and his wit delightful. I learned a tremendous amount, as will most readers, and Bernard Shaw and the Censors will doubtless be the last word on the topic.”

- Michel Pharand, former editor of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies and author of Bernard Shaw and the French (2001). 

"This book shows us a new side of Shaw and his complicated relationships to the powerful mechanisms of stage and screen censorship in the long twentieth century.”

-          - Lauren Arrington, Professor of English, Maynooth University, Ireland

A fresh view of Shaw versus stage and screen censors, this book describes Shaw as fighter and failure, whose battles against censorship – of his plays and those of others, of his works for the screen and those of others – he sometimes won but usually lost. We forget usually, because ultimately he prevailed and because his witty reports of defeats are so buoyant, they seem to describe triumphs. We think of him as a celebrity, not an outsider; as a classic, not one of the avant-garde, of which Victorians and Edwardians were intolerant; as ahead of his time, not of it, when he was called “disgusting,” “immoral", and "degenerate.” Yet it took over three decades and a world war before British censors permitted a public performance of Mrs Warren’s Profession. We remember him as an Academy Award winner for Pygmalion, not as an author whose dialogue censors required deletions for showings in the United States. Scrutinizing the powerful stage and cinema censorship in Britain and America, this book focuses on one of its most notable campaigners against them in the last century.

Unions, Strikes, Shaw: ‘The Capitalism of the Proletariat’ is the first book to treat Bernard Shaw—socialist, dramatist, public speaker and union member—in relation to unions and strikes. For over half a century he urged workers to join unions, which he called, paradoxically, “the Capitalism of the Proletariat,” because as capitalists try to get as much labor as possible from workers while paying them as little as possible, unions try to gain as high wages as possible from employers while working as little as possible. He opposed general strikes as destined to fail, since owners can hold out longer than workers, whose unions have less money to support them during strikes. This book offers background on major strikes in and before Shaw’s time —including the Colorado Coalfield War and the Dublin Lockout, both in 1913—before analyzing the causes, day-by-day events and consequences of Britain’s 1926 General Strike. It begins and ends with examinations of their and Shaw’s relevance to actions on unions and strikes in our own time.