REPORTER: The Hertfordshire village of Ayot St Lawrence
mourns its friend.
The world mourns one of the dominating figures of our time.
Gone from its presence but not from its mind
is the man of whom the Prime Minister has written,
"As critic, dramatist, man of letters,
"humourist, social revolutionary and prophet,
"he was our greatest entertainer and teacher."
So, in the box here is that wonderful puppet...
..of Shaw.
And there he is.
In his famous knickerbockers. Oh, my God, that's brilliant.
Wow!
If you have a little look at the head a bit, straight on,
that's a bit better. Oh, yeah.
There.
This probably puts how he thought about himself in some context.
He said, "The Greeks have Aristotle...
"..the Italians had Leonardo da Vinci,
"the English had Shakespeare
"and Ireland has my astonishing self."
THEY GIGGLE
Oh, ladies.
Well, this is a surprise.
Have you all come to see me, ladies and gentlemen?
Well...
I should never have expected this.
A few words from Mr Bernard Shaw.
I have always been intrigued by the work of George Bernard Shaw
but who was he,
this shy Irish playwright who conquered Britain
and the English-speaking world?
Oh, you're real good.
Thank you, captain.
A celebrity and a serious thinker who insisted we question everything.
I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe. Oh!
The winner of an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for Literature.
I suppose that I am here
as the next best thing to Shakespeare.
LAUGHTER
Shaw wrote about the big issues of his time and of our time -
poverty, war, feminism, race, fanaticism -
but always using charm and humour to get people's attention.
When I talk, at least I talk politics.
And he sold these big ideas by being larger than life.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is an exhibition of my profile.
How was that?
Shaw invented the idea of the artist as a brand.
This shy boy from Dublin
became one of the world's most famous and recognisable men.
Shall I now become the partly visible man?
Do you recognise the beard...
..or must I become a little more visible?
Even this exaggerated depiction here,
it's slightly abstract but you can see from it...
..that it's George Bernard Shaw.
But I think he would have been very happy to know
that at the end of the road there was,
as some people in Dublin call it, a Muriel, in honour of his...
in honour of his life.
Sadly, I think Shaw is underappreciated.
He's the forgotten man of Irish literature.
His birthplace in Dublin is closed to the public,
yet people around the city know his name but perhaps not much else.
So if you want to learn more about him or his big ideas,
you actually have to start in England.
He arrived aged 20 and spent three-quarters of his life there,
yet always felt like a foreigner.
When I came to London in the 1980s,
I understood that sense of exile myself.
Shaw had the outsider's ability to observe,
to question the way things are.
And long before he became famous,
he used to keep warm in the British Library, reading Karl Marx.
I think it was that time that inspired the great beliefs
and themes of his life and work.
"How shall we house our poor?"
The Practical Politics of Socialism by George Bernard Shaw.
This is a record of Shaw's speaking engagements.
"Labour is the source of all wealth...
"..therefore to the labourers all wealth is due."
"October the 11th, 1891,
"Mr G. Bernard Shaw, Fabian, lecture followed by discussion."
"Practical communism."
Wow.
It's interesting that he, kind of, taught himself to become an orator
because in the early part of his lifetime
he was a very shy and insecure, young man
and he became this, kind of, spellbinding orator.
What a great thing it would have been to go along
to one of these things and to hear him...to hear him speak.
Foolish people in easy circumstances flatter themselves
that there is no such thing as the class war in the British Empire,
where we are all far too respectable
to have any vulgar unpleasantness of that sort.
They deceive themselves.
We are up to the neck in the class war.
"The Women's Progressive Society."
"The London Vegetarian Society."
He was a vegetarian from the age of 24 and he said that at his funeral
instead of people coming behind his coffin, there'd be all the animals
that he hadn't eaten to pay tribute to him.
He must have been out every single night.
You get the idea that he never went to sleep.
To begin with, he was very anxious about could he stand up,
could he speak,
but very quickly he found that he was, well, like a good actor.
It's interesting you should say that
because some people have defined acting as the shy man's revenge.
Shaw's real need to spread new ideas overcame his natural shyness.
He understood the power of the spoken word,
first on a soap box, later on a stage.
No more so than in Man And Superman,
a razor-sharp exploration of nature, sex and evolution
dressed up as a verbose comedy of manners.
When I read Michael Holroyd's biography,
he talked about how Shaw himself honed his own speaking
on street corners, pamphleteering. Yes.
There's something Michael Holroyd writes about Shaw's consonants
could cut so strongly in a space
because he knew he had to communicate.
So I always thought, he's writing for people who really can speak
and really know how to phrase and lead an idea and land it.
We don't have that sort of writing. Ba-ba-ba-ba ba-bam-ba-bam.
It's exciting.
With a wonderful, instinctive cunning,
she kept silent and allowed me to glorify her.
To mistake my own visions, thoughts and feelings for hers.
I found that when I had touched a woman's imagination...
LAUGHTER
..she would allow me to persuade myself that she loved me
but when my suit was granted,
she never said, "I'm happy, my love is satisfied",
she always said first, "At last the barriers are down",
and second, "When will you come again?"
As Jack, you get to say mischievous, provocative things as a man. Yeah.
Which is great to say in front of an audience.
You get to tease and provoke with wit.
You don't have to insult the audience
but it's so witty but the ideas are still provocative.
It's wonderfully human.
We live in an atmosphere of shame.
We're ashamed of everything that's real about us.
Ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives,
of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions,
of our experience, just as we're ashamed of our naked skins.
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
Jack Tanner is a sort of self portrait of Shaw,
so he's possibly one of the most verbose...
In fact, that's one of the jokes of the play, that he does...
He comments on his own verbosity, doesn't he?
The last word of the play is "talking".
And it's about talking but it's about ideas.
Shaw's lifelong big idea was that inequality of any kind -
economic, gender or race - was neither inevitable nor acceptable.
He wrote that poverty was the greatest of our evils
and the worst of our crimes.
And he hated poverty because, like a lot of Dubliners,
he was born into it.
So, this was his bedroom.
Tiny little room.
It's not hard to imagine him sitting here as a little boy.
Born into what he called "shabby, genteel poverty."
His mother was a singer
and so he would have heard operas and all kinds of musicians play.
MUSIC: Home Sweet Home by Nellie Melba
So, this was his parents' room.
Shaw realised at the age of three
that his father was an alcoholic
and his mother, who was a woman who didn't bestow
any great deal of affection or love on him,
was involved with a music teacher called George Lee.
It wasn't just that the mother had supposedly taken this lover
but she lived with the lover and the husband in this house
and what a strange thing that must have been for the young boy,
to watch his father be isolated and diminished in that way.
Certainly an unorthodox household arrangement.
You think about the early life of Shaw in Synge Street.
What must that have been like for him to grow up in a place like this?
Shaw invented the word "downstart" and I think that's one of the things
that gave him his human sympathy, you know.
He was trying to shake people to say, "Look, it is not inevitable
"that vast numbers of people have to lead lives
"that are constrained by poverty,
"by ignorance, by filth, by inequality.
"We can change it."
When he was a kid, his nanny would take him out walking
and they would walk
and she was probably paid buttons by his mother and father, you know,
and it seems clear that she used to do some prostitution on the side,
so he'd be taken into the horror of the Dublin slums.
He saw this kind of poverty and he was horrified by it.
That's what haunted him.
There's a kind of smell of the slums in his nostrils
and it's what drives him.
He wants the world to get away from that kind of indignity.
"I now confess to an episode in my boyhood
"formerly so repugnant to me that for 80 years
"I never mentioned it to any mortal creature - not even my wife."
We're in the centre of Model School in Dublin.
This is the second school that Shaw attended.
"I was sent to Marlborough Street
"and at once became a boy with whom no Protestant young gentleman
"would speak or play."
A sole Protestant child in a school of poor Catholic pupils.
He was unhappy here.
Very unhappy
I suppose he felt the shame of being an outsider
but he also I'm sure felt the shame of being poor.
And he was ashamed that he was ashamed.
It further reinforced in him, I think,
the notion that poverty was a horrible thing
and later on he came to question, of course,
why some people were poor and other people were rich,
which was what led him to his philosophical examination
of how society is put together.
His whole idea about education was that it's not the teacher
who should be doing the questioning,
it's the child who should be questioning the teacher.
It should implant in the child a love of learning,
to develop the ability to think for one's self,
to think critically, to question everything.
Authority, religion, precepts, tenets, propaganda.
Even 100 years ago, Shaw understood that you had to look for the truth,
not simply accept it.
Many people today still don't trust the so-called voices of authority
or the media.
Shaw was adamant that we had to wake up.
To be active.
To question, to be aware of the world around us.
And awareness is the beginning of action.
He wasn't just telling you, this is what you must think,
he was telling you, this is how you must think.
You have a right but also a duty to think for yourself
and not to take the orthodoxies, you know,
but to actually feel that you are free as a human being
to engage with ideas
and to be sceptical about things that people are telling you.
By the age of 20, the one truth Bernard Shaw couldn't escape
was that Dublin was becoming too small for him.
Ireland is an island.
It's an island off the coast of an island.
There's something about living on an island that gives you a particular
desire to leave it, to get away from it, because it can be suffocating.
When I grew up in Ireland in the '50s and early '60s,
deep inside me there were some instinct try to prove myself
against something else rather than that staid, predictable, familiar,
grey society that I felt I was trapped in.
When Shaw left, he didn't come back 29 years.
His true ambition was to become a universal artist.
If your spirit is adventurous, you need something more than that.
You need to move beyond the comforts of a small town.
London wasn't much better.
He left his feckless father behind in Dublin
and lived with his mother in rented rooms,
earning a few shillings ghost-writing music reviews
and failing spectacularly as a novelist.
In his first decade in London,
he reckoned he'd earned the sum total of £6.
But on his 29th birthday,
wearing a brand-new suit paid for with the insurance money
from his father's death, George Bernard Shaw lost his virginity
to his mother's best friend.
It might sound like a Freudian nightmare
but it was the making of him.
The shy boy was replaced by a new, confident persona.
G.B.S.
He called it "the most fictitious character I have ever created".
Don't be deceived, ladies and gentlemen.
When a man is playing the simple, unaffected human being...
..in public he's always acting as hard as he possibly can.
And small blame to him, I do that sort of thing myself.
he had to create a persona, didn't he?
He had to invent G.B.S,
so he became this sort of conscious entertainer
always with an opinion on every subject
and I think that was a conscious effort on Shaw's part
to market his plays.
By the 1890s, this new, confident G.B.S stopped writing bad novels
and started to write what he called sermons -
plays about real social issues learned from his years
speaking, protesting and pamphleteering on the streets.
It was radical, but he really believed that serious business
could be conducted from the stage.
His first unpleasant plays dealt with the horrors
of slum landlordism, the social shame of divorce
and the grim economic realities of prostitution.
Victorian London was scandalised but he had their attention.
He was an overtly political writer.
He knew enough about the London audience
to know you always had to sugar the pill with jokes
but it is always an appeal to our intelligence
and to our emotional maturity
to see that the world is worth arguing over.
He is absolutely insistent
that his audiences share the lives of others and ideas of others.
What do you want to take down what I said for?
You'll just show me what you wrote.
How do I know if you took me down right?
That ain't proper writing.
I can't read that.
He's reacting against a form of theatre which he despised.
He despised those kind of heart on sleeve Victorian melodramas
that were the West End staple that he was trying to sweep away.
He was restoring seriousness to the London theatre.
But that's the key thing. I think Shaw was a great demolition expert.
He inherits a medium that when he comes into it into the 1890s
is ossified, really, and is dealing in certain stock forms.
Stock melodramas, stock romance, stock love stories,
bad Shakespeare productions, obviously,
actor managers dominating the whole theatre.
Shaw comes along and puts a bomb under it all, really,
and explodes it and says, no, theatre can actually be serious,
it can address big issues, it can be topical
and it can make you think.
Shaw is always challenging you
and people don't always like that.
I think it is good to challenge people.
Like a Trojan horse, Shaw was prepared not just to challenge
but to undermine the society he lived in.
To show his contempt for the British class system.
Pygmalion, I suppose, is the perfect example,
where he turns a flower girl into a lady
just by changing the way she speaks.
You see this creature with her kerbstone English?
The English that will keep her in the gutter for the rest her days.
Well, sir, in three months I could pass her off as a duchess
at an ambassador's reception. No, no, no.
Yes. I could even get her a job as a lady's maid or a shop assistant,
which requires better English. You mean you could make me...
Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf,
you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns,
you incarnate insult to the English language...
I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba.
Here's simultaneously entertaining,
theatrically appealing and...
complex, unresolvable, unpindownable.
I mean, obviously Shaw relishes ideas and a lot of his plays are
discussion plays, but at the same time, if you look at the plays,
there's an extraordinary, sort of, emotional undertone
and the very end of Pygmalion, what happens, Professor Higgins,
having sort of modelled and created this woman Eliza,
sees her become independent
and there's a wonderful, sort of, heartbreak at the end
when he's both rejoicing in Eliza's independence
and at the same time realising he's now left alone.
You know, he's the master who's been overtaken by his pupil.
You can't take away the knowledge you gave me.
You said I had a finer ear than you
and I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can.
Ah-ha, that's done you, Henry Higgins, that 'as.
Now, I don't give that for your bullying and your big talk.
I shall advertise in the papers that your duchess is a flower girl
that you taught, and that she'll teach anyone to be a duchess
just the same in six months for a thousand guineas.
Victorian London took to Shaw in a big way.
Like Oscar Wilde, they enjoyed this Irishman's charming way
of tearing their world apart.
So after 40 years, the shy boy from Dublin found notoriety and success.
And with success came money
and with money came the financial independence to leave
his mother's home and to find a wife.
At the tender age of 42, Shaw married an Irish woman,
Charlotte Payne-Townshend.
He once wrote that marriage is popular
because it combines the maximum of temptation
with the maximum of opportunity.
But Charlotte could never tolerate the matter of fact side of marriage
and it was probably never consummated.
But they lived contentedly for half a century in Ayot St Lawrence,
an hour north of London,
and of course it became known as Shaw's Corner.
And of course it was Shaw himself who left it to the National Trust.
This is exactly as Shaw left it.
It feels like he's just...
that he's just stepped out.
Ah!
The Oscar is a doorstop.
Academy Award for writing the screenplay of Pygmalion.
He was asked how he felt about winning the Oscar and he said...
"Considering the source, it's an insult."
Of course, he also won the Nobel Prize.
One of only two people to do that, the other one being Bob Dylan.
I had always read about Shaw's Corner and I had imagined it...
..but when you're here, you realise there's a stillness about this place
that is, erm... really powerful.
It feels like it's a cocoon...
..away from the world, though of course the world came to him here.
I've always found it kind of interesting
to know where writers write, the rooms that they write it -
It's, erm...
It's a wonderful feeling to be in the same...
in the space as where he wrote some of his greatest work.
It's not too difficult to imagine him sitting here typing away.
He didn't like to be disturbed.
People were always calling to the house to meet him,
to ask his opinion about everything
and sometimes they'd ask for money, sometimes he actually had stalkers.
And this was a place where he couldn't be found
and he could be distracted.
There's a unique feature about this little... little hut.
So it revolved with the sun.
He moved with the times and moved always towards the light, I think,
not to make too heavy a metaphor of it.
Shaw was always a forward-thinking man.
He said himself that he'd been born 50 years too early,
as if he were waiting for the 20th century to arrive.
He called himself the messenger boy for the new age.
I stand for the future and past,
for the posterity that has no vote
and for the tradition that never had any.
For intellectual integrity,
for humanity,
for the rescue of industry from commercialism
and of science from professionalism,
for all the things that you desire as sincerely as I...
..but which in you is held in leash by the power of the press.
By 1904, Shaw's plays and ideas were making an impact
on British social and political life.
He helped found the Labour Party,
the London School of Economics and the New Statesman magazine.
He was a socialist and a social media sensation.
He began a successful residency at the Royal Court Theatre
on Sloane Square, where he was called the Chelsea Shakespeare.
Coincidentally, it's where I made my own London acting debut.
He began his run here by taking the piss out of the English and Irish.
John Bull's Other Island made Edward VII break his chair with laughter.
"the cleverest man in England is an Irish man".
"Man alive, don't you know that all this 'top of the morning'
"and 'broth of a boy' and 'more power to your elbow' business
"is got up in England to fool you?
"Like the Albert Hall concerts of Irish music,
"no Irishman ever talks like that in Ireland or ever will."
Shaw was an interesting case, wasn't he,
because he lived in England much longer than he lived in Ireland
without ever relinquishing his sense of Irishness.
The thing about Shaw, wherever he was, he was an outsider.
Someone said he had the homelessness of genius
and I think there's some truth in that, actually.
The English enjoy an outsider commenting on them.
The English are more receptive to that, I think, than the Irish are.
The Irish don't like outsiders commenting on them.
No, I don't, and certainly we get very...
We're a little raw in that department. Yes.
Whereas the English have a greater tradition of it.
Shaw made people laugh and Wilde made people laugh,
Wogan made people laugh, Dave Allen made people...
and you make people laugh.
Is it a thing that you can make a more powerful inroad
if you do it through humour, or...?
Well, that was Shaw's take on it always.
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh,
otherwise they'll kill you.
They want us to take a wry look and look askance
because it is a comedy stance to be the intelligent alien,
to be slightly outside of somewhere and holding it up for examination
but with one eyebrow raised in a, "What I'm saying here
"isn't too damning, I'm just saying this is unusual."
Shakespeare had a mulberry tree
and I'm not going to be outdone by Shakespeare.
LAUGHTER
He was, as you can see there,
he was bearded and suited but in the machinery of the modern world,
I mean, that is somebody being a celebrity.
I am in a certain difficulty about it because it's perfectly obvious
to all of you that it's already planted.
LAUGHTER
He's a complete ham, isn't he?
I mean, he's acting up for the crowd and the cameras
and he has them in the palm of his hand.
The comparison I draw there is to Einstein,
as somebody who became iconic in their field.
You paid for the Shakespearean forehead, so here it is again.
You'll notice the arrangement of my hair,
it takes me 20 minutes every morning to get that up, you know,
to get it properly arranged for you to admire.
Another thing that strikes me, his accent.
Yes, he's still got an Irish accent even though he left the country
presumably 40, 50 years before then.
It's Irish but there's an inflection, a slight inflection.
Now, are we saying that he may have cultivated that accent slightly
to distinguish himself in the world he was working in? I don't know.
Now, whether you are a foreigner or a native,
the first thing I must impress on you
is that there is no such thing as ideally correct English.
I wish I could offer you your choice among them all as a model
but for the moment, I am afraid you must put up with me, an Irish man.
Shaw said, "In Britain, I am still a foreigner and I shall die one."
But his wife Charlotte had family in Cork and Kerry
and so, as a 50-year-old man, he was going to have to face
the inevitable at some point and go home.
The dilemma that every exile faces is that...
once you leave the place that you're from,
you never belong there in quite the same way again
and the place that you go to, you never truly belong either.
And that can produce a restlessness.
Sometimes, what we're imagining is something that's no longer...
it's no longer the same.
I think Shaw understood that and it was 30 years before he came back.
When he did come back, he didn't come back to Dublin
where he'd been born and brought up, he came back to a place like this,
which has a kind of a timelessness about it.
He was a notoriously bad driver...
..and Mrs Shaw insisted that when they came to Ireland
they would be driven.
What a figure he must have presented sitting in the back of...
this beautiful, modern machine
coming through the countryside at a time when there were
almost no cars on the road, with his white beard and his camera.
It must have been an amazing, amazing sight as it passed,
and the drama of it coming from a distance
and then materialising and then disappearing.
The idea that he was driving around in Ireland in a Rolls-Royce...
I heard somebody say once that it shows you what a hypocrite he was.
There he was, spouting about how everybody was equal.
But it reminds me of a story, apocryphal or not,
of Lenin coming back from Finland to lead the Russian Revolution
where somebody says, you're in a first-class carriage
and you're coming back to lead the Revolution,
what's up with that?
And he said, there should only be first-class carriages,
and I think Shaw would have agreed with him.
Probably that everybody should have their own Rolls-Royce.
Like his writing shed, Shaw loved the isolation of County Kerry.
He finished his plays Major Barbara and Saint Joan
on various visits here.
I think he found energy and inspiration from the landscape.
It stimulated him.
And when you look at his letters and photos from here,
you get the feeling that even though this was his native land,
he was still eager to explore.
He spent two hours rowing out to the Skellig Islands
off the Kerry coasts.
He called it "the most impossible rock in the world".
"Part of our dream world".
He had a childlike sense of curiosity and adventure.
He went up in hot air balloons,
he flew over the Cape and the Great Wall of China.
He experimented with cameras, mechanics and naturism.
He didn't navel gaze, he looked outwards,
fascinated by everything he saw
and questioning everything he saw as wrong.
Shaw wasn't afraid to bring his lifelong crusade against inequality
back to the city of his birth.
"Poverty is a crime.
"A crime not of the poor but of the people who allowed them to be poor.
"Poverty is a crime of society.
"A preventable crime."
There is an extraordinary meeting when he gives a lecture in 1910
in Dublin on The Poor Law and Destitution in Ireland.
They give him a round of applause when he arrives
and he said to them straightaway,
"I might not be able to reciprocate with some applause for yourselves",
as he's telling them what they might not want to hear.
And what's he saying,
"I went to the workhouse today and I saw how you're treating children
"in the workhouses and I'm telling you now,
"you're going to burn in hell
"for the way you're treating these children.
"And this is not about the Brits.
"This is in your control. This is your local government.
"This is what you're doing to Irish children right now."
When he was a very famous man and everybody wanted to have
a look at him and claim him a little bit as a Dubliner
and all the great and the good of Dublin society come to hear him.
I mean, to stand up in front of an audience
and to make them afraid of their souls...
And of course so prescient, it was so prescient.
He was the person who identified, before we set up the state,
the way we were treating children
was going to be the dark undercurrent of our society.
You know in Pygmalion where he gives Eliza, who's this kind of poor,
illiterate young woman off the streets, literally,
and he gives her that great line at end,
when she's become the sort of mock duchess
and she says, you know, "We become of the way we're treated."
The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves,
but how she's treated.
I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins
because he always treats me as a flower girl and always will.
But I know I can be a lady to you
because you always treat me as a lady and always will.
If you treat somebody like dirt, they'll become dirt.
If you treat them with decency and dignity,
they will be decent and dignified.
And I think that's the belief that runs through his politics, you know?
His politics, in a way, are very, very simple,
which is just that nobody should be treated like dirt.
I dare say my mother could find some chap or other who'd do very well.
We were above that in Covent Garden.
What do you mean? I sold flowers.
I didn't sell myself.
Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else.
Mrs Warren's Profession.
This amazing play, which was revolutionary for its time,
which is about the notion of prostitution.
More importantly about the economic demands that make a woman
turn to prostitution just to educate her daughter.
Shaw made no moral judgments
but he was scathing about the harsh realities
of life for women in Victorian England.
The play was banned in London
and in New York the cast were arrested on stage, mid-performance.
He was a true champion of women
and believed that women were in every way
the equal of men and that's something that we may say,
"Oh, yes, well, that's obvious," but at that time when he was writing,
it wasn't obvious.
His play Saint Joan, for example,
is about a woman who takes on the male establishment,
questions it and is willing to sacrifice her life
for her principles and for the truth.
I think I'm very drawn to Shaw because I think I am, as a director,
drawn to plays that are full of debate and full of ideas.
It feels at the moment like we are so polarised in politics
that we can't understand the other's view.
Now, that's incredibly painful at a point where you've got Trump
in America and you've got Brexit here, you know,
one's natural instinct is not to look at the other perspective.
You've not many friends at court.
Why do all these nights and courtiers and churchmen hate me?
Simpleton.
Do you expect stupid people to love you for showing them up?
In terms of the depictions of women in theatre,
she's a very strong and powerful character. Yes.
It's one of the great roles for women
because it's so difficult to play and epic and complex.
What I love about Joan is that she sees herself
as a soldier and so she's not a woman or a man.
I really believe that she sees herself in that way
and that's sort of a post-feminist thing,
that I hope one day we manage to achieve, where it doesn't
really matter what sex you are, you can just do something.
I think he is fascinated by women as the outrageous voice
and the challenging voice.
It feels like it's written by a woman for a woman as opposed to
a man for a woman. Yeah, and even I feel it from the audience,
sometimes they don't like Joan because she's so full of pride
and conviction and that's not very feminine, is it?
Light your fires!
Do you think I dread it as much as the life of a rat in a hole?
My voices were right.
Joan, Joan! Yes!
He didn't just put women on the stage in great roles.
Many of those great roles were supported
and inspired by women that he knew.
He was really supportive of women and he supported women
who otherwise people would see as troublemakers.
That was what really impressed him about the suffragettes.
You know, people saying you're completely crazy and he's like,
"Well, no, they're not crazy. They are actually going to do this
"and they sound like hooligans."
What was it Emmeline Pankhurst said?
"I am what you would call a hooligan."
But hey, you know, I sit here talking to you
and I do have the vote and the right to education
and many of the things that were imagined to the impossible.
How about you listed Shaw
as one of the "top ten" feminists of the century?
Why do you say that?
Because...
Because he had enormous influence and he didn't just write journalism,
he turned up at meetings, he promoted people,
he went to rallies, he shouted.
But not only that, but he actually was doing that decades before
with his friends in the socialist movement, like Eleanor Marx.
Saying, "If we have socialism on the agenda,
"if we're looking at equality, then this journey, part of this journey,
"is also the inequality between people,
"between humans and between men and women as well."
He would have said that women's rights were human rights. Yeah.
I think Shaw was a truly brave man,
always prepared to risk unpopularity or outrage.
At the beginning of World War I, his closest friends ostracised him.
One called him "a complete bastard"
and there were calls for him to be shot as a traitor.
But Shaw couldn't stay quiet about the propaganda,
the jingoism, about the greed of the arms trade or the sheer futility of
war, where the only winner was war itself.
In 1914,
I was as sorry for the young Germans who lay slain or mutilated
in no man's land as for the British lads who lay beside them.
War is to me a sheer waste of life.
Sadly, I think Shaw could have written these words yesterday.
I have visions of streets heaped with mangled corpses
in which children wander, crying for their parents,
and babies grasp and strangle in the clutches of dead mothers.
I dislike war,
not only for its dangers and inconveniences,
but because of the loss of so many young men,
any of whom may be a Newton or an Einstein, a Beethoven,
a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare or even a Shaw.
It wasn't easy to be that kind of commentator.
It required real bravery and courage, don't you think?
I've no doubt that Shaw
was exceptionally brave and courageous.
It would have been easier for him to stay silent
about a lot of burning issues
in domestic and international politics
and controversies at that time.
Take the First World War - he could have decided that he was going
to be relatively quiet about that but he explodes about it.
There are various issues in relation to what's going on in Ireland
that he could have been relatively quiet about
but he's not going to stay silent about what he sees as the excesses,
the mistakes of British rule in Ireland.
You've got to remember that in the middle of Ireland's struggle
for independence, which came to a head in the 1916 rising,
Shaw was one of the few Irish voices that Britain might listen to.
And so he offered his support to a man on trial in London for his life.
Sir Roger Casement was a highly respected diplomat
and knight of the realm
but also an Irish Republican and a gun-runner.
Roger Casement was a really interesting character.
Protestant from the North of Ireland
who was knighted by the British establishment
for his work in the Congo.
Somewhat later, then,
he was caught importing arms into Ireland
for the Irish revolution and he went from being an establishment hero
to being a villain.
And Shaw came to his defence and for Shaw
the courtroom was a theatre
and he wanted Casement to defend himself
by reciting a defence that
would be written specifically by Shaw
in which he would get the jury to think about why they were trying him
and to appeal to their sense -
in a weird way it's a Shavian kind of paradox -
to appeal to their sense of what was right.
"If you persist in treating me as an Englishman,
"you bind yourself thereby
"to hang me as a traitor before the eyes of the world.
"Now, as a simple matter of fact
"I am neither an English man nor a traitor.
"I am an Irish man captured in a fair attempt to achieve
"the independence of my country."
Unfortunately, Casement was talked out of that defence by his counsel
and as a matter of fact he was found guilty and he was hanged.
It wasn't just Casement.
I mean, Shaw, in relation to the Irish revolution in 1916,
he tried to prevail upon the British government from executing those men
by saying that if you execute them,
you'll turn them into martyrs
and he was also aware of this with Roger Casement because
Casement did become a martyr and those men of 1916 who were executed
summarily by the British government also became martyrs
and he thought that that was a huge mistake.
But he had a tremendous capacity to see the bigger picture.
He has developed this way of engaging with the world
that involves him speaking out, writing.
It's also feeding his ego.
There's a reason why Shaw becomes so iconic and part of it is ego.
I don't think he could help himself.
There has been one very important omission
in the proceedings today.
I simply ask you
to drink the health
of Mr Bernard Shaw.
LAUGHTER
He is Doctor Frankenstein, you know,
he creates GBS and it's a very self-conscious,
thought-through way of projecting himself.
So now take a good look at me
because I am the actual, real and original Bernard Shaw.
NEWSREEL: When the Irish dramatist came back to Southampton on the Arandora Star,
he favoured British news with one of his most meaty interviews.
Perhaps the vanity of Shaw
allowed him to square a lot of his own circles.
As a young campaigner,
Shaw had been committed to gradual social change.
But as an old man in his 70s and running out of years,
he was getting frustrated.
He felt democratic change was just too slow.
In the 1930s, he certainly wasn't alone in thinking that a short,
sharp shock in the form of a Stalin,
Mussolini or Hitler might save socialism
and save the world. And when Shaw spoke, the world listened.
The great majority of the human race are easy-going,
sensible people and left to themselves,
they look round for somebody who looks intelligent
and they say, "Tell us what to do."
You can't get anything done without a dictatorship.
I think in justice to Signor Mussolini,
I ought to tell you that he has a very wonderful head.
He has a wonderful brow, which comes down to here.
Then there came a very intelligent gentleman named Adolf Hitler and he,
knowing perfectly well that the powers would not fight,
he snapped his fingers at the Treaty of Versailles.
So far as Hitler and Second World War is concerned,
he said at the end of the first war,
"What you are doing is going to create
"another world war while I'm still alive.
"To say that they are the enemy of people, of human beings,
"they will look in and make somebody else the enemy,
"rather than themselves."
This is the interesting thing about Shaw's longevity.
He was there during this period in the 19th century of a nationalism
He has an awful lot to say about international conflict,
about the dangers of nationalism and patriotism and xenophobia and there,
in the 1920s and 1930s, he's still there observing the new regimes,
the new orders, the questioning of democracy.
The real thing, you cannot get responsibility without dictatorship.
What you've got to do
is to make your dictator really responsible so that
when he abuses his powers or doesn't do the job, you can get rid of him.
That's... Everything that is done, has to be done,
somebody's got to dictate it.
His thinking starts to change
but that takes him into some kind of dark areas through his support
of Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin.
What do you make of that swerve into territory that a lot of people
found very hard to reconcile with the earlier Shaw?
He was deeply wrong about Hitler, he was deeply wrong about Mussolini.
He doesn't have the humility to turn around and say,
"You know what? I was wrong about that."
Actually, he shouldn't be spared the opprobrium of it.
But I think it shouldn't be used to sort of take away everything
that goes before that, you know?
In the end, for all the dark parts of him,
he did more than almost any modern individual
to try to uphold the ideas that everybody could be dignified
and that they could be dignified by their mind,
by having the power to think as independent individuals.
And what did you come to see?
An old man...
who was once a famous playwright.
Who talked about everything on Earth
and wrote about it.
Well, here's what is left of him.
Not much to look at, is it?
What drove him to have this need to communicate constantly,
to be speaking, to be writing, to be commentating?
When you're around these pages that he touched,
there's a sense of him being present and at the same time unreachable.
It kind of leaves you with a sense
of really wishing you could meet him.
Now, I wish that the Movietone could bring you
not only this picture of me
but I wish it could bring you the fresh air
that I'm breathing at present.
I think that all that I can do is to end as I have begun,
to beat the drum in front of my own booth,
to ask you to walk up and to see all those old, old,
old plays of mine that now appear to be so new, new, new.
His plays and the musical version of Pygmalion, My Fair Lady,
have been a source of great bounty since his death.
Three institutions, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts,
the British Museum and the National Gallery of Ireland,
all get about £200,000 a year from the royalties he left them.
It's a wonderful gift to the people of Dublin
that this bequest continues year after year
to buy and curate paintings.
It's a mark of the man. He really believed in accessibility,
that people should have free access to art because he believed
in the power of art to change the way people think.
He also understood that art for many people was an elitist preoccupation,
that it was only people who were wealthy,
who had access to this kind of work and he was extremely aware
that art belonged to everybody.
How do you think he might have developed had he not left Ireland?
Do you think it would have hampered him
or would he have become Shaw anyway?
Oh, he would have become Shaw anyway because, in a way,
he needs a nest
in which to become the cuckoo, you know?
And he does that with British society.
I think we probably should have given him greater recognition.
We here in Ireland owe him a great deal.
What's he saying to us?
Well, I think what he would say here is the importance of education.
The importance of rejecting powerfully the suggestion
that there are matters over which
ordinary citizens cannot exercise control.
Everything in Shaw very much is about the endless capacities
of people who actually put the work in
in relation to thinking and sharing and taking
the vulnerability of the other into account.
What I would call the necessary grace of discourse.
When he died, each of the places to which he left his royalties
were given one additional memento.
When you think of
the mind of this man and the influence that he had,
there's something very touching about it being...
About being stilled.
Small ears.
He wrote about his ears and said, you know,
that he didn't like his ears so much
but they're actually quite neat little ears.
And the way to have a happy life
is to be too busy doing what you like...
..all the time.
Having no time left to you
to consider whether you're happy or not and...
Oh, look here, I'm getting talking.
I must stop.
Shaw, he wasn't Irish, he wasn't English.
He was always an outsider to the end of his life and, in the end,
as a husband, he chose to be buried with his wife.
Charlotte died five years before he did,
five or six years before he did,
and although he had expressed the desire at one stage to be buried
in St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin,
he changed his mind and he...
He was cremated at Golders Green crematorium, like Charlotte was,
and their ashes were mixed around this hut.
It's a beautiful... It's a beautiful thing to do at the end of a life.
My abiding sense of the man is of compassion, humanity and courage.
A life spent seeking and speaking the truth and damn the consequences.
As he said, "My life belongs to the community
"and, as long as I live,
"it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die.
"Life is no brief candle to me.
"It is a sort of splendid torch
"and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible
"before handing it on to the future generations."
They are making me a signal by which I understand
that they have had about enough of me.
I am very reluctant to leave you, ladies and gentlemen, but,
you see, they can cut me off at any moment.
To save myself from that humiliation, || Downloadha.com ||
I must bid you good morning.