Only Mr. Shaw could do this - live during harrowing, exciting, uncertain times when future seemed brilliant one moment and bleak another, when a huge war was complicated by a revolution in a huge, huge nations sprawled across eastern half of Europe and all of north Asia, when kingdoms fell down and royal families were assassinated and aristocrats fled their homes and countries and lived lives of penury in greatly strained circumstances and still tried to maintain their haughty demeanor, when middle and upper classes were uncertain if their own servants would rise up and slay them all over when asleep, and colonial rules were beginning to totter with independence movements gaining momentum - only he could live through all this, and take a look at it with a seemingly close focus and paint a seemingly sarcastic, ridiculing portrait of his own side, and yet come out making a reader and a viewer adoring the very people we were all laughing at a moment ago.
The short play is set in the battlefield of the first world war somewhere in the background, with a typical slightly dense upper- upper middle class Augustus attempting to do his best for his nation, saying all the right things with complete sincerity and yet be naive enough to be fooled by a woman of upper class who has arrived to spy, to take away important papers that lie openly on his desk in the belief that everyone shall be British and play cricket, and not lie or spy while looking like a lady or a gentleman.
But it is all right after all - she is merely there to win a bet with his boss, which she does very easily, and leaves the bumbling Englishman to take care of the affairs pretty much representative of his ilk, his nation - and to do all right after all.
Wednesday, February 26, 2014.
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