Bernard Shaw - Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

GBS

64/ To an actress, theatre director, producer and costume designer Edith Craig

20th August 1897

My dear Miss Craig

Will you send me a line to remind me of the business in the scene with Eugene at the place where you say “Pray are you flattering me or flattering yourself.” Do you go back to the typewriter at the end of that speech or at “I’ll leave the room, Mr Mb [Marchbanks]: I really will. It’s not proper.” I want to get it right for the printer.

Also, if you have accumulated any effective gags, you might let me have them for inclusion in the volume.

All the accounts I have received agree that you and Burgess saved the piece from utter ruin, and that Prossy (as [Charles] Wyndham foresaw) was the popular favorite.

Please make your mother [Ellen Terry] tell me what you thought of the performance; and then bring her to Eastbourne [to see it] so that she can tell me what she thinks herself.

yours sincerely

G.Bernard Shaw

65/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

30th August 1897

That work of art, [Courtenay] Thorpe, haunts me! He does every part so cleverly. Helmer [in A Doll House ] or Eugene, the more difficult the thing to be done the better he does it. But I cant think it right to show as clever as that. Must one show all “the tricks of the trade” to be understood by an audience?

Well, I’ve seen Candida , and it comes out on the stage even better than when one reads it. It is absorbingly interesting every second, and I long for it to be done in London. Even the audience understood it all. I dont see how anything so simple and direct could fail to be understood by the dullest. Only one thing struck me at the time as wrong. Towards quite the end of a play to say “Now let’s sit down and talk the matter over.” Several people took out their watches and some of them left to catch a train, or a drink! And it interrupted the attention of all of us who stayed. Of course you may think it unnecessary to mention such a trifle. I’m going to write to Janet about one or two trifling things in her acting, suggestions which she may care, or not care, to try over. She is a dear thing.

I was very happy being able to be with Edy. I know she was glad to have me there. I went for a drive with Janet and Mr Charrington (I like him) but was so ill when they came to supper in the evening I could scarce sit up. My eyes were dazed with the pain in my head. I’m well again now. It was the great excitement of seeing Candida . I was all right the night before!

Darlingest are you well? and happy enough? Where are you? When does your holiday end? Are you most of your time working? I guess you are!

I begin a drive of ten days on the first or second of September. We go 226 miles (to Aylesbury first) and amongst other wonderful places I go to Tewkesbury. I wonder I dont turn into an Angel there, I feel so nice, and as if I could fly. I’m reading now all the time of Russia.

Let me press you to a jelly now, for I must go.

Your Ellen

66/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

4th September 1897

. . . I’m glad you are still in the fresh air. This London is lovely when one drives out as I did yesterday at 9 in the morning, but about noon a pall of heavy murkiness hangs over everything and it seems to crush in one’s head. Edy came from Folkestone Sunday morning and yesterday went on to Nottingham. I would advise you to see Candida before producing it in London. If it is to be done, when is it to be done? A clever friend of mine said to me yesterday—“If Edy stays long with the Independent Theatre Company she will get dull, heavy, conceited, frowsy, trollopy, and dirty! In fact will look moth-eaten! And no one will see her act, because nobody goes to their Theatre.” That’s lively news for Edy’s Mama, who is missing her all the while, and for you who have a play there. I have a frightful cold and am stuck in bed to-day. I’ll send Peter [Laurence Irving’s play Peter the Great] in a day or so. Oh, my muddled head. I think I’m fit for nothing. Look now! You and Miss P. T. [Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend later Mrs Shaw] live in a fine house in the country and I will “keep the Lodge”! And run out wet or shine and open the gates! And then sometimes you’ll come to tea with me. I can make delicious girdle-cakes and jam, fruitfools and Hominy cakes. Send me my letter my very precious Bernie!

E. T.

67/ To Richard Mansfield

8th September 1897

My dear Mansfield

In a month or two will appear, in England and America simultaneously, a couple of volumes of my plays, including Arms & the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny and You Never Can Tell, as well as three earlier plays, Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer, & Mrs Warren’s Profession. My description of Bluntschli [in Arms and the Man] will beat your best efforts off the stage, and as for Candida, your reputation will not survive the discovery of your monstrous error and sin in letting it slip through your fingers. . .

It is as an organizer of the theatre that you really interest me; and here I find you paralyzed by the ridiculous condition that the drama must always be a Mansfield exhibition. I wanted Candida done. Why didnt you send for Courtenay Thorpe, who has just ‘created’ Eugene here? If you set your mind to it you could teach all the necessary tricks to the first dozen able bodied human shells you meet in the street. I dont believe a bit in your own acting; you’re too clever, too positive, and have imagination instead of what people call ‘feeling’. Why not hire a specimen of the real actor-article—the true susceptible, hysterical, temperamental, somnambulistic, drunk-on-air nothingness—and put ideas into the creature’s head, and hypnotize him with a part. He’ll act your head off, because you have to be yourself, whereas he has no self and can only materialize himself in the delusive stuff spun out of another man’s fancy. For you acting is only intentional madness, like David drabbling in his beard. Harden your heart against, and manage, manage, manage. Bless you, I know by your letters: I miss the hollowness, the brainless void full of tremulously emotional chaos waiting for a phantom shape in a play—bah! it’s no profession for you. The people come because they are curious about the interesting man, Richard Mansfield, and because you have imagination enough to strike their imaginations with stage effects; but that’s quite another thing. You may as me whether these spooks of people will ever understand my plays. I reply that I dont want them to understand. If they did theyd he dumfoundered. Besides, my plays never will be played, though they can be. I’ll write them & print them; and the right people will understand. Meanwhile play the Devil’s Disciple , and then retire & write to the papers explaining (as above) why you scorn to act any longer, except in an emergency as Marcellus or Bernardo [characters in Hamlet ] and devote the rest of your life to the organization of victory all over the States—ten companies at a time—instead of to broadsword combats.

Do not shew this letter to your wife: she will blow me up for allowing the winds of heaven to visit your face too harshly.

Irving’s son [Laurence] has written a play about Peter the Great of which I hear high praise. The younger generation is knocking at the door: nephew Alf has played Osric to [Herbert Beerbohm] Tree’s Hamlet here—at least I saw him announced for the part, I did not see the performance, as I am in the country for August & September.

Any chance of seeing you over here?

yrs sincerely

G. Bernard Shaw

68/ To Ellen Terry

8th September 1897

. . . Are you going to do Peter [the Great] on the road? You should. Think of how much anxiety it will save you if you have your difficulties with the words settled before the first night in London. Mansfield produces “The Devil’s Disciple” at the 5th Avenue Theatre on the 6th Oct, after an experiment or two with it in the provinces. Ah, if you only would play a matinee of it with Forbes[-Robertson], I would actually go to see it (a compliment I haven’t paid Candida). Besides, I would teach that rapscallionly flower girl of his something. “Caesar & Cleopatra” has been driven clean out of my head by a play I want to write for them in which he shall be a west end gentleman and she [Mrs Patrick Campbell] an east end dona in an apron and three orange and red ostrich feathers [a first reference to Pygmalion written during 1912 and 1913].