Major Barbara

"Major Barbara" is a morality tale of a young woman, a Major in the Salvation Army, who finds her work supported by an arms dealer. Surprisingly, the arms dealer in the play, Undershaft, is witty, urbane, generous, industrious, and ruthless. He has some of the same rationalizations for what he does that contemporary arms dealers still use. He does not kill anyone. He does not start wars. He is in business. He creates jobs. If he did not do it, someone else would. Everyone does it, including governments. Poverty is the crime. Industry, including making armaaments, is the cure. So, not much has changed. The world of the play is a complex web of moral ambiguity, hiding the most murderous of crimes. Or, are they really crimes at all? You be the judge. This is a play worth reading. But if you are interested in the morals, or lack of them, in gun-running, and don't like reading plays, try "Lord of War," the film with Nicholas Cage.

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So says Andrew Undershaft, the extremely wealthy owner of a tremendously successful English armaments business, in George Bernard Shaw's play "Major Barbara." Undershaft, whose self-proclaimed religion is his wealth and his industry, inherited the business from a long line of Andrew Undershafts, each of whom was a foundling adopted by the corresponding previous Andrew Undershaft. This is not to say that the Undershafts don't marry and have families -- the current Andrew Undershaft has married the aristocratic Lady Britomart and has three children by her; he just doesn't let them have anything to do with the family business, preferring to stick to the tradition of bringing in an outsider to perpetuate the Andrew Undershaft dynasty. Indeed, Undershaft feels that poverty is the primordial crime from which all other crimes -- burglary, murder -- spring, and that it is better to give a poor man a job so he can afford to live rather than spend public money on methods of punishing him should he violate the law in his efforts to afford to live. Undershaft moralizes when he speaks, but in actuality he scoffs at what he considers ordinary Christian morals of the kind professed by his daughter Barbara, who has joined the Salvation Army in her fervid desire to help the poor and has attained the rank of major. She works at a shelter doling out bread and milk to the downtrodden and trying to find work for the unemployed, but her real goal is to bring them to "salvation" by raising them to a higher state of spirituality. When her fiance, a scholar of Greek named Adolphus Cusins, who by a certain twist of logic happens to be his own cousin, reveals himself to be a foundling, Undershaft decides he's found his heir.Although the play reflects the perspectives that Shaw, as a Socialist, had on the effects of poverty on morality and society, he doesn't seem to take sides with his characters and instead lets them be funny within the context of their respective social classes. His idle rich characters are lovably comical, like the mentally vapid trio of Undershaft's son Stephen (who wouldn't know what to do with his father's armaments business even if he were qualified to inherit it), daughter Sarah, and her fiance Charles Lomax. His impoverished characters -- those who come to the Salvation Army shelter for handouts -- can be honorably industrious like Peter Shirley or pugnacious and troublesome like Bill Walker. If Undershaft, for all his willingness to feed his fortune by manufacturing items that shed the blood of millions, represents the right way to fix poverty and Barbara the wrong way, why is the play named after her? I think it's possibly because her morality is one with which most theatergoers of the day could identify, while Undershaft's is idiosyncratic to say the least.

Shaw can be absolutely captivating even when he is being an evangelist for political philosophies that the twentieth century has proven to be nothing but vehicles for repression and mass murder (Communism - Shaw approved of Lenin even when the evidence showed him to be pure evil). This play-among his best (if you can see the movie with Rex Harrison, do not miss it)- has such brilliant dialogue and sparkling humor that it is easy to forget that one is being preached to. Shaw thinks human evil is due to socially deprived environments. Ergo, pour money into poor neighborhoods and social evils will vanish. Unfortunately for Shaw's argument, poverty and human evil are two different things entirely and only intersect occasionally and coincidently. The poor can be poor due to lack of opportunity or due to a culture of self-destructiveness (illegitmacy, drug/alcohol use, disdain for values that lead to achievement, disdain for skills that lead to steady employability). It is difficult to sustain an argument that the poor in the USA are so due to a lack of opportunity when recent immigrants have pretty much taken the available opportunities and ran with them, rapidly entering the middle classes within a generation of arriving here. Shaw simply cannot believe that anyone would choose to remain poor. Well, they can and do, when getting ahead means putting in 40+ hours a week, and not loafing all day on a street corner in an inebriated/stoned condition. Accepting that fact would have saved millions of lives that were sacrificed in the last century in the attempt to build a perfect "worker's paradise".Leaving the silly premise behind the play aside, Shaw has crafted a startling piece of theatre and uses his magisterial command of the English language to amuse, provoke, and amaze the audience.

The playwright uncovers the debate about war and pacifism. Shaw also illuminates the poverty industry, and shows that all money is tainted. The play is a vehicle for a debate on philosophies, the burning issues of the day. Shaw shows that the audience can laugh and think, in the same play. Probably Britain's best known playwright, after Shakespeare, Shaw shines in Major Barbara