SHAW’S LAST SPEECH

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3791, 5 August 1936, Page 6

SHAW’S LAST SPEECH

PRIDE IN PLAY. Mr. George Bernaid Shaw announced that he was making his last speech on any stage when he addressed the audience at the conclusion of a performance of his play “Candida,” at the People’s Theatre, Newcastle, recently, says the Daily Telegraph. The performance was part of the theatre’s silver jubilee celebrations, and “Candida” was revived as the first full-length play performed by the theatre in 1911. “I have retired from public speak-

ing,” said Mr. Shaw. “How old do you think I am? “I can keep up appearances. I don’t suppose that I look more than seventy, but I am a good deal older than that and the time has come for me to retire from the footlights. “This being my last speech in the theatre I like it to be in this one. (Cheers).

“I have listened to this old play of mine, which I wrote before any of you were born, with a certain pleasure that I never can get from completely professional performances. “It is just as well that people should understand that it is in performances of this kind, by people who are doing the thing for the-love of it, who work hard and are not paid for it, that you get quality of performance that you cannot get from even

the most highly skilled professional actors.

'“I want to say a word or two as to why the play was written. It was written when a tremendous sepsation was being made in London by the arrival of the great Norwegian dramatist, Ibsen. This sensation was being made by a play called ‘The Doll’s House.’

“It was a remarkable play, but it completely upset not only the stage’s conventions of the relations between husband and wife, but Europe’s conceptions.

“There you have the fine manly husband and the charming, delightful little squirrel of a wife. “In the end the wife suddenly stood the gentleman on his head and made him and the audience understand that he was a rather poor

specimen. Ibsen said to the woman: ‘Cease to be the plaything of the man and the household. Be independent and be yourself.’

“I was not satisfied with that. It implied that the women had to go out of the house, so long as she stayed in the house she was nobody.

“I thought that it would be a good thing to write a play in which the husband would not be mean and contemptible, but should be a fine fellow in his way.

“I thought it would be nice to have the wife suddenly making the gentleman understand that she was the leading thing and the making of him. So I wrote ‘Candida.’ That is the whole point of this particular play.”