HOW G.B.S. WRITES

Taranaki Daily News, 13 October 1934, Page 17 (Supplement)

HOW G.B.S. WRITES

EXPLANATION OF METHOD. “NO BOTHER ABOUT IT.” At the Malvern Festival Mr. Bernard Shaw told his audience how he writes plays. “With me,” he said, “the thing happens, and I no more bother about how it happens or why it happens than I bother about how I breathe or how I digest my food (when I do). “The novelist has a glorious liberty and license which is denied to the playwright. When I ask my friend, Mr. H. G. Wells, why he does not try his hand at writing a play he says with great truth, ‘Nothing can happen on the stage.’ “That is quite true in a sense. Nothing can happen on the stage. I have sometimes been reproached with the accusation that people in my plays do nothing but talk. That is a very queer accusation, because there are no plays in which anything can occur except talk. Plays are all talk. “My method, my system, my tradition is founded upon music. It is not founded on literature at all. I was brought up on music when I was young. I did not read plays very much because I could not get hold of them, except, of course, Shakespeare, who was mother’s milk to me. "What I was really interested hi was musical development. If you study operas and symphonies you will find a useful clue to my particular type of writing. If you want to produce anything !n the way of great poetic drama you have to take a theme, as Beethoven did in his symphonies, and keep hammering a< the one theme. “You can produce a mechanical kind of play—something which is very much like a detective novel—but a real play is a play that is inspired. “A jigsaw puzzle is very amusing to the person who is putting it together, but very dull for the person looking on. “That strikes me about certain detective plays. But a murder is a very good thing to keep a play together if you cannot write a real play. I enjoy these plays a little more because in my case I am never able to understand how it was that the particular character who is finally convicted of the murder really did commit it. Sometimes I begin to wonder whether the murder was really committed at all.

“I depend entirely on inspiration,” Mr. Shaw concluded. “A play grows in my mind and I put it on paper. The funny thing is that it sometimes strikes me, when I see an early play of my own, that it looks as if I had elaborately constructed it. All the results of perfect construction are achieved in that way, but I do not mean that everybody can do it.”