Regent Theatre, London

Presented by the Macdona Company, with Shaw’s ‘Androcles and The Lion’, for five weeks during a repertory season at the Regent Theatre (Mander & Mitchenson, p. 294). 'It was a clever idea to put Mr. Shaw’s two early religions works together. In “The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet,” a play at one time banned, he has as unimpeachably moral sentiments as any Rural Dean; and Posnet, with his “great game and his rotten game,” is but the forerunner of *Billy Sunday' (Daily Herald, 30 December 1925. Billy Sunday,1862-1935, was an American baseball player and evangelical preacher: Billy Sunday - Wikipedia). 'Will there be a New Year sermon preached anywhere better than “Blanco Posnet”? I saw a number of clergymen in the house sitting enthralled by the burning eloquence of Blanco’s discourse on salvation. Just the plain material of any Sunday sermon, but how transfused in this instance by imagination and the sense of spiritual beauty!' (Daily News (London), 1 January 1926). '‘By way of celebrating the holiday season and of showing the adaptability of their idol to all moods and most publics, the Macdona Players at the Regent are performing a double bill ... consisting of “The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet” and “Androcles and the Lion.” The first is held to be suitable, no doubt, on grounds of general colour and rough-and-tumble, and its message, of course, is unexceptionable. I shall confidently expect the introduction of “the great game” to the juvenile public to bear fruit, and on every count I think it more reasonable that this work should be placed on the recommended list for Boy Scouts’ entertainments than forbidden, as it is hard to believe that it once was, by an obdurate Censor. Incidentally, it is one of the most closely knit and genuinely felt pieces which has come from Mr. Shaw’s pen, and, in spite of some appearance of skilful improvisation, never fails to make its effect in the theatre. The Macdona Players are fairly at home in it, and although I remember the performance of the Irish Players as having a more natural abandon, there is a good deal to be said for the painstaking thoroughness of Mr. Esme Percy and his coadjutors’ (Truth, 6 January 1926). ‘“The name of Bernard Shaw does not now strike terror as it once did.” That sentence is printed on the programme of the Macdona players’ repertory company at the Regent Theatre. It seems a truism that hardly needed enunciation. “Strike terror.” There is certainly no terror among the Regent Theatre audiences. At times there is an almost antiquarian interest in recalling the “daring” of a forgotten epoch, to-day so tame. For the rest there is a keen intellectual (seldom emotional) pleasure in listening to the reflections of an intellect so brilliant that it shines even through a tattered technique. For some of Shaw, beyond any question, is “tattered.” He has suffered the fate of all innovators. His innovations have been given far more prominence than they deserved, and as a result, as soon as they cease to be innovations they be become old-fashioned … All of which is merely to say that to endow Shaw - as so many of his admirers insist - with a perpetual and divine youth is a foolish and irritating habit. He is quite big enough to bear just criticism. For if some of his work appeared on Monday like a desert - dreary stretches of talk covered with the footprints of a vanished age, it was abundantly evident that the desert is yet worth traversing. It contains oases of insight so clear and sparkling that they will never be parched, and is dotted with mountains on which human thought reaches its loftiest heights … “The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet” might have been written yesterday. Why? Because it tells a simple story, because it deals with primitive human emotions. Because, in fact, it does not preach. It narrates. Shaw plunges deep into the human heart in that great scene between the mystery mother and the “loose girl” of the town. It is a tremendous exposition of an eternal antithesis. As long, too, as the English language is spoken will live the figure of Blanco Posnet himself, the sodden, blaspheming wastrel who shakes his fist in the face of God, with the searing words, “He always keeps a trick up His sleeve. He’s a mean one. He’s a sly one"' (Weekly Dispatch (London), 10 January 1925). 'The run of the present plays [at the Regent Theatre] (“Androcles and the Lion” and “Blanco Posnet”) will terminate on January 30' (The Stage, 21 January 1926).

Performed for the week.

Performed on 10 November.