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New exhibition delves into the remarkable genius of GBS
George Bernard Shaw is being commemorated at The National Gallery in Merrion Square in an exhibition called Shaw And The Gallery: A Priceless Education, that runs until April 2021.
Shaw hated the name George, and insisted on being called just Bernard Shaw. Yet his letters and postcards, of which there were tens of thousands, were usually signed ‘G. Bernard Shaw’. To friends and the public he was often just GBS.
The exhibition is not large, but it illustrates his connection with the gallery, which he called ‘the cherished asylum of my boyhood to which I owe much of the only real education I ever got as a boy in Éire.’ No wonder he took refuge there. His father was an alcoholic and his mother was more interested in her singing and her singing teacher than in looking after Shaw and his two sisters.
The exhibition shows original postcards, letters, photos and pictures, giving visitors the story of Shaw’s close association with the gallery. He writes that his university had three colleges: Dalkey, the National Gallery and George Lee’s amateur dramatic society. And he repaid the gallery handsomely by donating a third of his posthumous royalties to it.
In 1950, the gallery had just £1,000 for pictures: by the end of 1959 it had reached £240,000.
And the bequest really became a bonanza when his play Pygmalion was adapted into the musical My Fair Lady. Since then the bequest has produced over €10million for the gallery.
It’s worthwhile having a look round the gallery to see the works bought with Shaw’s bequest. Ironically, Shaw himself didn’t want Pygmalion turned into a musical because he wasn’t happy with The Chocolate Soldier, Oscar Straus’s musical version of his play Arms And The Man.
Some of the correspondence in the exhibition forms a little drama of its own. The sculpture by Paolo Troubetzkoy had impressed Shaw so much he wrote, in an unusual burst of humility, that the work was ‘a treasure that will long be famous after I am forgotten’. But the gallery insisted that portraits of living people were not shown during their lifetime.
Patrick O’Reilly, a dustman who emptied bins around Synge Street, became a friend of Shaw’s and made great efforts to have the sculpture shown. He also gathered money to have a plaque put on the house where Shaw was born.
It’s possible that Shaw had him in mind when he created the philosophical dustman Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion. The first item in the exhibition is a death mask of Shaw, a replica of the original in the British Museum. Like all such masks, it’s a cold image, that conveys nothing of the impish humour that was such a part of Shaw’s appeal despite his vast outpouring of convoluted political and philosophical polemics.
‘I am a comedian as well as a philosopher,’ he said. When people complained that his plays were all talk, talk, talk, he agreed, adding, ‘just as all Michelangelo’s paintings are all just paint’.
The Shaw royalty bequest runs out this year, seventy years after the writer’s death.
■ The Gifts You Gave To The Dark is an intense and very moving short play by Darren Murphy now streaming online until October 31, about the effect of the coronavirus
on a family separated by quarantine and illness.
Tom (Marty Rea) is stranded at home in Belfast coughing and sweating, obviously suffering from the virus, unable to travel to his apparently unconscious, dying mother (Marie Mullen) in Dublin as he speaks about her to his uncle Larry (Seán McGinley).
Larry holds the phone near Rose (Marie Mullen) so Tom can speak to her even if she can’t hear him.
This could be mawkish and sentimental, but it’s not. It’s compelling and realistic drama about a nasty subject, without the dramatics, beautifully directed by Caitríona McLaughlin. To watch this show and support it, go to irishrep.org/ show/irish-rep-online-2020/thegifts-you-gave-to-the-dark.
His plays were all talk ‘like Michelangelo’s paintings were just all paint’