This Very Old Fair Lady: the Last Years of Mrs. Patrick Campbell

1990 ◽  
Vol 6 (21) ◽  
pp. 57-63
Author(s):  
Alan Brock
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Very Old ◽  
Living Well ◽  
Bernard Shaw

Mrs. Patrick Campbell had captivated New York, in her distinctively grand manner, well before Bernard Shaw wrote the part of Eliza for her in Pygmalion, and immortalized her reputation on stage – as, perhaps, his own protracted and largely epistolatory affair with the temperamental actress immortalized her off-stage. But by the early 1930s, when Mrs. Pat was approaching her own seventh decade, her stage appearances were infrequent, and less fortunate times found her living well beyond her means in New York. There, Alan Brock, at the time an aspiring young actor, made her acquaintance, and in due course became her agent. In the following article he tells the story of Mrs. Pat's declining years – which were marked by a final triumph, half the proceeds of which evaporated, instantly and characteristically, on celebrating the success. Alan Brock went on to become an actor for George Abbott, Howard Lindsay, and the Shuberts. Also a New York actors’ agent, he represented numerous leading players, and later worked with Ben Hecht and Billy Rose on two Broadway shows, while authoring his own radio series and contributing a regular column to the trade weekly Backstage.

scholarly journals Thrift Television: Narratives of Enduring, Saving, and Living Well. A Thematic Introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 421-442
Author(s):  
Alexa Faerber ◽  
Aneta Podkalicka
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Living Well ◽  
The Status ◽  
Post War ◽  
Popular Television

Concepts of thrift and dwelling are central to how societies live together. Thrift refers to a complex and morally-loaded set of economic practices that people engage with out of necessity, choice, or both. Whilst home-making or dwelling refers to social integration and self-representation. The ways in which social realms of thrift and dwelling relate to each other are historically and culturally specific, and media representations are an important intersection for reflecting and putting forward specific ‘imaginaries’ of thrift and dwelling. In this special issue, depictions of thrift in popular television are treated inclusively and span makeover reality TV, comedy-drama and documentaries, and target different national and international audiences. Contributions by researchers from the US, France, Germany and Australia examine how ‘appropriate’ ways of dwelling, involving thrift are negotiated in situations marked by material scarcity, precarity and aspirational lifestyles. These include: negotiating the harsh realities of housing in expensive cities such as New York in Insecure or Broad City (Perkins; Kanai & Dobson), make-over through decluttering and controlling debt in Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (Ouellette); Life or Debt; Raus aus den Schulden (Meyer), and are linked to specific historical and social circumstances in different national contexts. Suburban areas of post-war France are represented in 1967-1981 TV documentaries (Overney); gentrified British rural areas in Midsomer Murders (Zahlmann) and post-recessional New York City after the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in Broad City. Drawing on recent thrift scholarship and analyses of televised thrift in this special issue, we demonstrate how thrift and dwelling are articulated largely as a middle-class concern and a disciplining discourse and apparatus. Positive incidents of thrift are also revealed for example, in the comedy form and female voice in French post-war women’s documentaries. In other discussions there is much scepticism over the possibilities for protagonists to self-fashion themselves within the system of television series. This raises the question of whether alternative forms of imagining subjectivities and social relations in neo-liberal economies of dwelling can occur in entertainment television, or whether thrift imagined as what we call ‘televised endurance’ merely serves to reproduce the status quo as an irreversible condition.

Pygmalion: Bernard Shaw's Dramatic Theory and Practice

PMLA ◽  
1951 ◽  
Vol 66 (6) ◽  
pp. 879-885
Author(s):  
Milton Crane
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Very Old ◽  
Dramatic Theory ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
Bernard Shaw

In the last of his many discussions of the so-called play of ideas, Bernard Shaw remarked, “I was, and still am, the most old-fashioned playwright outside China and Japan.” This is one of the few statements that Shaw made about his own work of which we may safely believe every word—always assuming him to be correct about China and Japan. He was, to be sure, merely echoing his earlier, confession in the Preface to Three Plays For Puritans, in which he had defended The Devil's Disciple against a reckless charge of originality: “If it applies to the incidents, plot, construction, and general professional and technical qualities of the play, [it] is nonsense; for the truth is, I am in these matters a very old-fashioned playwright.” He elsewhere admonished us: “Remember that my business as a classic writer of comedies is ‘to chasten morals with ridicule’ . . .” It is my purpose here to describe and interpret some of the stages through which Shaw passed and some of the attitudes which he assumed in the course of coming to such conclusions.

Archer, William (1856–1924)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Postlewait
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
British Drama ◽  
Elizabeth Robins ◽  
Master Builder ◽  
Bernard Shaw ◽  
A Doll's House

Born in Edinburgh, William Archer served as a London theater critic from 1881 to 1920. He retired from weekly reviewing when his melodrama The Green Goddess was a major success in New York (1920–1922) and London (1923–1924). His translations of Henrik Ibsen’s plays began to be published in 1888 and culminated in The Works of Henrik Ibsen (twelve volumes, 1906–1908). He translated and helped to stage the first London productions of A Doll’s House (1889), Ghosts (1891), and Rosmersholm (1892), and in close partnership with the actress Elizabeth Robins co-directed the productions of Hedda Gabler (1891), The Master Builder (1893), Little Eyolf (1896), and John Gabriel Borkman (1898). He also translated and published plays by Maurice Maeterlinck and Gerhart Hauptmann. In his advocacy for modern English drama, Archer supported the plays of Arthur Wing Pinero, Oscar Wilde, James Barrie, Harley Granville Barker, and Bernard Shaw. He led the British campaigns against stage censorship and for a national theater. In 1907 he and Barker published A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates. In the mid-1880s he and Shaw drafted a play entitled Rhinegold that Shaw later transformed into Widowers’ Houses (1892), the play that launched his playwriting career. Between 1892 and 1924 Archer wrote well over 100 articles and reviews on Shaw and his plays. Although he criticized some of the plays, he repeatedly praised Shaw as a modern dramatic genius. Their abiding friendship thrived on their debates about all aspects of modern drama, including Shaw’s plays. In 1923 Archer published The Old Drama and the New, a historical survey of British drama with a lengthy (and still argumentative) section on Shaw.

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