GEORGE BERNARD SHAW’S – “OVERRULED”

Overruled (1912) is a comic one-act on the manners and mores of “genteel” British Society.  In Shaw’s own words, it is about “how polygamy occurs among quite ordinary people innocent of all unconventional views concerning it.” The play concerns two lovelorn couples who desire to switch partners, but are prevented from doing so by an amusing set of considerations, both moral and, by British standards of the time,  ever-so-slightly questionable, and end up resolving their dilemmas bynegotiating an ambiguous set of relationships.

This will be another entry in our staged reading series and will be accompanied by a selection of piano pieces by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW’S – “HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND”

Shaw stated that, “Nothing in the theatre is staler than the situation of husband, wife and lover, or the fun of knockabout farce. I have taken both, and got an original play out of them, as anybody else can if only he will look about him for his material instead of plagiarizing Othello and the thousand plays that have proceeded on Othello’s romantic assumptions and false point of honor.”

Shaw wrote this One Act Comedy of manners and mores of British society over a period of four days while he was vacationing in Scotland in 1904. In its preface he described it as “a sample of what can be done with even the most hackneyed stage framework by filling it in with an observed touch of actual humanity instead of with doctrinaire romanticism.” The play has often been interpreted as a kind of satirical commentary on Shaw’s own highly successful earlier play Candida (which one of the characters gets tickets to see).

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW – “THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS”

This 1910 short comedy by George Bernard Shaw in which William Shakespeare, intending to meet the “Dark Lady”, accidentally encounters Queen Elizabeth I and attempts to persuade her to create a national theatre. The play was written as part of a campaign, ardently supported by Shaw to create a “Shakespeare National Theatre” by 1916.

The play refers to the “dark lady”, who is the addressee of Shakespeare’s sonnets 127 to 152, so-called because her hair is said to be black and her skin “dun.”

In the sonnets, the poet is apparently involved in a sexual relationship with the Lady, but it is implied that she is unfaithful to him, perhaps with the “Fair Youth”, the young man who is the addressee of most of the other sonnets.