Pick Up Too True To Be Good : A Political Extravaganza Author George Bernard Shaw Provided As Digital

I thoroughly loathed this play, Granted, I read it specifically for the character of Private Meek, who is partly based on T, E. Lawrence, and I did get a kick out of the portrayal especially re: his noisy motorcycle, But apart from a few witty quotes and observations on WWI, the dialogues and plot are kind of nauseating, My edition included thepreface by Shaw, and by comparison, "Too True to Be Good" expresses his sociopolitical agenda with a lack of subtlety which must have been as awkward back then as it is now.
Id est, I feel no more enthusiastic about Stalinist Russia now than I was before reading it, This play is on stage at the Shaw Festival in Canada, It all strikes me as a farce, It also strikes me as longer than necessary, I guess I will find out when I see the play in August, These notes were made in:, Source U of C. There is an overwhelming temptation here to make the obvious bon mot: that the play itself is "too true to be good", so full of "statement" that it neglects "art".
But in fact, after a lapse of three weeks, my lingering impression of the play is that its "statement" intentionally or not is not the best part of it, and that its principal merit might well be that it will come off well on the stage.
That remains to be seen, for I am unfortunately not gifted with that kind of visual imagination which transforms the written text onto an imaginary stage, I will therefore be most interested to see what the Shaw Festival makes of it, As to the "statement" itself, which centres around the paradox of a churchman who is a rogue, and his father, an upright atheist and who is in fact the truer man, given the horror of the Great War it all may have had some validity when it was written although it was some thirteen years after the end of WWI but now it just seems like a rather selfconscious paradox, too simple for the complexity of modernday despair.

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, socialist, and a co founder of the London School of Economics, Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama.
Over the course of his life he wrote thanplays, Nearly all his plays

address prevailing social problems, but each also includes a vein of comedy that makes their stark themes palatable, In these works Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege, An ardent socialist, Shaw was angered by what he perceived to be the exploitation of the working class, He wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Societ George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, socialist, and a co founder of the London School of Economics.
Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama.
Over the course of his life he wrote thanplays, Nearly all his plays address prevailing social problems, but each also includes a vein of comedy that makes their stark themes palatable, In these works Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege, An ardent socialist, Shaw was angered by what he perceived to be the exploitation of the working class, He wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society, He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles.
For a short time he was active in local politics, serving on the London County Council, In, Shaw married Charlotte Payne Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived, They settled in Ayot St, Lawrence in a house now called Shaw's Corner, He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize for Literatureand an Oscar, The former for his contributions to literature and the latter for his work on the film "Pygmalion" adaptation of his play of the same name, Shaw wanted to refuse his Nobel Prize outright, as he had no desire for public honours, but he accepted it at his wife's behest, She considered it a tribute to Ireland, He did reject the monetary award, requesting it be used to finance translation of Swedish books to English, Shaw died at Shaw's Corner, aged, from chronic health problems exacerbated by injuries incurred by falling, sitelink.