Superman of the modern stage

As a critic, George Bernard Shaw laid the foundation of 20th-century theatre, but his plays lie outside their time, writes Peter Gahan, on the 150th anniversary of the playwright's birth

Bernard Shaw, 150 years after his birth in Dublin and some 56 years after his death in Ayot St Lawrence, continues to be a published author of "new" writing: collections of his journalism, criticism and correspondence appear regularly from North American academic presses, as do new biographies and critical studies of the writer often labelled the second-best dramatist in the English language.

In early June, a conference at Brown University brought together leading Shaw scholars to discuss the standing of Shaw and his works. The astonishing Shaw Theatre Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake in Canada runs each year from April to October. BBC-Warner Home Video have released, for the North American market, a stunning 150th-anniversary DVD collection of 10 Shaw plays produced in the 1970s and 1980s. RTÉ radio presented a series of Shaw plays from its archives, notably Siobhán McKenna's Saint Joan. New York is celebrating the year with staged readings of all 52 plays - a dramatic corpus in terms of quantity and quality equalled only by those of Euripides, Shakespeare, and Ibsen. Four of his plays (Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, Saint Joan, and Man and Superman) feature on the 2000 National Theatre poll of the 100 best English language plays of the 20th century.

And the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the National Theatre in London, and the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford, all of which Shaw nobly supported in their infant phases, are celebrating his sesquicentennial by doing what?

Shaw, of course, was not only a dramatist; he was well into his 30s when he completed his first play. As the leading Fabian socialist thinker, economist, writer and orator, he was among the more prominent political writers of his time. For good or ill, his impact on the history of the 20th century was immense. His influential prose essays on theatre, on education, on marriage laws, on religion, on government, on censorship, on medical science, were often published as prefaces to his plays. Especially, his critical journalism made him famous in 1880s and 1890s London. I defy anyone to read a couple of pages of his music criticism, for instance, without breaking out in smiles. In that respect, Shaw's language works, like the music of his artistic model Mozart, as a source of constant delight.

Shaw, who had started his working life at 15 as an ill-paid clerk in a Dublin land agency, knew everybody of any consequence in the literary and theatrical world of his time (including Wilde, Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Sean O'Casey), as well as artists such as William Morris and Rodin, prime ministers such as McDonald and Churchill, scientists such as Haldane and Einstein, composers such as Richard Strauss and Elgar, thinkers such as Krishnamurti and Bertrand Russell, and celebrity icons of the age such as Ghandi, Gene Tunny, Marie Stopes, Lawrence of Arabia and Charlie Chaplin.

One of his typists was Dickens's granddaughter, and another temporary secretary became the mother of the future Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald. Yet Shaw remains a paradoxical figure: for someone so luminous in his own time, he remains curiously obscure today. As a crusading drama critic, he helped lay the foundations for 20th-century English-language literary theatre, but, again like Mozart in the history of music, his inimitable plays have little part in such historical development; their extraordinary qualities lie outside their time.

And they are extraordinary. Just compare Shaw's You Never Can Tell with Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Shaw was a champion of his compatriot, as was Wilde of Shaw. Shaw, whose own theatre has often been accused - wrongly - of neglecting human emotion, didn't deny the brilliance of Wilde's most famous play, but his review of Earnest criticised the mechanical basis of that brilliance. And Shaw did not simply write his review; he set about writing his next play to engage Wilde's Earnest in a kind of artistic conversation: You Never Can Tell plumbed the depths of Shaw's own unhappy background in what is nonetheless one of the most effervescent comedies ever written.

Laughter, he claimed, was his sword, his shield and his spear. The metaphorical depths in Shaw's comedies, whether in You Never Can Tell, Man and Superman, John Bull's Other Island, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, Saint Joan, or Too True to be Good, that reveal themselves in good productions make their experience in a theatre akin to the cathartic effects of Greek tragedy - an influence repeatedly invoked in his plays.

Rosset's Shaw of Dublin: The Formative Years (1964), remains the best account - supplemented a year later by John O'Donovan's Shaw and the Charlatan Genius - of Shaw's first 20 years in Dublin. Shaw, at his own insistence, had been part writer and editor of all the major biographies in his lifetime - and beyond - by Henderson, Harris, Pearson, and St John Ervine. Michael Holroyd's biography, consisting of five volumes in the original British edition between 1988 and 1992, does not escape this influence.

Indeed, he admits Shaw as joint author by incorporating large chunks of Shaw's autobiographical writing in a well-balanced double-act, where Holroyd's mordant commentary keeps the Shavian exuberance in check. And Holroyd adds the safety valve of a third voice: the compulsive journal keeper Beatrice Webb, who provides a critical, often acerbic, but ultimately sympathetic commentary on her husband's super-intelligent Irish friend, GBS, and his independently wealthy Irish wife, Charlotte.

IT COMES AS something of a shock when, during the Webbs' annual visit to the Shaws in their old age, Beatrice notes that Shaw was so delighted to see them he embraced her and - for the first time in their long lives - kissed her! Holroyd's argument is that deprivation of love in childhood as a result of parental neglect and marital disharmony resulted in Shaw's lifelong search for emotional compensation. The survival tactics he used to overcome this deficit included a relentlessly optimistic facade that sometimes - particularly in later years - cracked open, exposing a deeper inner pessimism.

Holroyd condensed this thesis into a more manageable 800-page single volume in 1997. If anyone wants a comprehensive biography of the last of the great Victorians, who also happens to be the first of the great Moderns, then the single-volume Holroyd can hardly be bettered.

Two more recent works seek to extricate more rigorously Shaw biography from autobiography. Sally Peters in Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman (1996) proposed that much of the Shavian oeuvre can be traced to the vagaries of a homosexual aspect in Shaw's psychological make-up and literary imagination. Although careful not to declare Shaw homosexual, her biographical labours have been criticised by Shavian scholars for dwelling on an aspect of the imagination the advocate of the Womanly Man and the Manly Woman well understood.

Yet Peters's efforts offered a brief hope that Shaw's life and its quite extraordinary achievements could be detached from its Edwardian heyday by yanking him into late 20th-century postmodern notions of art and biography.

In practice Shaw's erotic life seems to have centred around women, often older where he could improve on his unsatisfactory relationship with his mother, but also younger where he could indulge his Henry Higgins type proclivities. His wife proved something of an exception - Charlotte being almost the same age and already a Fabian socialist who would later become a suffragette and something of an Irish nationalist; in many respects theirs was a marriage of equals.

Although there was undoubtedly physical attraction and emotional intimacy during their courtship - more of the latter, for instance, than with Shaw's first mistress, the Irish widow Jenny Patterson - the question of sex after marriage, unusually, becomes the most vexed question for Shaw's biographers. Charlotte was troubled three times by her husband's notorious reputation for philandering. The first was early in the 20th century with the impetuous young Fabian Erica Cotterill, whom Shaw encouraged in her demands to practice the free love advocated in his journalism and plays. Most famously, there was the tempestuous romance (possibly not fully consummated but physically intimate) with the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell which nearly wrecked the Shaw marriage before the first World War, especially after Charlotte overheard intimate phone calls. And in the late 1920s, his liaison in Italy with the young American actress Molly Tompkins resulted - one of the very few startling biographical revelations of recent years - in an aborted pregnancy.

Tony Gibbs's Bernard Shaw deliberately sets itself against both Holroyd's thesis of the search for emotional compensation and Peters's investigations of a homosexual imagination, as well as against Shaw's own protestations of a miserable upbringing.

GIBBS IS ON the side of respectability. Thus Shaw's neglectful parents prove themselves in his account model parents and fine examples of the Dublin Protestant bourgeoisie; Shaw's mother was far too well brought up to have had an affair with her Catholic music teacher Vandeleur Lee; Shaw's father was too respectable for him to have been the miserable alcoholic his ungrateful son remembered. As for the family break-up, when Bessie Shaw and her daughters went to London in hot pursuit of her musical associate Lee - leaving the teenage George behind in Dublin with his father, Gibbs sees a perfectly amicable separation necessitated by putting her eldest daughter, Lucy, on the English stage. Shaw, perhaps, remains a safer witness to the childhood imagination, if not always to the facts, that proved so successful a father to the literary playwriting man.

Gibbs is at his best in depicting Shaw and the London he arrived in from 1876 through his years as a struggling novelist and journalist, his increasing fame as socialist, critic, philanderer, and unperformed playwright at the turn of the century, to the high point with the West End production of Pygmalion in 1914.

And Gibbs's Bernard Shaw rightly emphasises, as does Holroyd, their subject as distinctively an Irish writer among Irish writers. Everyone in Ireland knows that Yeats was one of Lady Gregory's best friends, but do they know that so was Shaw? Or that Shaw worked closely with Yeats on Irish cultural matters from the 1890s on? Or that another great Irish friend was Horace Plunkett, founder of the Irish co-operative movement? Or that he wrote a defence for Roger Casement in 1916? Or that he befriended Sean O'Casey, the great dramatist of the Dublin they both knew all too well? Shaw's reputation as critic and prose stylist is unassailable, while his political contributions will be assessed and reassessed according to prevailing ideologies.

At the very least, a dozen of his plays will continue to be performed with some regularity. Just as Shakespeare and Mozart had to be rediscovered in the early 20th century, so must Shaw be experienced with fresh eyes. Only Shakespeare and Dickens match Shaw as a creator of character. Shaw, the disciple of Ruskin and Morris, was as fastidious an artist in his way as was Henry James (he was, incidentally, one of the few critics to appreciate James's play Guy Domville at its disastrous premiere), but like Joyce, for whom Shaw proved something of a role-model, he fused it with popular culture. Shaw's plays continue to be relevant to our own time; there were literally gasps of recognition from the audience at a 2004 production of Major Barbara that I saw in San Jose. The same year, the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake celebrated the 100th anniversary of Man and Superman with a performance of the entire text that lasted for almost seven electrifying hours; an unforgettable experience.

So perhaps the National Theatre in London, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and the Royal Shakespeare Company might be persuaded to join forces with each producing one of the three great plays written between 1901-05, Man and Superman, John Bull's Other Island (Shaw's contribution to the Irish literary revival), and Major Barbara, which inaugurated what we know as 20th century theatre. If Shaw had written only this trilogy, it would be easier to assess the magnitude of his achievement; but, in fact, he left us much, much more.

Peter Gahan is author of Shaw Shadows: Rereading the Texts of Bernard Shaw (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004). He is on the board of SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies (Penn State University Press). His introduction to the Penguin Classics reprint of Candida was published in June