Captain: What is God?
Lavinia: When we know that, Captain, we shall be gods ourselves.
Shaw took care that his Christians were not carbon copies of each other. As he commented, "All my articulate Christians have different enthusiasms." And in the case of Ferrovius he allowed a would-be martyr to fail at the moment of trial by committing wholesale slaughter. In a striking change from his other roles for the Festival, Charles Cioffi gives Ferrovius a low, gruff voice and makes him a quick-tempered powerhouse, an ogre. Later, when he returns from the arena brandishing a bloody sword, he makes a wonderful effect not by howling, "Cut off this right hand," but by whispering it in self-horror. The director has undercut one of Shaw's points by having Ferrovius toss a coin to the Roman Centurion rather than to the prescribed old beggar.
As the debauched Christian, Spintho, Richard Mathews does carry a wine pouch, but makes the character much too hale and hearty. He is supposed to have "gone helplessly to the bad," and complains, "I'm full of disease. I've drunk all my nerves away," but our eyes tell us that it just isn't so.
On the Roman side, the young courtiers Lentulus (Anthony Mainionis) and Metellus (Michael Parish) are insufficiently differentiated. Ken Parker is an amusingly scared Menagerie Keeper. Rex Everhart, wielding a billy-club, is the Editor in charge of all the gladiators, of whom the near-naked Retiarius (Harold Miller) and armored Secutor (DeVeren Bookwalter) go through their paces commendably, and lend color to the spectacle (an excess of color is provided by Jane Greenwood's costumes for many of the Christians, which are far too gaudy and even psychedelic).
Rex Robbins plays the Emperor to the hilarious hilt; and he comes over somewhat too ludicrous and undignified for my taste, though this is certainly one way to play him. It is undeniable that everyone will be grossly entertained by the prodigious and protracted cat-and-mouse chase with which the Emperor and the Lion climax the second act. It is inventive, fast, furious, and so athletic that, at the opening performance, the Emperor's august knee not surprisingly got skinned and began to bleed. When at last the Emperor brags, "I have subdued the beast," the supine Lion himself places the Emperor's phonily victorious foot on the vanquished leonine belly instead of letting the Emperor do it of his own accord as Shaw prescribes--a delightfully inspired touch.
Although Shaw wrote Androcles as a children's fable, he intended it to have allegorical significance. "My martyrs," he said, "are the martyrs of all time, and my persecutors the persecutors of all time." When he came to add his Postscript in 1915, he stated: "The most striking aspect of the play at this moment is the terrible topicality given it by the war.... We see that even among men who make a profession of religion the great majority are as Martian as the majority of their congregations." Comedy or no, Androcles would once again, I think, have had for Shaw a "terrible topicality" in the 1960's.
The play itself and its current production aside, there are two further matters that may be of interest. it is well known that Shaw was fond of supplying prose prefaces to his plays. Even though Androcles was a short play aimed at children, Shaw considered it important enough to merit the longest preface he ever wrote, running to a hundred pages.
In this Preface, "On the Prospects of Christianity," Shaw divides what is on his mind into some 83 short sections. He devotes a good many of these to a careful analysis and comparison of the four Gospels, showing how they give widely different pictures of Jesus' life, character, and teachings--sometimes to the point of absolute irreconcilability.
He discusses whether or not Jesus was a coward, a martyr, a proselytist, a bigot, a communist, an economist, a biologist, and other things. he argues his view of the apostle Paul as "a man of genius" but "violently anti-Christian." He presents discussions of free will, marriage, sex, celibacy, miracles, baptism, immortality, and hell. And he winds up with his reasons for believing that Jesus was "a thorough-going ant-Clerical."
As he did so often, Shaw hoped to shake his readers up, and succeeded brilliantly. The Preface is witty, and it is blunt; moreover, it is utterly serious in content. And it has lost none of its punch in a half century. Anyone interested in religion can profit from trying to match his mind against Shaw's here.
The second matter involves certain provisions of Shaw's will. Shaw left the largest fortune of any dramatist in history. Having long been vitally interested in language, pronunciation, and script, he specified that most of his estate be used to seek out and promote a more efficient British alphabet of at least 40 letters; and that, when such an alphabet was found, a parallel edition of Androcles and the Lion be published with the traditional and the new, phonetic alphabet on opposite pages.
Shaw was branded a raving lunatic, and in fact his provisions were ruled invalid in law. An appeal from the court's decision elicited a compromise agreement from the three residuary legatees, and a public competition was announced. Of the 467 entries, four were judged worthy of sharing the prize money. The design finally adopted, however--an ingeniously logical and space-saving system of 48 characters--was largely that of Kingsley Read. And the bi-alphabetic edition of Androcles was duly published in 1962. Whether the Shaw Alphabet achieves widespread use remains to be seen.
(A regular edition complete with Preface and Postscript and the Shaw Alphabet edition are both available in paperback, published by Penguin Books.)