The London Stage: Metaphysical Tinker Bell

“Somebody,” George Bernard Shaw once said, “must take the Garden of Eden in hand and weed it properly.” Obviously, the man that Shaw had in mind for the job was himself. In Back to Methuselah, his five-play cycle completed in 1921, he tried to settle once and for all the meaning of creation ac cording to the Shavian doctrine of creative evolution. Written when he was 65 and for once heedless of commercial practicalities, the drama is frankly intended as his philosophical summa. Unfortunately, as a new London production by Britain’s National Theater makes clear, it is a summa that is not quite the equal of its parts.

In Shaw’s conception, Adam and Eve are unable to bear “the terrible burden of immortality.” They opt instead for a mortal span of 1,000 years, and their fallen heirs settle for progressively less. At last, in the 20th century, man realizes that his days have grown far too short. He is only a vessel of the life force that is evolving along “the path to godhead,” and if civilization is to advance or even survive, he must learn to live to a riper, wiser age. Over the next 300 centuries, he begins working his way back to Adam’s 1,000 years, or at least to Methuselah’s 969.

The full version of this “metabiological pentateuch,” as Shaw called it, had been staged only four times in five decades. Thus the National Theater production, directed by Clifford Williams with Donald MacKechnie, is by definition a major event, and may be pardoned for exuding some of the earnestness of being important.

Tuned to Pitch. Running for six hours over two evenings, Methuselah takes on life and force most often in its acting. Paul Curran and Harry Lomax gleefully caricature Lloyd George and Herbert Asquith as, respectively, fatuous and feckless. Charles Kay, made up to resemble Shaw, touchingly yet comically portrays one of the last of the 31st century’s “short-livers”; Philip Locke and Jeanne Watts lend a glint of intellectual ecstasy to the bald, sexless ancients of the future. In such performances, the strands of Shaw’s sometimes garrulous argument are tuned to a fine pitch, so that only a few maxims thump through ungraced by melody.

The sci-fi staging—revolving globes, electronic music, atoms whirling on projection screens—deftly captures the sweep and playfulness of Shaw’s vision in the early parts. As the play draws on, however, the production stretches a bit thin. By the time the curtain rises on the dancing children of the 320th century, in Part 5, it appears that evolution has led to a Swedish gym class in a grove of neon tubes.

To be fair, this is where Shaw’s inspiration thins out too. In a final peroration, Lilith—lyrically evoked by Joan Plowright—broods on the results of human history and concludes: “It is enough that there is a beyond.” It may be enough for Lilith, but it is not for the play. The ascetic longevity of the ancients is, of course, Shaw’s metaphor for a nobler human development. But for this metaphor to be effective, the audience must will it into life, like a sort of metaphysical Tinker Bell. Faced with an imagined future where imperfect infants are put to death, where sex is outgrown at the age of four and where life’s true realm is pure, icy mind, most playgoers simply will not aspire to it. Not in a thousand years.