Theater: Too Bad to Be True

Too True to Be Good, by George Bernard Shaw. Gab is the gift and the curse of Irish playwrights. Greatly gifted though G.B.S. was, this play of his old age is a cursedly garrulous bore. At 74, Shaw apparently found the construction of a plot beneath him or beyond him.

The nonsensical events: a minister (Robert Preston), disguised as a jewel thief and accompanied by a hotel chambermaid (Eileen Heckart). coaxes an invalided gentlewoman (Glynis Johns) into letting him sell her pearls and kidnap her for ransom. The trio lives it up globally on the loot before coming to rest in a desert outpost of empire where a bean-brained colonel (Cyril Ritchard) and a versatile private (David Wayne) in Bedouin regalia, a la T. E. Lawrence, dizzily keep the pax Britannica.

Here, everyone runs a seminar on the contents of Shaw’s remarkably closed mind. Religion is hypocrisy. Armies are idiotic. The British upper classes are smugly ignorant of life; the lower classes are self-taught fanatics and uncouth blackguards. As destiny’s dutiful darling, G.B.S. slays these asses with his jawbone. Minus his customary wit, Shaw is a nagging scold. In a final soliloquy, delivered with fine evangelistic fervor by Robert Preston, the great iconoclast pitiably begs for an icon worthy of his worship.