Professor Declan Kiberd talks about the life and work of his hero, playwright George Bernard Shaw.
In 1925, George Bernard Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the programme 'Nobel Call', Declan Kiberd discusses the life and work of the Nobel laureate.
Born in Dublin in 1856, he moved to London at the age of 20. He developed an interest in the English class system and became a socialist after reading Das Kapital by Karl Marx. One of George Bernard Shaw's great achievements was to reconcile Marxism and humour in plays such as 'Heartbreak House' (1916-17) and 'Major Barbara' (1941).
While living in England, he never forgot Ireland and referred to it as
An open air lunatic asylum to which all Englishmen should be sent for a spell in order to learn flexibility of mind.
George Bernard Shaw also spoke about his bohemian mother, Lucinda, and her complete disregard for convention. He also exposed the quaint rituals and little hypocrisies in England. In his deliberately provocative play 'Mrs Warren's Profession' (1893), he showed how any woman faced with the choice between poverty and prostitution would always choose prostitution if she were sane, describing prostitution as a less popular word for high capitalism.
While in London, he became heavily engaged in a series of public speaking programmes on the subject of socialism.
He became instead GBS, a mythical, bearded personality. A pure self invention.
From his father, George Carr Shaw, he inherited a love of humour which was rooted in a sense of anti-climax. This humour became a hallmark of his comedy writing.
The challenge for George Bernard Shaw as an artist was how to free his audiences of their own ideological ideas, to defamiliarise their routine responses and adopt a more coolly scientific attitude. He adopted a principle of substitution, which he applied in his work, allowing him to apply distance in his work. In this way, audiences were tricked into laughing at a slightly skewed version of their own society before realising that they were really laughing at themselves. Some critics believed that George Bernard Shaw's analysis was almost heartless.
Declan Kibred believes that being brought up in Ireland led George Bernard Shaw to the inclusive, visionary belief that there should be no necessary contradiction between science and religion or reason and emotion.
Shaw's plays were filled with manly women and womenly men decades before such figures became fashionable on music videos.
Declan Kiberd points to the play, 'St Joan', where the heroine is a manly woman, a child-like adult, a politician and a saint, a foundress of modern nationalism, and a global exemplar of the new woman.
She is quite simply the most challenging of all roles for actresses in the history of English drama.
It was on the back of this play that George Bernard Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize and he became the most famous author in the world. He refused to accept the money that came with the prize.
'Nobel Call: George Bernard Shaw' was broadcast on 27 December 1999. The presenter is Declan Kiberd.
Four Irish writers of the 20th century were awarded Nobel prizes for literature. These include William Butler Yeats (1923), George Bernard Shaw (1925), Samuel Beckett (1969) and Seamus Heaney (1995). In 'A Nobel Call', Radio One salutes the country's literary laureates by inviting four acclaimed contemporary writers to pay tribute to giants they admire and in whose shadow they have grown. Brendan Kennelly celebrates the diversity and self-reinvention of WB Yeats. Anthony Cronin salutes his old friend Samuel Beckett. Poet and broadcaster Theo Dorgan celebrates the contemporary work of Seamus Heaney.
