Time and Tide, AUGUST 1940
The Devil’s Disciple, which is perhaps the best play Shaw ever wrote, is not acted as often as it deserves, probably because of the largeness of the cast. It was a brave gesture to put it on at this moment, but evidently it is going to be justified. On the second night, which is always a critical moment, the house was packed to the walls and wildly enthusiastic—a little too enthusiastic, in fact, for there was much clapping during the scenes, a habit that Mr Shaw himself rightly protested against in his critical days fifty years ago.
The play is essentially a melodrama, and a melodrama of the kind that depends upon somebody being ‘shown up in his true colours’. Two men, opposites in character and reputation, suddenly tear off their masks at a critical moment and reveal that each is in reality the other. Dick Dudgeon, eldest son of a New England family, has grown up in the horrible atmosphere of hypocritical puritanism and reacted against it by proclaiming himself a worshipper of the Devil. The God of the Calvinists is in fact so evil in every way that one can make a tolerable sort of God by simply reversing His attributes. Over against the sinful Dick is Mr Anderson, the local Presbyterian minister, who has every appearance of being a saint— except that he is a man of powerful physique who has married a pretty wife in middle age. The period of the play is the American War of Independence. Suddenly the English soldiers arrive at the minister’s house—they have had orders to hang one rebel, in terrorem, and a hanged clergyman is expected to have a particularly strong moral effect—and by a well-contrived mistake they arrest Dick Dudgeon instead of Mr Anderson. Just here the professional bad man finds that he is not a bad man after all, but something more like a martyr. It is psychologically impossible for him to take his neck out of the noose and put another man’s into it. So he lets the soldiers lead him away, without revealing his identity. But the clergyman, it turns out, has equally mistaken his own character. He is not a saint but a man of action. When he finds out what has happened he does not meekly give himself up to be hanged in Dick’s place. Instead he flings himself on to a horse, rides to the nearest rebel lines (the familiar melodramatic ride against time—if it were on the films we should see the same old white horse going over the same bit of ground) and procures for himself a safe-conduct which he knows is to be given to an emissary from the rebels to General Burgoyne. Then, just as Dick is mounting the gallows, he arrives, announces his identity, and presents the safe-conduct. He explains that he is leaving the Church and starting life anew as a captain in the Springfield Militia. Dick, we are left to understand, will probably become a clergyman.
Watching this witty and well-made play, one cannot help feeling how much it owes to the time in which it was written. In the late ’eighties or early ’nineties there was still an accepted code to fight against, and it was possible to make a good book or play out of mere naughtiness and debunking. Nowadays there is nothing left to debunk, except the new orthodoxies of which Mr Shaw is such a warm admirer. For by a strange irony Mr Shaw himself was to go through a psychological ‘showing up’ very similar to that of the two main characters in The Devil’s Disciple. The seeming rebel was actually an apostle of the authoritarian State. Naturally—for it would have seemed natural at that date—he is on the side of the American colonists against the British. All of Mr Shaw’s best work belongs to the period 1890–1914, when he was dealing with something he had grown up in and understood, the humbug of a puritanical monied society. It was something solid to kick against, and he kicked memorably.
Mr Robert Donat, as Dick Dudgeon, understood his part well and looked it even better, but in my opinion he acted a shade too boisterously. Mr Roger Livesey, as Anthony Anderson, was extremely good. The dramatic moment in which he drops his saintly air and shouts for his horse and pistols—a difficult thing to bring off successfully—was entirely convincing. The women were less satisfactory, but they have rather poor parts, and that of Mrs Anderson (Miss Rosamund John) is complicated by an abortive love-affair which is not really necessary to the plot. Mr Milton Rosmer was excellent as General Burgoyne. This character, an able commander who sees his battles being lost for him by wire-pullers in London, has all the best lines in the second act. His remark, ‘The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office’ was much appreciated by an audience well sprinkled with uniforms.