My Astonishing Self: Gabriel Byrne on George Bernard Shaw


My Astonishing Self: Gabriel Byrne on George Bernard Shaw

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-REPORTER:

-The Hertfordshire village of Ayot St Lawrence

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mourns its friend.

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The world mourns one of the dominating figures of our time.

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Gone from its presence but not from its mind

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is the man of whom the Prime Minister has written,

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"As critic, dramatist, man of letters,

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"humourist, social revolutionary and prophet,

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"he was our greatest entertainer and teacher."

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So, in the box here is that wonderful puppet...

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..of Shaw.

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And there he is.

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-In his famous knickerbockers.

-Oh, my God, that's brilliant.

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Wow!

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If you have a little look at the head a bit, straight on,

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-that's a bit better.

-Oh, yeah.

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There.

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This probably puts how he thought about himself in some context.

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He said, "The Greeks have Aristotle...

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"..the Italians had Leonardo da Vinci,

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"the English had Shakespeare

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"and Ireland has my astonishing self."

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THEY GIGGLE

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Oh, ladies.

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Well, this is a surprise.

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Have you all come to see me, ladies and gentlemen?

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Well...

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I should never have expected this.

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A few words from Mr Bernard Shaw.

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I have always been intrigued by the work of George Bernard Shaw

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but who was he,

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this shy Irish playwright who conquered Britain

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and the English-speaking world?

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Oh, you're real good.

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Thank you, captain.

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A celebrity and a serious thinker who insisted we question everything.

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-I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe.

-Oh!

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The winner of an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for Literature.

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I suppose that I am here

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as the next best thing to Shakespeare.

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LAUGHTER

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Shaw wrote about the big issues of his time and of our time -

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poverty, war, feminism, race, fanaticism -

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but always using charm and humour to get people's attention.

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When I talk, at least I talk politics.

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And he sold these big ideas by being larger than life.

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This, ladies and gentlemen, is an exhibition of my profile.

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How was that?

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Shaw invented the idea of the artist as a brand.

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This shy boy from Dublin

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became one of the world's most famous and recognisable men.

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Shall I now become the partly visible man?

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Do you recognise the beard...

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..or must I become a little more visible?

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Even this exaggerated depiction here,

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it's slightly abstract but you can see from it...

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..that it's George Bernard Shaw.

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But I think he would have been very happy to know

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that at the end of the road there was,

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as some people in Dublin call it, a Muriel, in honour of his...

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in honour of his life.

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Sadly, I think Shaw is underappreciated.

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He's the forgotten man of Irish literature.

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His birthplace in Dublin is closed to the public,

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yet people around the city know his name but perhaps not much else.

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So if you want to learn more about him or his big ideas,

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you actually have to start in England.

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He arrived aged 20 and spent three-quarters of his life there,

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yet always felt like a foreigner.

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When I came to London in the 1980s,

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I understood that sense of exile myself.

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Shaw had the outsider's ability to observe,

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to question the way things are.

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And long before he became famous,

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he used to keep warm in the British Library, reading Karl Marx.

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I think it was that time that inspired the great beliefs

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and themes of his life and work.

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"How shall we house our poor?"

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The Practical Politics of Socialism by George Bernard Shaw.

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This is a record of Shaw's speaking engagements.

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"Labour is the source of all wealth...

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"..therefore to the labourers all wealth is due."

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"October the 11th, 1891,

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"Mr G. Bernard Shaw, Fabian, lecture followed by discussion."

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"Practical communism."

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Wow.

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It's interesting that he, kind of, taught himself to become an orator

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because in the early part of his lifetime

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he was a very shy and insecure, young man

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and he became this, kind of, spellbinding orator.

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What a great thing it would have been to go along

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to one of these things and to hear him...to hear him speak.

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Foolish people in easy circumstances flatter themselves

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that there is no such thing as the class war in the British Empire,

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where we are all far too respectable

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to have any vulgar unpleasantness of that sort.

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They deceive themselves.

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We are up to the neck in the class war.

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"The Women's Progressive Society."

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"The London Vegetarian Society."

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He was a vegetarian from the age of 24 and he said that at his funeral

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instead of people coming behind his coffin, there'd be all the animals

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that he hadn't eaten to pay tribute to him.

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He must have been out every single night.

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You get the idea that he never went to sleep.

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To begin with, he was very anxious about could he stand up,

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could he speak,

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but very quickly he found that he was, well, like a good actor.

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He could speak extremely well.

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It's interesting you should say that

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because some people have defined acting as the shy man's revenge.

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Shaw's real need to spread new ideas overcame his natural shyness.

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He understood the power of the spoken word,

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first on a soap box, later on a stage.

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No more so than in Man And Superman,

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a razor-sharp exploration of nature, sex and evolution

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dressed up as a verbose comedy of manners.

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When I read Michael Holroyd's biography,

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he talked about how Shaw himself honed his own speaking

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-on street corners, pamphleteering.

-Yes.

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There's something Michael Holroyd writes about Shaw's consonants

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could cut so strongly in a space

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because he knew he had to communicate.

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So I always thought, he's writing for people who really can speak

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and really know how to phrase and lead an idea and land it.

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We don't have that sort of writing. Ba-ba-ba-ba ba-bam-ba-bam.

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It's exciting.

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With a wonderful, instinctive cunning,

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she kept silent and allowed me to glorify her.

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To mistake my own visions, thoughts and feelings for hers.

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I found that when I had touched a woman's imagination...

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LAUGHTER

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..she would allow me to persuade myself that she loved me

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but when my suit was granted,

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she never said, "I'm happy, my love is satisfied",

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she always said first, "At last the barriers are down",

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and second, "When will you come again?"

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-As Jack, you get to say mischievous, provocative things as a man.

-Yeah.

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Which is great to say in front of an audience.

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You get to tease and provoke with wit.

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You don't have to insult the audience

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but it's so witty but the ideas are still provocative.

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It's wonderfully human.

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We live in an atmosphere of shame.

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We're ashamed of everything that's real about us.

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Ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives,

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of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions,

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of our experience, just as we're ashamed of our naked skins.

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The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

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Jack Tanner is a sort of self portrait of Shaw,

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so he's possibly one of the most verbose...

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In fact, that's one of the jokes of the play, that he does...

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He comments on his own verbosity, doesn't he?

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The last word of the play is "talking".

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And it's about talking but it's about ideas.

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Shaw's lifelong big idea was that inequality of any kind -

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economic, gender or race - was neither inevitable nor acceptable.

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He wrote that poverty was the greatest of our evils

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and the worst of our crimes.

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And he hated poverty because, like a lot of Dubliners,

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he was born into it.

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So, this was his bedroom.

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Tiny little room.

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It's not hard to imagine him sitting here as a little boy.

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Born into what he called "shabby, genteel poverty."

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His mother was a singer

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and so he would have heard operas and all kinds of musicians play.

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MUSIC: Home Sweet Home by Nellie Melba

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So, this was his parents' room.

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Shaw realised at the age of three

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that his father was an alcoholic

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and his mother, who was a woman who didn't bestow

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any great deal of affection or love on him,

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was involved with a music teacher called George Lee.

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It wasn't just that the mother had supposedly taken this lover

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but she lived with the lover and the husband in this house

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and what a strange thing that must have been for the young boy,

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to watch his father be isolated and diminished in that way.

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Certainly an unorthodox household arrangement.

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You think about the early life of Shaw in Synge Street.

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What must that have been like for him to grow up in a place like this?

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Shaw invented the word "downstart" and I think that's one of the things

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that gave him his human sympathy, you know.

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He was trying to shake people to say, "Look, it is not inevitable

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"that vast numbers of people have to lead lives

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"that are constrained by poverty,

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"by ignorance, by filth, by inequality.

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"We can change it."

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When he was a kid, his nanny would take him out walking

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and they would walk

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and she was probably paid buttons by his mother and father, you know,

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and it seems clear that she used to do some prostitution on the side,

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so he'd be taken into the horror of the Dublin slums.

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He saw this kind of poverty and he was horrified by it.

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That's what haunted him.

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There's a kind of smell of the slums in his nostrils

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and it's what drives him.

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He wants the world to get away from that kind of indignity.

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"I now confess to an episode in my boyhood

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"formerly so repugnant to me that for 80 years

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"I never mentioned it to any mortal creature - not even my wife."

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We're in the centre of Model School in Dublin.

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This is the second school that Shaw attended.

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"I was sent to Marlborough Street

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"and at once became a boy with whom no Protestant young gentleman

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"would speak or play."

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A sole Protestant child in a school of poor Catholic pupils.

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He was unhappy here.

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Very unhappy

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I suppose he felt the shame of being an outsider

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but he also I'm sure felt the shame of being poor.

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And he was ashamed that he was ashamed.

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It further reinforced in him, I think,

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the notion that poverty was a horrible thing

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and later on he came to question, of course,

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why some people were poor and other people were rich,

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which was what led him to his philosophical examination

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of how society is put together.

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His whole idea about education was that it's not the teacher

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who should be doing the questioning,

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it's the child who should be questioning the teacher.

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It should implant in the child a love of learning,

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to develop the ability to think for one's self,

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to think critically, to question everything.

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Authority, religion, precepts, tenets, propaganda.

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Even 100 years ago, Shaw understood that you had to look for the truth,

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not simply accept it.

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Many people today still don't trust the so-called voices of authority

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or the media.

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Shaw was adamant that we had to wake up.

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To be active.

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To question, to be aware of the world around us.

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And awareness is the beginning of action.

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He wasn't just telling you, this is what you must think,

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he was telling you, this is how you must think.

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You have a right but also a duty to think for yourself

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and not to take the orthodoxies, you know,

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but to actually feel that you are free as a human being

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to engage with ideas

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and to be sceptical about things that people are telling you.

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By the age of 20, the one truth Bernard Shaw couldn't escape

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was that Dublin was becoming too small for him.

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Ireland is an island.

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It's an island off the coast of an island.

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There's something about living on an island that gives you a particular

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desire to leave it, to get away from it, because it can be suffocating.

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When I grew up in Ireland in the '50s and early '60s,

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deep inside me there were some instinct try to prove myself

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against something else rather than that staid, predictable, familiar,

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grey society that I felt I was trapped in.

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When Shaw left, he didn't come back 29 years.

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His true ambition was to become a universal artist.

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If your spirit is adventurous, you need something more than that.

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You need to move beyond the comforts of a small town.

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London wasn't much better.

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He left his feckless father behind in Dublin

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and lived with his mother in rented rooms,

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earning a few shillings ghost-writing music reviews

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and failing spectacularly as a novelist.

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In his first decade in London,

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he reckoned he'd earned the sum total of £6.

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But on his 29th birthday,

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wearing a brand-new suit paid for with the insurance money

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from his father's death, George Bernard Shaw lost his virginity

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to his mother's best friend.

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It might sound like a Freudian nightmare

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but it was the making of him.

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The shy boy was replaced by a new, confident persona.

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G.B.S.

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He called it "the most fictitious character I have ever created".

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Don't be deceived, ladies and gentlemen.

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When a man is playing the simple, unaffected human being...

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..in public he's always acting as hard as he possibly can.

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And small blame to him, I do that sort of thing myself.

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He realised that to get his work around, you know,

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he had to create a persona, didn't he?

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He had to invent G.B.S,

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so he became this sort of conscious entertainer

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always with an opinion on every subject

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and I think that was a conscious effort on Shaw's part

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to market his plays.

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By the 1890s, this new, confident G.B.S stopped writing bad novels

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and started to write what he called sermons -

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plays about real social issues learned from his years

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speaking, protesting and pamphleteering on the streets.

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It was radical, but he really believed that serious business

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could be conducted from the stage.

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His first unpleasant plays dealt with the horrors

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of slum landlordism, the social shame of divorce

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and the grim economic realities of prostitution.

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Victorian London was scandalised but he had their attention.

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He was an overtly political writer.

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He knew enough about the London audience

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to know you always had to sugar the pill with jokes

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but it is always an appeal to our intelligence

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and to our emotional maturity

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to see that the world is worth arguing over.

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He is absolutely insistent

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that his audiences share the lives of others and ideas of others.

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What do you want to take down what I said for?

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You'll just show me what you wrote.

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How do I know if you took me down right?

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That ain't proper writing.

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I can't read that.

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He's reacting against a form of theatre which he despised.

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He despised those kind of heart on sleeve Victorian melodramas

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that were the West End staple that he was trying to sweep away.

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He was restoring seriousness to the London theatre.

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But that's the key thing. I think Shaw was a great demolition expert.

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He inherits a medium that when he comes into it into the 1890s

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is ossified, really, and is dealing in certain stock forms.

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Stock melodramas, stock romance, stock love stories,

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bad Shakespeare productions, obviously,

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actor managers dominating the whole theatre.

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Shaw comes along and puts a bomb under it all, really,

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and explodes it and says, no, theatre can actually be serious,

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it can address big issues, it can be topical

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and it can make you think.

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Shaw is always challenging you

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and people don't always like that.

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I think it is good to challenge people.

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Like a Trojan horse, Shaw was prepared not just to challenge

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but to undermine the society he lived in.

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To show his contempt for the British class system.

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Pygmalion, I suppose, is the perfect example,

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where he turns a flower girl into a lady

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just by changing the way she speaks.

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You see this creature with her kerbstone English?

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The English that will keep her in the gutter for the rest her days.

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Well, sir, in three months I could pass her off as a duchess

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-at an ambassador's reception.

-No, no, no.

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Yes. I could even get her a job as a lady's maid or a shop assistant,

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-which requires better English.

-You mean you could make me...

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Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf,

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you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns,

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you incarnate insult to the English language...

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I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba.

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Here's simultaneously entertaining,

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theatrically appealing and...

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complex, unresolvable, unpindownable.

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I mean, obviously Shaw relishes ideas and a lot of his plays are

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discussion plays, but at the same time, if you look at the plays,

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there's an extraordinary, sort of, emotional undertone

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and the very end of Pygmalion, what happens, Professor Higgins,

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having sort of modelled and created this woman Eliza,

0:20:580:21:01

sees her become independent

0:21:010:21:03

and there's a wonderful, sort of, heartbreak at the end

0:21:030:21:06

when he's both rejoicing in Eliza's independence

0:21:060:21:09

and at the same time realising he's now left alone.

0:21:090:21:13

You know, he's the master who's been overtaken by his pupil.

0:21:130:21:17

You can't take away the knowledge you gave me.

0:21:170:21:21

You said I had a finer ear than you

0:21:220:21:24

and I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can.

0:21:240:21:27

Ah-ha, that's done you, Henry Higgins, that 'as.

0:21:270:21:30

Now, I don't give that for your bullying and your big talk.

0:21:300:21:33

I shall advertise in the papers that your duchess is a flower girl

0:21:330:21:37

that you taught, and that she'll teach anyone to be a duchess

0:21:370:21:40

just the same in six months for a thousand guineas.

0:21:400:21:43

Victorian London took to Shaw in a big way.

0:21:450:21:48

Like Oscar Wilde, they enjoyed this Irishman's charming way

0:21:480:21:52

of tearing their world apart.

0:21:520:21:54

So after 40 years, the shy boy from Dublin found notoriety and success.

0:21:540:22:00

And with success came money

0:22:000:22:02

and with money came the financial independence to leave

0:22:020:22:04

his mother's home and to find a wife.

0:22:040:22:07

At the tender age of 42, Shaw married an Irish woman,

0:22:070:22:11

Charlotte Payne-Townshend.

0:22:110:22:13

He once wrote that marriage is popular

0:22:130:22:16

because it combines the maximum of temptation

0:22:160:22:19

with the maximum of opportunity.

0:22:190:22:21

But Charlotte could never tolerate the matter of fact side of marriage

0:22:210:22:25

and it was probably never consummated.

0:22:250:22:28

But they lived contentedly for half a century in Ayot St Lawrence,

0:22:300:22:33

an hour north of London,

0:22:330:22:35

and of course it became known as Shaw's Corner.

0:22:350:22:39

And of course it was Shaw himself who left it to the National Trust.

0:22:390:22:43

This is exactly as Shaw left it.

0:22:440:22:48

It feels like he's just...

0:22:500:22:53

that he's just stepped out.

0:22:530:22:55

Ah!

0:23:060:23:08

The Oscar is a doorstop.

0:23:100:23:12

Academy Award for writing the screenplay of Pygmalion.

0:23:130:23:18

He was asked how he felt about winning the Oscar and he said...

0:23:190:23:24

"Considering the source, it's an insult."

0:23:250:23:28

Of course, he also won the Nobel Prize.

0:23:300:23:33

One of only two people to do that, the other one being Bob Dylan.

0:23:330:23:37

I had always read about Shaw's Corner and I had imagined it...

0:23:420:23:46

..but when you're here, you realise there's a stillness about this place

0:23:470:23:52

that is, erm... really powerful.

0:23:520:23:55

It feels like it's a cocoon...

0:23:560:23:59

..away from the world, though of course the world came to him here.

0:24:000:24:03

I've always found it kind of interesting

0:24:120:24:15

to know where writers write, the rooms that they write it -

0:24:150:24:19

It's, erm...

0:24:210:24:22

It's a wonderful feeling to be in the same...

0:24:240:24:29

in the space as where he wrote some of his greatest work.

0:24:290:24:34

It's not too difficult to imagine him sitting here typing away.

0:24:360:24:40

He didn't like to be disturbed.

0:24:400:24:42

People were always calling to the house to meet him,

0:24:420:24:45

to ask his opinion about everything

0:24:450:24:48

and sometimes they'd ask for money, sometimes he actually had stalkers.

0:24:480:24:54

And this was a place where he couldn't be found

0:24:550:24:58

and he could be distracted.

0:24:580:25:00

There's a unique feature about this little... little hut.

0:25:010:25:05

So it revolved with the sun.

0:25:130:25:15

He moved with the times and moved always towards the light, I think,

0:25:160:25:22

not to make too heavy a metaphor of it.

0:25:220:25:24

Shaw was always a forward-thinking man.

0:25:270:25:30

He said himself that he'd been born 50 years too early,

0:25:300:25:33

as if he were waiting for the 20th century to arrive.

0:25:330:25:37

He called himself the messenger boy for the new age.

0:25:380:25:41

I stand for the future and past,

0:25:430:25:46

for the posterity that has no vote

0:25:460:25:48

and for the tradition that never had any.

0:25:480:25:51

For intellectual integrity,

0:25:510:25:53

for humanity,

0:25:530:25:55

for the rescue of industry from commercialism

0:25:550:25:59

and of science from professionalism,

0:25:590:26:01

for all the things that you desire as sincerely as I...

0:26:010:26:06

..but which in you is held in leash by the power of the press.

0:26:070:26:13

By 1904, Shaw's plays and ideas were making an impact

0:26:150:26:19

on British social and political life.

0:26:190:26:22

He helped found the Labour Party,

0:26:220:26:24

the London School of Economics and the New Statesman magazine.

0:26:240:26:28

He was a socialist and a social media sensation.

0:26:280:26:32

He began a successful residency at the Royal Court Theatre

0:26:320:26:35

on Sloane Square, where he was called the Chelsea Shakespeare.

0:26:350:26:40

Coincidentally, it's where I made my own London acting debut.

0:26:400:26:44

He began his run here by taking the piss out of the English and Irish.

0:26:460:26:51

John Bull's Other Island made Edward VII break his chair with laughter.

0:26:510:26:56

Lloyd George saw it five times and declared

0:26:560:26:59

"the cleverest man in England is an Irish man".

0:26:590:27:02

"Man alive, don't you know that all this 'top of the morning'

0:27:030:27:06

"and 'broth of a boy' and 'more power to your elbow' business

0:27:060:27:09

"is got up in England to fool you?

0:27:090:27:11

"Like the Albert Hall concerts of Irish music,

0:27:110:27:14

"no Irishman ever talks like that in Ireland or ever will."

0:27:140:27:19

Shaw was an interesting case, wasn't he,

0:27:190:27:21

because he lived in England much longer than he lived in Ireland

0:27:210:27:24

without ever relinquishing his sense of Irishness.

0:27:240:27:27

The thing about Shaw, wherever he was, he was an outsider.

0:27:270:27:30

Someone said he had the homelessness of genius

0:27:300:27:32

and I think there's some truth in that, actually.

0:27:320:27:35

The English enjoy an outsider commenting on them.

0:27:370:27:40

The English are more receptive to that, I think, than the Irish are.

0:27:400:27:44

The Irish don't like outsiders commenting on them.

0:27:440:27:48

No, I don't, and certainly we get very...

0:27:480:27:50

-We're a little raw in that department.

-Yes.

0:27:500:27:52

Whereas the English have a greater tradition of it.

0:27:520:27:55

Shaw made people laugh and Wilde made people laugh,

0:27:550:27:58

Wogan made people laugh, Dave Allen made people...

0:27:580:28:00

and you make people laugh.

0:28:000:28:02

Is it a thing that you can make a more powerful inroad

0:28:020:28:06

if you do it through humour, or...?

0:28:060:28:08

Well, that was Shaw's take on it always.

0:28:080:28:10

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh,

0:28:100:28:13

otherwise they'll kill you.

0:28:130:28:14

They want us to take a wry look and look askance

0:28:140:28:17

because it is a comedy stance to be the intelligent alien,

0:28:170:28:20

to be slightly outside of somewhere and holding it up for examination

0:28:200:28:25

but with one eyebrow raised in a, "What I'm saying here

0:28:250:28:28

"isn't too damning, I'm just saying this is unusual."

0:28:280:28:31

Shakespeare had a mulberry tree

0:28:320:28:34

and I'm not going to be outdone by Shakespeare.

0:28:340:28:37

LAUGHTER

0:28:370:28:39

He was, as you can see there,

0:28:390:28:41

he was bearded and suited but in the machinery of the modern world,

0:28:410:28:46

I mean, that is somebody being a celebrity.

0:28:460:28:49

I am in a certain difficulty about it because it's perfectly obvious

0:28:490:28:52

to all of you that it's already planted.

0:28:520:28:55

LAUGHTER

0:28:550:28:56

He's a complete ham, isn't he?

0:28:580:29:01

I mean, he's acting up for the crowd and the cameras

0:29:010:29:03

and he has them in the palm of his hand.

0:29:030:29:06

The comparison I draw there is to Einstein,

0:29:060:29:08

as somebody who became iconic in their field.

0:29:080:29:11

You paid for the Shakespearean forehead, so here it is again.

0:29:110:29:15

You'll notice the arrangement of my hair,

0:29:150:29:19

it takes me 20 minutes every morning to get that up, you know,

0:29:190:29:23

to get it properly arranged for you to admire.

0:29:230:29:26

Another thing that strikes me, his accent.

0:29:260:29:29

Yes, he's still got an Irish accent even though he left the country

0:29:290:29:32

presumably 40, 50 years before then.

0:29:320:29:34

It's Irish but there's an inflection, a slight inflection.

0:29:340:29:38

Now, are we saying that he may have cultivated that accent slightly

0:29:380:29:42

-to distinguish himself in the world he was working in?

-I don't know.

0:29:420:29:47

Now, whether you are a foreigner or a native,

0:29:500:29:53

the first thing I must impress on you

0:29:530:29:56

is that there is no such thing as ideally correct English.

0:29:560:30:01

I wish I could offer you your choice among them all as a model

0:30:020:30:06

but for the moment, I am afraid you must put up with me, an Irish man.

0:30:060:30:12

Shaw said, "In Britain, I am still a foreigner and I shall die one."

0:30:130:30:18

But his wife Charlotte had family in Cork and Kerry

0:30:180:30:21

and so, as a 50-year-old man, he was going to have to face

0:30:210:30:24

the inevitable at some point and go home.

0:30:240:30:28

The dilemma that every exile faces is that...

0:30:280:30:31

once you leave the place that you're from,

0:30:310:30:35

you never belong there in quite the same way again

0:30:350:30:38

and the place that you go to, you never truly belong either.

0:30:380:30:44

And that can produce a restlessness.

0:30:440:30:46

Sometimes, what we're imagining is something that's no longer...

0:30:460:30:51

it's no longer the same.

0:30:510:30:53

I think Shaw understood that and it was 30 years before he came back.

0:30:540:30:57

When he did come back, he didn't come back to Dublin

0:30:570:31:00

where he'd been born and brought up, he came back to a place like this,

0:31:000:31:04

which has a kind of a timelessness about it.

0:31:040:31:08

He was a notoriously bad driver...

0:31:130:31:16

..and Mrs Shaw insisted that when they came to Ireland

0:31:170:31:20

they would be driven.

0:31:200:31:22

What a figure he must have presented sitting in the back of...

0:31:240:31:29

this beautiful, modern machine

0:31:290:31:34

coming through the countryside at a time when there were

0:31:340:31:38

almost no cars on the road, with his white beard and his camera.

0:31:380:31:42

It must have been an amazing, amazing sight as it passed,

0:31:420:31:46

and the drama of it coming from a distance

0:31:460:31:50

and then materialising and then disappearing.

0:31:500:31:53

The idea that he was driving around in Ireland in a Rolls-Royce...

0:31:580:32:02

I heard somebody say once that it shows you what a hypocrite he was.

0:32:020:32:06

There he was, spouting about how everybody was equal.

0:32:060:32:09

But it reminds me of a story, apocryphal or not,

0:32:090:32:12

of Lenin coming back from Finland to lead the Russian Revolution

0:32:120:32:16

where somebody says, you're in a first-class carriage

0:32:160:32:19

and you're coming back to lead the Revolution,

0:32:190:32:22

what's up with that?

0:32:220:32:23

And he said, there should only be first-class carriages,

0:32:230:32:27

and I think Shaw would have agreed with him.

0:32:270:32:30

Probably that everybody should have their own Rolls-Royce.

0:32:300:32:33

Like his writing shed, Shaw loved the isolation of County Kerry.

0:32:350:32:40

He finished his plays Major Barbara and Saint Joan

0:32:400:32:43

on various visits here.

0:32:430:32:45

I think he found energy and inspiration from the landscape.

0:32:450:32:48

It stimulated him.

0:32:480:32:50

And when you look at his letters and photos from here,

0:32:500:32:53

you get the feeling that even though this was his native land,

0:32:530:32:56

he was still eager to explore.

0:32:560:32:59

He spent two hours rowing out to the Skellig Islands

0:32:590:33:01

off the Kerry coasts.

0:33:010:33:03

He called it "the most impossible rock in the world".

0:33:030:33:06

"Part of our dream world".

0:33:060:33:08

He had a childlike sense of curiosity and adventure.

0:33:080:33:11

He went up in hot air balloons,

0:33:110:33:13

he flew over the Cape and the Great Wall of China.

0:33:130:33:17

He experimented with cameras, mechanics and naturism.

0:33:170:33:20

He didn't navel gaze, he looked outwards,

0:33:200:33:23

fascinated by everything he saw

0:33:230:33:25

and questioning everything he saw as wrong.

0:33:250:33:28

Shaw wasn't afraid to bring his lifelong crusade against inequality

0:33:280:33:33

back to the city of his birth.

0:33:330:33:35

"Poverty is a crime.

0:33:400:33:42

"A crime not of the poor but of the people who allowed them to be poor.

0:33:420:33:46

"Poverty is a crime of society.

0:33:460:33:49

"A preventable crime."

0:33:490:33:51

There is an extraordinary meeting when he gives a lecture in 1910

0:33:540:33:59

in Dublin on The Poor Law and Destitution in Ireland.

0:33:590:34:04

They give him a round of applause when he arrives

0:34:050:34:09

and he said to them straightaway,

0:34:090:34:12

"I might not be able to reciprocate with some applause for yourselves",

0:34:120:34:19

as he's telling them what they might not want to hear.

0:34:190:34:23

And what's he saying,

0:34:230:34:24

"I went to the workhouse today and I saw how you're treating children

0:34:240:34:29

"in the workhouses and I'm telling you now,

0:34:290:34:32

"you're going to burn in hell

0:34:320:34:33

"for the way you're treating these children.

0:34:330:34:35

"And this is not about the Brits.

0:34:350:34:37

"This is in your control. This is your local government.

0:34:370:34:40

"This is what you're doing to Irish children right now."

0:34:400:34:43

When he was a very famous man and everybody wanted to have

0:34:430:34:46

a look at him and claim him a little bit as a Dubliner

0:34:460:34:48

and all the great and the good of Dublin society come to hear him.

0:34:480:34:51

I mean, to stand up in front of an audience

0:34:510:34:54

and to make them afraid of their souls...

0:34:540:34:57

And of course so prescient, it was so prescient.

0:34:570:35:00

He was the person who identified, before we set up the state,

0:35:000:35:04

the way we were treating children

0:35:040:35:06

was going to be the dark undercurrent of our society.

0:35:060:35:10

You know in Pygmalion where he gives Eliza, who's this kind of poor,

0:35:100:35:15

illiterate young woman off the streets, literally,

0:35:150:35:19

and he gives her that great line at end,

0:35:190:35:22

when she's become the sort of mock duchess

0:35:220:35:24

and she says, you know, "We become of the way we're treated."

0:35:240:35:27

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves,

0:35:280:35:33

but how she's treated.

0:35:330:35:34

I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins

0:35:350:35:38

because he always treats me as a flower girl and always will.

0:35:380:35:41

But I know I can be a lady to you

0:35:410:35:42

because you always treat me as a lady and always will.

0:35:420:35:46

If you treat somebody like dirt, they'll become dirt.

0:35:460:35:49

If you treat them with decency and dignity,

0:35:490:35:52

they will be decent and dignified.

0:35:520:35:54

And I think that's the belief that runs through his politics, you know?

0:35:540:35:57

His politics, in a way, are very, very simple,

0:35:570:35:59

which is just that nobody should be treated like dirt.

0:35:590:36:01

I dare say my mother could find some chap or other who'd do very well.

0:36:010:36:05

We were above that in Covent Garden.

0:36:060:36:08

-What do you mean?

-I sold flowers.

0:36:080:36:11

I didn't sell myself.

0:36:110:36:12

Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else.

0:36:130:36:16

Mrs Warren's Profession.

0:36:180:36:20

This amazing play, which was revolutionary for its time,

0:36:210:36:25

which is about the notion of prostitution.

0:36:250:36:29

More importantly about the economic demands that make a woman

0:36:290:36:33

turn to prostitution just to educate her daughter.

0:36:330:36:36

Shaw made no moral judgments

0:36:360:36:38

but he was scathing about the harsh realities

0:36:380:36:41

of life for women in Victorian England.

0:36:410:36:44

The play was banned in London

0:36:440:36:46

and in New York the cast were arrested on stage, mid-performance.

0:36:460:36:50

He was a true champion of women

0:36:540:36:56

and believed that women were in every way

0:36:560:37:00

the equal of men and that's something that we may say,

0:37:000:37:03

"Oh, yes, well, that's obvious," but at that time when he was writing,

0:37:030:37:06

it wasn't obvious.

0:37:060:37:08

His play Saint Joan, for example,

0:37:080:37:11

is about a woman who takes on the male establishment,

0:37:110:37:14

questions it and is willing to sacrifice her life

0:37:140:37:18

for her principles and for the truth.

0:37:180:37:20

I think I'm very drawn to Shaw because I think I am, as a director,

0:37:200:37:24

drawn to plays that are full of debate and full of ideas.

0:37:240:37:29

It feels at the moment like we are so polarised in politics

0:37:290:37:32

that we can't understand the other's view.

0:37:320:37:35

Now, that's incredibly painful at a point where you've got Trump

0:37:350:37:38

in America and you've got Brexit here, you know,

0:37:380:37:40

one's natural instinct is not to look at the other perspective.

0:37:400:37:42

You've not many friends at court.

0:37:420:37:45

Why do all these nights and courtiers and churchmen hate me?

0:37:450:37:48

Simpleton.

0:37:490:37:51

Do you expect stupid people to love you for showing them up?

0:37:510:37:54

In terms of the depictions of women in theatre,

0:37:560:38:01

-she's a very strong and powerful character.

-Yes.

0:38:010:38:04

It's one of the great roles for women

0:38:040:38:07

because it's so difficult to play and epic and complex.

0:38:070:38:11

What I love about Joan is that she sees herself

0:38:110:38:14

as a soldier and so she's not a woman or a man.

0:38:140:38:18

I really believe that she sees herself in that way

0:38:180:38:21

and that's sort of a post-feminist thing,

0:38:210:38:25

that I hope one day we manage to achieve, where it doesn't

0:38:250:38:28

really matter what sex you are, you can just do something.

0:38:280:38:31

I think he is fascinated by women as the outrageous voice

0:38:310:38:36

and the challenging voice.

0:38:360:38:39

It feels like it's written by a woman for a woman as opposed to

0:38:390:38:42

-a man for a woman.

-Yeah, and even I feel it from the audience,

0:38:420:38:46

sometimes they don't like Joan because she's so full of pride

0:38:460:38:51

and conviction and that's not very feminine, is it?

0:38:510:38:54

Light your fires!

0:38:560:38:57

Do you think I dread it as much as the life of a rat in a hole?

0:38:580:39:02

My voices were right.

0:39:040:39:06

-Joan, Joan!

-Yes!

0:39:060:39:08

He didn't just put women on the stage in great roles.

0:39:080:39:10

Many of those great roles were supported

0:39:100:39:12

and inspired by women that he knew.

0:39:120:39:14

He was really supportive of women and he supported women

0:39:140:39:18

who otherwise people would see as troublemakers.

0:39:180:39:21

That was what really impressed him about the suffragettes.

0:39:210:39:24

You know, people saying you're completely crazy and he's like,

0:39:240:39:27

"Well, no, they're not crazy. They are actually going to do this

0:39:270:39:30

"and they sound like hooligans."

0:39:300:39:32

What was it Emmeline Pankhurst said?

0:39:320:39:34

"I am what you would call a hooligan."

0:39:340:39:36

But hey, you know, I sit here talking to you

0:39:360:39:40

and I do have the vote and the right to education

0:39:400:39:43

and many of the things that were imagined to the impossible.

0:39:430:39:48

How about you listed Shaw

0:39:480:39:50

as one of the "top ten" feminists of the century?

0:39:500:39:55

Why do you say that?

0:39:550:39:57

Because...

0:39:570:39:58

Because he had enormous influence and he didn't just write journalism,

0:39:580:40:03

he turned up at meetings, he promoted people,

0:40:030:40:06

he went to rallies, he shouted.

0:40:060:40:08

But not only that, but he actually was doing that decades before

0:40:080:40:12

with his friends in the socialist movement, like Eleanor Marx.

0:40:120:40:16

Saying, "If we have socialism on the agenda,

0:40:160:40:19

"if we're looking at equality, then this journey, part of this journey,

0:40:190:40:22

"is also the inequality between people,

0:40:220:40:24

"between humans and between men and women as well."

0:40:240:40:29

-He would have said that women's rights were human rights.

-Yeah.

0:40:290:40:32

I think Shaw was a truly brave man,

0:40:340:40:36

always prepared to risk unpopularity or outrage.

0:40:360:40:40

At the beginning of World War I, his closest friends ostracised him.

0:40:400:40:44

One called him "a complete bastard"

0:40:440:40:47

and there were calls for him to be shot as a traitor.

0:40:470:40:50

But Shaw couldn't stay quiet about the propaganda,

0:40:500:40:54

the jingoism, about the greed of the arms trade or the sheer futility of

0:40:540:40:59

war, where the only winner was war itself.

0:40:590:41:02

In 1914,

0:41:030:41:06

I was as sorry for the young Germans who lay slain or mutilated

0:41:060:41:11

in no man's land as for the British lads who lay beside them.

0:41:110:41:16

War is to me a sheer waste of life.

0:41:160:41:21

Sadly, I think Shaw could have written these words yesterday.

0:41:220:41:26

I have visions of streets heaped with mangled corpses

0:41:280:41:32

in which children wander, crying for their parents,

0:41:320:41:37

and babies grasp and strangle in the clutches of dead mothers.

0:41:370:41:42

I dislike war,

0:41:440:41:46

not only for its dangers and inconveniences,

0:41:460:41:50

but because of the loss of so many young men,

0:41:500:41:54

any of whom may be a Newton or an Einstein, a Beethoven,

0:41:540:41:59

a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare or even a Shaw.

0:41:590:42:03

It wasn't easy to be that kind of commentator.

0:42:070:42:10

It required real bravery and courage, don't you think?

0:42:100:42:15

I've no doubt that Shaw

0:42:150:42:16

was exceptionally brave and courageous.

0:42:160:42:21

It would have been easier for him to stay silent

0:42:210:42:24

about a lot of burning issues

0:42:240:42:26

in domestic and international politics

0:42:260:42:29

and controversies at that time.

0:42:290:42:31

Take the First World War - he could have decided that he was going

0:42:310:42:36

to be relatively quiet about that but he explodes about it.

0:42:360:42:40

There are various issues in relation to what's going on in Ireland

0:42:400:42:44

that he could have been relatively quiet about

0:42:440:42:46

but he's not going to stay silent about what he sees as the excesses,

0:42:460:42:51

the mistakes of British rule in Ireland.

0:42:510:42:53

You've got to remember that in the middle of Ireland's struggle

0:42:550:42:59

for independence, which came to a head in the 1916 rising,

0:42:590:43:02

Shaw was one of the few Irish voices that Britain might listen to.

0:43:020:43:07

And so he offered his support to a man on trial in London for his life.

0:43:070:43:12

Sir Roger Casement was a highly respected diplomat

0:43:120:43:15

and knight of the realm

0:43:150:43:16

but also an Irish Republican and a gun-runner.

0:43:160:43:20

Roger Casement was a really interesting character.

0:43:200:43:23

Protestant from the North of Ireland

0:43:230:43:25

who was knighted by the British establishment

0:43:250:43:28

for his work in the Congo.

0:43:280:43:31

Somewhat later, then,

0:43:310:43:33

he was caught importing arms into Ireland

0:43:330:43:36

for the Irish revolution and he went from being an establishment hero

0:43:360:43:42

to being a villain.

0:43:420:43:43

And Shaw came to his defence and for Shaw

0:43:430:43:47

the courtroom was a theatre

0:43:470:43:51

and he wanted Casement to defend himself

0:43:510:43:56

by reciting a defence that

0:43:560:43:59

would be written specifically by Shaw

0:43:590:44:04

as a piece of theatre

0:44:040:44:07

in which he would get the jury to think about why they were trying him

0:44:070:44:13

and to appeal to their sense -

0:44:130:44:15

in a weird way it's a Shavian kind of paradox -

0:44:150:44:18

to appeal to their sense of what was right.

0:44:180:44:22

"If you persist in treating me as an Englishman,

0:44:230:44:27

"you bind yourself thereby

0:44:270:44:28

"to hang me as a traitor before the eyes of the world.

0:44:280:44:32

"Now, as a simple matter of fact

0:44:320:44:34

"I am neither an English man nor a traitor.

0:44:340:44:37

"I am an Irish man captured in a fair attempt to achieve

0:44:370:44:41

"the independence of my country."

0:44:410:44:44

Unfortunately, Casement was talked out of that defence by his counsel

0:44:500:44:56

and as a matter of fact he was found guilty and he was hanged.

0:44:560:45:01

It wasn't just Casement.

0:45:040:45:05

I mean, Shaw, in relation to the Irish revolution in 1916,

0:45:050:45:11

he tried to prevail upon the British government from executing those men

0:45:110:45:16

by saying that if you execute them,

0:45:160:45:18

you'll turn them into martyrs

0:45:180:45:20

and he was also aware of this with Roger Casement because

0:45:200:45:25

Casement did become a martyr and those men of 1916 who were executed

0:45:250:45:30

summarily by the British government also became martyrs

0:45:300:45:34

and he thought that that was a huge mistake.

0:45:340:45:37

But he had a tremendous capacity to see the bigger picture.

0:45:370:45:40

He has developed this way of engaging with the world

0:45:460:45:52

that involves him speaking out, writing.

0:45:520:45:55

It's also feeding his ego.

0:45:550:45:57

There's a reason why Shaw becomes so iconic and part of it is ego.

0:45:570:46:03

I don't think he could help himself.

0:46:030:46:05

There has been one very important omission

0:46:050:46:08

in the proceedings today.

0:46:080:46:10

I simply ask you

0:46:110:46:13

to drink the health

0:46:130:46:16

of Mr Bernard Shaw.

0:46:160:46:17

LAUGHTER

0:46:170:46:19

He is Doctor Frankenstein, you know,

0:46:190:46:21

he creates GBS and it's a very self-conscious,

0:46:210:46:25

thought-through way of projecting himself.

0:46:250:46:28

So now take a good look at me

0:46:280:46:30

because I am the actual, real and original Bernard Shaw.

0:46:300:46:34

-NEWSREEL:

-When the Irish dramatist came back to Southampton on the Arandora Star,

0:46:340:46:37

he favoured British news with one of his most meaty interviews.

0:46:370:46:40

Perhaps the vanity of Shaw

0:46:400:46:42

allowed him to square a lot of his own circles.

0:46:420:46:45

As a young campaigner,

0:46:460:46:48

Shaw had been committed to gradual social change.

0:46:480:46:51

But as an old man in his 70s and running out of years,

0:46:510:46:54

he was getting frustrated.

0:46:540:46:56

He felt democratic change was just too slow.

0:46:560:46:59

In the 1930s, he certainly wasn't alone in thinking that a short,

0:46:590:47:03

sharp shock in the form of a Stalin,

0:47:030:47:06

Mussolini or Hitler might save socialism

0:47:060:47:10

and save the world. And when Shaw spoke, the world listened.

0:47:100:47:14

The great majority of the human race are easy-going,

0:47:160:47:19

sensible people and left to themselves,

0:47:190:47:22

they look round for somebody who looks intelligent

0:47:220:47:25

and they say, "Tell us what to do."

0:47:250:47:27

You can't get anything done without a dictatorship.

0:47:270:47:30

I think in justice to Signor Mussolini,

0:47:300:47:33

I ought to tell you that he has a very wonderful head.

0:47:330:47:39

He has a wonderful brow, which comes down to here.

0:47:390:47:42

Then there came a very intelligent gentleman named Adolf Hitler and he,

0:47:470:47:52

knowing perfectly well that the powers would not fight,

0:47:520:47:57

he snapped his fingers at the Treaty of Versailles.

0:47:570:48:00

So far as Hitler and Second World War is concerned,

0:48:010:48:07

he said at the end of the first war,

0:48:070:48:09

"What you are doing is going to create

0:48:090:48:12

"another world war while I'm still alive.

0:48:120:48:15

"To say that they are the enemy of people, of human beings,

0:48:150:48:19

"they will look in and make somebody else the enemy,

0:48:190:48:24

"rather than themselves."

0:48:240:48:26

This is the interesting thing about Shaw's longevity.

0:48:260:48:29

He was there during this period in the 19th century of a nationalism

0:48:290:48:34

that ultimately results in the First World War.

0:48:340:48:37

He has an awful lot to say about international conflict,

0:48:370:48:40

about the dangers of nationalism and patriotism and xenophobia and there,

0:48:400:48:46

in the 1920s and 1930s, he's still there observing the new regimes,

0:48:460:48:51

the new orders, the questioning of democracy.

0:48:510:48:54

The real thing, you cannot get responsibility without dictatorship.

0:48:540:48:59

What you've got to do

0:48:590:49:00

is to make your dictator really responsible so that

0:49:000:49:02

when he abuses his powers or doesn't do the job, you can get rid of him.

0:49:020:49:07

That's... Everything that is done, has to be done,

0:49:070:49:09

somebody's got to dictate it.

0:49:090:49:11

His thinking starts to change

0:49:140:49:16

but that takes him into some kind of dark areas through his support

0:49:160:49:21

of Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin.

0:49:210:49:24

What do you make of that swerve into territory that a lot of people

0:49:240:49:28

found very hard to reconcile with the earlier Shaw?

0:49:280:49:31

He was deeply wrong about Hitler, he was deeply wrong about Mussolini.

0:49:310:49:34

He doesn't have the humility to turn around and say,

0:49:340:49:37

"You know what? I was wrong about that."

0:49:370:49:38

Actually, he shouldn't be spared the opprobrium of it.

0:49:380:49:41

But I think it shouldn't be used to sort of take away everything

0:49:410:49:44

that goes before that, you know?

0:49:440:49:46

In the end, for all the dark parts of him,

0:49:460:49:50

he did more than almost any modern individual

0:49:500:49:54

to try to uphold the ideas that everybody could be dignified

0:49:540:49:58

and that they could be dignified by their mind,

0:49:580:50:02

by having the power to think as independent individuals.

0:50:020:50:06

And what did you come to see?

0:50:090:50:10

An old man...

0:50:130:50:15

who was once a famous playwright.

0:50:150:50:18

Who talked about everything on Earth

0:50:220:50:25

and wrote about it.

0:50:250:50:26

Well, here's what is left of him.

0:50:270:50:31

Not much to look at, is it?

0:50:320:50:36

What drove him to have this need to communicate constantly,

0:50:360:50:41

to be speaking, to be writing, to be commentating?

0:50:410:50:44

When you're around these pages that he touched,

0:50:500:50:53

there's a sense of him being present and at the same time unreachable.

0:50:530:50:58

It kind of leaves you with a sense

0:51:010:51:02

of really wishing you could meet him.

0:51:020:51:04

Now, I wish that the Movietone could bring you

0:51:070:51:12

not only this picture of me

0:51:120:51:16

but I wish it could bring you the fresh air

0:51:160:51:18

that I'm breathing at present.

0:51:180:51:20

I think that all that I can do is to end as I have begun,

0:51:250:51:30

to beat the drum in front of my own booth,

0:51:300:51:33

to ask you to walk up and to see all those old, old,

0:51:330:51:37

old plays of mine that now appear to be so new, new, new.

0:51:370:51:41

His plays and the musical version of Pygmalion, My Fair Lady,

0:51:480:51:52

have been a source of great bounty since his death.

0:51:520:51:55

Three institutions, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts,

0:51:550:51:58

the British Museum and the National Gallery of Ireland,

0:51:580:52:02

all get about £200,000 a year from the royalties he left them.

0:52:020:52:06

It's a wonderful gift to the people of Dublin

0:52:080:52:11

that this bequest continues year after year

0:52:110:52:14

to buy and curate paintings.

0:52:140:52:17

It's a mark of the man. He really believed in accessibility,

0:52:170:52:22

that people should have free access to art because he believed

0:52:220:52:26

in the power of art to change the way people think.

0:52:260:52:29

He also understood that art for many people was an elitist preoccupation,

0:52:310:52:37

that it was only people who were wealthy,

0:52:370:52:39

who had access to this kind of work and he was extremely aware

0:52:390:52:44

that art belonged to everybody.

0:52:440:52:46

How do you think he might have developed had he not left Ireland?

0:52:500:52:53

Do you think it would have hampered him

0:52:530:52:56

or would he have become Shaw anyway?

0:52:560:52:58

Oh, he would have become Shaw anyway because, in a way,

0:52:580:53:02

he needs a nest

0:53:020:53:05

in which to become the cuckoo, you know?

0:53:050:53:09

And he does that with British society.

0:53:090:53:11

I think we probably should have given him greater recognition.

0:53:110:53:15

We here in Ireland owe him a great deal.

0:53:150:53:18

What's he saying to us?

0:53:180:53:21

Well, I think what he would say here is the importance of education.

0:53:210:53:28

The importance of rejecting powerfully the suggestion

0:53:280:53:32

that there are matters over which

0:53:320:53:35

ordinary citizens cannot exercise control.

0:53:350:53:39

Everything in Shaw very much is about the endless capacities

0:53:390:53:43

of people who actually put the work in

0:53:430:53:46

in relation to thinking and sharing and taking

0:53:460:53:49

the vulnerability of the other into account.

0:53:490:53:52

What I would call the necessary grace of discourse.

0:53:520:53:56

When he died, each of the places to which he left his royalties

0:54:010:54:05

were given one additional memento.

0:54:050:54:07

When you think of

0:54:410:54:44

the mind of this man and the influence that he had,

0:54:440:54:48

there's something very touching about it being...

0:54:480:54:51

About being stilled.

0:54:530:54:54

Small ears.

0:55:010:55:02

He wrote about his ears and said, you know,

0:55:050:55:07

that he didn't like his ears so much

0:55:070:55:09

but they're actually quite neat little ears.

0:55:090:55:11

And the way to have a happy life

0:55:390:55:40

is to be too busy doing what you like...

0:55:400:55:42

..all the time.

0:55:460:55:48

Having no time left to you

0:55:480:55:50

to consider whether you're happy or not and...

0:55:500:55:54

Oh, look here, I'm getting talking.

0:55:550:55:59

I must stop.

0:55:590:56:00

Shaw, he wasn't Irish, he wasn't English.

0:56:120:56:15

He was always an outsider to the end of his life and, in the end,

0:56:150:56:22

as a husband, he chose to be buried with his wife.

0:56:220:56:25

Charlotte died five years before he did,

0:56:250:56:28

five or six years before he did,

0:56:280:56:30

and although he had expressed the desire at one stage to be buried

0:56:300:56:36

in St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin,

0:56:360:56:39

he changed his mind and he...

0:56:390:56:41

He was cremated at Golders Green crematorium, like Charlotte was,

0:56:440:56:49

and their ashes were mixed around this hut.

0:56:490:56:52

It's a beautiful... It's a beautiful thing to do at the end of a life.

0:56:530:56:59

My abiding sense of the man is of compassion, humanity and courage.

0:57:010:57:08

A life spent seeking and speaking the truth and damn the consequences.

0:57:080:57:13

As he said, "My life belongs to the community

0:57:150:57:19

"and, as long as I live,

0:57:190:57:20

"it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

0:57:200:57:23

"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die.

0:57:240:57:27

"Life is no brief candle to me.

0:57:280:57:30

"It is a sort of splendid torch

0:57:300:57:32

"and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible

0:57:320:57:36

"before handing it on to the future generations."

0:57:360:57:39

They are making me a signal by which I understand

0:57:410:57:44

that they have had about enough of me.

0:57:440:57:46

I am very reluctant to leave you, ladies and gentlemen, but,

0:57:460:57:50

you see, they can cut me off at any moment.

0:57:500:57:53

To save myself from that humiliation,

0:57:530:57:56

I must bid you good morning.

0:57:560:57:59

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