Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction is a short play by Bernard Shaw, subtitled The Fatal Gazogene: a Brief Tragedy for Barns and Booths. It is a comic mock-melodrama, written to raise funds for charity. It has been revived occasionally, in tandem with other short works by Shaw or by other playwrights.
Shaw began writing the play in May 1905 and finished it on 4 June. It was published in Harry Furniss's Christmas Annual 1905, and was privately printed for copyright purposes in the US in the same year. It first appeared in book form in Translations and Tomfooleries, 1926. [1]
Shaw wrote of the piece, "This tragedy was written at the request of Mr Cyril Maude, under whose direction it was performed repeatedly, with colossal success, in a booth in Regent's Park, for the benefit of The Actors' Orphanage, on the 14th July 1905". Brandon Thomas and Lionel Brough stationed themselves outside the tent drumming up custom for the show. [2]
Period: "Not for an age but for all time". Scene: A bed sitting-room in a fashionable quarter of London. [3]
Late at night, Phyllis, the maid, is combing the hair of her employer, Lady Magnesia FitzTollemache. Phyllis expresses foreboding and the fear that she will never see her beloved mistress again. Magnesia retires to sleep, serenaded by a heavenly choir singing "Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey". A murderous figure enters, brandishing a dagger. Before he can stab Magnesia she wakes, and recognises her husband. Her admirer, Adolphus, demands admittance so that he can show her his new suit of evening clothes made of bright yellow and black cloth with a silver-spangled waistcoat and red kerchief. [4]
Fitz offers Adolphus a whisky and soda. The gazogene (soda-siphon) contains poison and Adolphus is soon writhing on the floor. Magnesia declares that with Adolphus dead she will have to devote all her energies to doting on her husband. Finding this prospect overwhelming, Fitz reveals that there is an antidote to the poison, namely lime, which they can get from the plaster of the ceiling. They throw boots up to bring pieces of the ceiling down. Adolphus cannot force the plaster down this throat, and instead Magnesia reaches for a plaster bust of herself, which she bids Phyllis dissolve in hot water. Adolphus drinks the mixture, and with the poison neutralised he sinks into a deep sleep. [5]
The FitzTollemaches' landlord appears, complaining at the noise from the room. He believes that the recumbent Adolphus is dead, accuses the others of murdering him, and summons the police. The constable cannot rouse Adolphus, and discovers that the plaster has set inside him, turning him into a living statue. A doctor arrives as a violent storm breaks. Lightning fatally strikes the doctor, the policeman and the landlord. The FitzTollemaches raise the statue upright and kneel before it, as the heavenly choir again sings "Bill Bailey". The statue raises its hands in benediction, the band plays the national anthem and attendants pass through the auditorium ejecting the audience. [6]
The BBC broadcast a radio version of the play in 1926, and the early BBC television service transmitted another in 1939. [7] The play was staged in London in 1945, [8] and again as part of a Shaw Festival at the Arts Theatre in 1951. [9] This was the last production in London during Shaw's lifetime. Later productions included one at the Mermaid Theatre in 1967, of which the reviewer in The Times observed that Shaw's plot and punning anticipated Spike Milligan at his most surrealist. [10] The piece was revived again at the Arts the following year in a triple bill with short comedies by Michel de Ghelderode and Chekhov. [11]
The play was adapted in 1975 for a comic opera, Lady Magnesia , by the Polish-Russian composer Mieczysław Weinberg (his Opus 112). It was also made into operas by Bruce Taub (1976) [12] and Philip Hagemann (1988). [13]
George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Messiah is an English-language oratorio composed in 1741 by George Frideric Handel. The text was compiled from the King James Bible and the Coverdale Psalter by Charles Jennens. It was first performed in Dublin on 13 April 1742 and received its London premiere a year later. After an initially modest public reception, the oratorio gained in popularity, eventually becoming one of the best-known and most frequently performed choral works in Western music.
Victorien Sardou was a French dramatist. He is best remembered today for his development, along with Eugène Scribe, of the well-made play. He also wrote several plays that were made into popular 19th-century operas such as La Tosca (1887) on which Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca (1900) is based, and Fédora (1882) and Madame Sans-Gêne (1893) that provided the subjects for the lyrical dramas Fedora (1898) and Madame Sans-Gêne (1915) by Umberto Giordano. His play Gismonda, from 1894, was also adapted into an opera of the same name by Henry Février.
Major Barbara is a three-act English play by George Bernard Shaw, written and premiered in 1905 and first published in 1907. The story concerns an idealistic young woman, Barbara Undershaft, who is engaged in helping the poor as a Major in the Salvation Army in London. For many years, Barbara and her siblings have been estranged from their father, Andrew Undershaft, who now reappears as a rich and successful munitions maker. The father gives money to the Salvation Army, which offends Barbara because she considers it "tainted" wealth. The father argues that poverty is a worse problem than munitions and claims that he is doing more to help society by giving his workers jobs and a steady income than she is doing by giving people free meals in a soup kitchen.
Man and Superman is a four-act drama written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903, in response to a call for Shaw to write a play based on the Don Juan theme. Man and Superman opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 21 May 1905 as a four-act play produced by the Stage Society, and then by John Eugene Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker on 23 May, without Act III. A part of the third act, Don Juan in Hell, was performed when the drama was staged on 4 June 1907 at the Royal Court. The play was not performed in its entirety until 1915, when the Travelling Repertory Company played it at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh.
Thomas William Robertson was an English dramatist and stage director known for his development of naturalism in British theatre.
In Greek mythology, Pygmalion was a legendary figure of Cyprus. He is most familiar from Ovid's narrative poem Metamorphoses, in which Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved.
Major Barbara is a 1941 British film starring Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison. The film was produced and directed by Gabriel Pascal and edited by David Lean. It was adapted for the screen by Marjorie Deans and Anatole de Grunwald, based on the 1905 stage play Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw. It was both a critical and a financial success.
Sarah Fairbrother was an English actress and the mistress of Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, a male-line grandson of George III. As the couple married in contravention of the Royal Marriages Act 1772, their marriage was not recognised under the law.
The gasogene is a late Victorian device for producing carbonated water. It consists of two linked glass globes: the lower contained water or other drink to be made sparkling, the upper a mixture of tartaric acid and sodium bicarbonate that reacts to produce carbon dioxide. The produced gas pushes the liquid in the lower container up a tube and out of the device. The globes are surrounded by a wicker or wire protective mesh, as they have a tendency to explode.
The Shaw Festival is a major Canadian theatre festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, the second largest repertory theatre company in North America. Founded in 1962, its original mandate was to stimulate interest in George Bernard Shaw and his period, and to advance the development of theatre arts in Canada.
The Dark Lady of the Sonnets is a 1910 short comedy by George Bernard Shaw in which William Shakespeare, intending to meet the "Dark Lady", accidentally encounters Queen Elizabeth I and attempts to persuade her to create a national theatre. The play was written as part of a campaign to create a "Shakespeare National Theatre" by 1916.
Frederic Lewis Tuffley, better known by his stage name, Eric Lewis, was an English comedian, actor and singer. In a career spanning five decades, he starred in numerous comedies and in a few musical comedy hits, but he is probably best remembered today as the understudy to George Grossmith in the Gilbert & Sullivan comic operas of the 1880s who left the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company just in time to give Henry Lytton his big break.
Clara Millington Dow was an English operatic soprano and actress of the early twentieth century. After a concert career, she appeared at the Savoy Theatre in the first repertory seasons of Gilbert and Sullivan operas mounted by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1906–09, under the direction of the author. She is remembered as one of the last principal sopranos personally trained by W. S. Gilbert at the Savoy. In between engagements with D'Oyly Carte, Dow performed in concerts and operetta. After her retirement from the professional stage, she directed amateur productions of the Savoy Operas until she was in her seventies.
The Music Cure, a Piece of Utter Nonsense (1913) is a short comedy sketch by George Bernard Shaw, satirising therapeutic fads of the era and the Marconi scandal of 1912.
Overruled (1912) is a comic one-act play written by George Bernard Shaw. In Shaw's words, it is about "how polygamy occurs among quite ordinary people innocent of all unconventional views concerning it." The play concerns two couples who desire to switch partners, but are prevented from doing so by various considerations and end up negotiating an ambiguous set of relationships.
The Glimpse of Reality, A Tragedietta (1909) is a short play by George Bernard Shaw, set Italy during the 15th century. It is a parody of the verismo melodramas in vogue at the time. Shaw included it among what he called his "tomfooleries".
The Fascinating Foundling (1909) is a short comic play by George Bernard Shaw. Shaw classified it as one of his "tomfooleries". He was so unimpressed with his own work that the published text was humorously subtitled "a Disgrace to the Author".
Lady Magnesia is a 1975 comic opera by Mieczysław Weinberg to his own Russian libretto after the 1905 play Passion, Poison and Petrifaction by George Bernard Shaw. To celebrate Weinberg's 90th birthday in 2009, the opera was performed along with several of his works including his 1997 "Requiem." While engaged in the writing of the opera, Weinberg invited Soviet composer David Krivitsky to his home to play the music, of which an analysis was included in his book, "One-act opera of the 20th century."
Philip Hagemann is an American composer and conductor.
