New Play in Toronto

Geneva (by George Bernard Shaw; produced by Maurice Colbourne & Barry Jones). At 83, Shaw is still almost the smartest guy in show business. Last year his Geneva--spoofing the League of Nations and potching the dictators--was produced at the Malvern Festival and in London. This year, the minute war broke out Shaw decided to bring Geneva up to date. He further announced that as long as the headlines continue to be dramatic, he will continue to crib from them.

Last week the revised Geneva had its world premiere in Toronto. However topical, the play is not so much straight political satire as one more Shavian exercise in deflating the human race, one more proof that the world's most famed vegetarian is intellectually a cannibal. Shaw's mischief-hungry mind first conceived of Geneva when he learned that The League of Nations possessed something called the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. When he decided that the Committee showed few signs of intellect and fewer of cooperation, he licked his chops and fell to. In Geneva the committee consists of a single hen-brained Cockney typist, who manages in no time at all to have the whole continent of Europe teetering on the brink of war.

Blithely letting it teeter, Shaw shifts his base and conducts a League-of-Nations trial of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, with a British diplomat and a Soviet Commissar to whoop things up. In fantastic costumes and with grand-opera flourishes, truculent "Battler" (Maurice Colbourne), swaggering "Bombardone" and arrogant "Flanco" engage in a vicious dialectical dogfight, snapping at the judge and at one another like so many paradoxhunds.

The revised ending of Geneva brings the news that Hitler's troops have invaded Poland. Gloats Der Fuehrer: "While you have been talking, my army has been doing." He turns to Mussolini for help. "Do you suppose," barks Il Duce, "that I am going to ruin my country to make you emperor of the universe?" He turns to the diplomat, taunting him that England will not fight. "Fight? We shall wipe you off the face of the earth!" He turns defiantly to them all: "I shall sweep through Poland like a hurricane." "Do so by all means, Comrade," coos the Commissar. "When you have finished, you will settle with me how much of it you may keep."

Anti-fascist in a typically Shavian way, Geneva makes fools rather than villains of the dictators. For that matter, it pretty well makes fools of everybody in the play. But at 83, G. B. S. is no longer foolproof himself. Despite some brilliant thrusts, he bumbles on far too long, says far too little. More of his ideas are old than new, more of his jokes forced than funny. But what Dr. Johnson said of women preaching is also true of octogenarian play writing: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

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