Shaw and Christopher Newton: Explorations of Shavian Theatre

David E. Kemp is chair of the Drama Department at Queen’s University
and author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Christopher Newton, artistic director of the Shaw Festival at
Niagara-on-the-Lake, has succeeded in placing his annual six-month
celebration of the works of George Bernard Shaw firmly on the map of
world theatre. Keith Garebian, whose previous published work includes a
theatre portrait of William Hutt and a selection from a decade of his
own critical writing, seeks to show that Newton’s success lies in his
refusal to treat Shaw’s plays as didactic Edwardian period pieces.
Instead, he shows how Newton has reinterpreted the deconstructed Shavian
theatre, and in doing so has not only “rediscovered” the dramatist
but made him totally relevant for audiences in the last quarter of the
20th century.

Garebian begins with a personal and empathetic biographical section
that sketches some of the most pervasive influences on Newton’s art.
Successive chapters document Newton’s concept of Shaw as surrealist by
making detailed reference to Newton’s festival productions in the
1980s. Garebian conclusively proves that Newton’s approach to the
plays, for all its paradoxes, ultimately succeeds in making Shaw our
dynamic contemporary.

Completely accessible to the general reader, this book is free of the
kind of academic doublespeak that infects so many of the so-called
prestigious volumes emanating from our universities. But Garebian is a
critic and a man of the theatre, and we would have expected no less.