Four Plays: Shaw and His Contemporaries

James Noonan is an adjunct professor of English at Carleton University
and the author of Biography and Autobiography: Essays on Irish and
Canadian History and Literature.

The Shaw Festival Production Record, 1962–1999 updates Dan H.
Laurence’s first two editions of the book, and while it adds only nine
years (1991–99) to those editions, those nine years take up almost 50
percent of the calendar pages. Meticulous and user-friendly, the book
includes every season’s productions, pre- and post- season tours by
the Shaw Festival, the total number of performances for each season and
for each play, as well as four appendixes and three indexes.

The four plays in Shaw and His Contemporaries—all of which were
produced at the Shaw Festival in 2001, its 40th anniversary season—are
Shaw’s The Millionairess and Fanny’s First Play, J.M. Barrie’s
Peter Pan (adapted by Christoper Newton), and St. John Hankin’s The
Return of the Prodigal. The text of each play is followed by an
enlightening four-page essay taken from the house program—two by
Ronald Bryden (for The Millionairess and Peter Pan), one by Leonard
Conolly (Fanny’s First Play), and one by Alan Andrews (The Return of
the Prodigal). The date and place of the first performances of three of
the plays are given on the flip side of each title page (the curious
exception is The Millionairess, which was first performed, in German, at
the Akademietheater in Vienna on January 4, 1936). Three of the plays
were not readily available in print, and the fourth (Newton’s
adaptation of Peter Pan) is published in this volume for the first time.
A more logical choice would have been to publish either four plays by
Shaw alone or four Festival-produced plays, by four different authors,
that have a unifying theme or themes.