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by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Kimberley Rampersad

Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

June 23-October 6, 2018

O’Flaherty: “You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race”

The Shaw Festival has chosen to revive an ideal play by its namesake as part of its commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.  Shaw wrote O’Flaherty V.C. in 1915 and it was first staged by officers of the Royal Flying Corps in France in 1917.  The fact that the play satirizes the recruiting drives to get men to enlist and and the low intellectual abilities of officers show that soldiers were able to laugh at the grim situation they were in and at the propaganda used to get them there.  More than plays written in the present with their 20-20 hindsight about the Great War, a play like O’Flaherty gives us insight into what some people of the time thought about the events they were experiencing. 

The premise of the 45-minute playlet is simple but its ramifications are wide.  Dennis O’Flaherty (Ben Sanders) has won the Victoria Cross, the highest award for bravery in the British Armed Forces.  He has returned to his home village in Ireland with General Sir Pearce Madigan (Patrick McManus), who is also the local squire, on a recruiting drive to get Irishmen to enlist.  O’Flaherty is anxious about meeting his mother, who is an Irish Republican, because, even though he is a war hero, she thought that he must have joined the war the fight against Ireland’s British oppressors, not for them.

Shaw, a well-known pacifist, fills O’Flaherty’s speeches with surprisingly cutting anti-war sentiments that completely destroy any illusions of the glory of fighting for king and country that the government propaganda promotes.  It’s no wonder that the Abbey Theatre in Dublin for whom Shaw wrote the play, banned it, but that makes it all the more intriguing that officers of the RAC would perform it.  O’Flaherty points out that a true Irishman can hardly fight for king and country because they don’t regard the British ruler as their king and their country is hardly theirs until the the British, like his mother’s own landlord Madigan, leave it. 

O’Flaherty emphasizes that he never joined the army because of patriotic idealism but rather for adventure and to escape the closed-mindedness and petty squabbles that make up Irish life.  Patriotism is a scam anyway as he notes in the prescient but eyebrow-raising remark for its time, “You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race”.  O’Flaherty also has no belief in heroism.  When Madigan suggests that the Irishman killed Germans for the sake of an ideal, O’Flaherty replies, “I know quite well why I kilt them, because I was afeard that, if I didn't, they'd kill me”.  When Madigan says O’Flaherty should be proud to have participated in “the greatest war ever fought”, O’Flaherty undercuts that notion with, “I don't know about it's being a great war, sir. It's a big war; but that's not the same thing”.  It would be fascinating to know how Shaw’s total rejection of the glorification of war was received by the officers who originally performed the play and those who saw it.     

Ben Sanders is excellent as the reluctant hero.  Sanders shows O’Flaherty’s disgust with British propaganda using his example to entice young men to war underlies his sullen attitude.  He delivers O’Flaherty’s stream of anti-war remarks not as witticisms but as truths he has discovered from bitter experience.  Sanders creates a complex portrait of disenchantment that has as much a serious side as it does a comic one.

Patrick McManus plays Sir Pearce Madigan as more of a caricature of a British general than as a fully rounded character.  Quite unlike his previous work at the Shaw, he tends to mug to make his lines funnier thus adopting an acting style that clashes with the realism of Sanders portrayal.  Were Kimberley Rampersad a stronger director, she might have asked for more restraint.

Tara Rosling is very funny as O’Flaherty’s termagant of a mother even though the she is rather too young for the part.  Had the Festival not divested itself of its entire tier of older actors, there are many who might have played the role of a wizened but feisty women, since Rosling does not look remotely wizened despite the mother being called so in the text.  Nevertheless, Rosling fully conveys the mother’s comic combination of pride and outrage and her embarrassing desire still to treat O’Flaherty as a boy even though he is a grown man.

Gabriella Sundar Singh has a fine comic turn as O’Flaherty’s girlfriend Teresa, who unwittingly reveals that she is at least as interested in what O’Flaherty’s future pension will be, if not more than in O’Flaherty himself.  When he tells her he would get more money if he were wounded, she pertly suggests that he should go back to the front and do so. 

The Festival has not staged this play since 1983, but now is the perfect time to see it.  As usual with Shaw, it is amazing how modern his ideas are.  In 45 minutes in 1917 Shaw basically makes every point that Joan Littlewood set out to do in her anti-war musical Oh What a Lovely War in two-and-a-half hours 46 years later.  Seeing this play and knowing the circumstances of its first staging, we have to realize that some people at the time of World War I had a much more ironic or even cynical view of the events than we tend to give them credit for.  O’Flaherty V.C. is a very amusing play in its own right, but it is also a real eye-opener about contemporary attitudes that only a play about the war written during the war can provide.           

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Ben Sanders as O’Flaherty and Patrick McManus as Sir Pearce; Gabriella Sundar Singh as Teresa, Ben Sanders as O'Flaherty and Tara Rosling as Mrs. O'Flaherty. ©2018 Emily Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.