“CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND’S CONVERSION”
CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND’S CONVERSION” is a fantastic comedy, written with no very ponderous ulterior purpose and without the undercurrents that course through some of Shaw’s plays, but nevertheless, it is by no means a bit of mere foolery. The play of character upon character is shown with excellent skill, and if the drama has never attracted much attention from aspiring comedians it is because the humor is fine-spun, and not because it is weak.
The scene is the coast of Morocco and the hero, Captain Brassbound, is a sort of refined, latter-day pirate, who has a working arrangement with the wild natives of the interior and prospers in many ventures. To his field of endeavor come two jaded English tourists—Sir Howard Hallam, a judge of the criminal bench, and Lady Cicely Waynflete, his sister-in-law. Lady Cicely is a queer product of her sex’s unrest. She has traveled often and afar; she has held converse with cannibal kings; she has crossed Africa alone. Hearing that it is well-nigh suicidal to venture into the Atlas Mountains, which rear their ancient peaks from the eastern skyline, she is seized by a yearning to explore them. Sir Howard expostulates, pleads, argues, and storms—and in the end consents to go with her.
It is here that Brassbound enters upon the scene—in the capacity of guide and commander of the expedition. He is a strange being, this gentleman pirate, a person of “olive complexion, dark southern eyes ... grim mouth ... and face set to one tragic purpose....” A man of blood and iron. A hero of scarlet romance, red-handed and in league with the devil.
And so the little caravan starts off—Sir Howard, Lady Cicely, Brassbound and half a dozen of Brassbound’s thugs and thieves. They have little adventures and big adventures and finally they reach an ancient Moorish castle in the mountains, heavy with romance and an ideal scene for a tragedy. And here Brassbound reveals his true colors. Pirate no longer, he becomes traitor—and betrays his charges to a wild Moroccan chieftain.
But it is not gold that leads him into this crime, nor anything else so prosaic or unworthy. Revenge is his motive—dark, red-handed revenge of the sort that went out of fashion with shirts of mail. He has been seeking a plan for Sir Howard’s destruction for years and years, and now, at last, providence has delivered his enemy into his hands.
To see the why and wherefore of all this, it is necessary to know that Sir Howard, before reaching his present eminence, had a brother who fared upon the sea to the West Indies and there acquired a sugar estate and a yellow Brazilian wife. When he died the estate was seized by his manager and his widow took to drink. With her little son she proceeded to England, to seek Sir Howard’s aid in her fight for justice. Disgusted by her ill-favored person and unladylike habits, he turned her out of doors and she, having no philosophy, straightway drank herself to death. And then, after many years, Sir Howard himself, grown rich and influential, used his riches and his influence to dispossess the aforesaid dishonest manager of his brother’s estate. Of the bibulous widow’s son he knew nothing, but this son, growing up, remembered. In the play he bobs into view again. He is Captain Brassbound, pirate.
Brassbound has cherished his elaborate scheme of vengeance for so many years that it has become his other self. Awake and sleeping he thinks of little else, and when, at last, the opportunity to execute it arrives, he goes half mad with exultation. That such revenges have come to seem ridiculous to civilized men, he does not know. His life has been cast along barren coasts and among savages and outcasts, and ethically he is a brother to the crusaders. His creed still puts the strong arm above the law, and here is his chance to make it destroy one of the law’s most eminent ornaments. Viewed from his standpoint the stage is set for a stupendous and overpowering drama.
But the saturnine captain reckons without the fair Lady Cicely. In all his essentials, he is a half-savage hairy-armed knight of the early thirteenth century. Lady Cicely, calm, determined and cool, is of the late nineteenth. The conflict begins furiously and rages furiously to the climax. When the end comes Brassbound feels his heroics grow wabbly and pitiful; he sees himself mean and ridiculous.
“Damn you!” he cries in a final burst of rage. “You have belittled my whole life to me!”
There is something pathetic in the figure of the pirate as his ideals come crashing down about his head and he blindly gropes in the dark.
“It was vulgar—vulgar,” he says. “I see that now; for you have opened my eyes to the past; but what good is that for the future? What am I to do? Where am I to go?”
It is not enough that he undoes his treason and helps to save Sir Howard. What he wants is some rule of life to take the place of the smashed ideals of his wasted years. He gropes in vain and ends, like many another man, by idealizing a woman.
“You seem to be able to make me do pretty well what you like,” he says to Lady Cicely, “but you cannot make me marry anybody but yourself.”
“Do you really want a wife?” asks Cicely archly.
“I want a commander,” replies the reformed Brassbound. “I am a good man when I have a good leader.”
He is not the first man that has fallen beneath the spell of her dominating and masterful ego, to mistake his obedience for love, and she bluntly tells him so. And thus they part—Brassbound to return to his ship and his smuggling, and Cicely to go home to England.
As will be observed, this is no ordinary farce, but a play of considerable depth and beam. Shaw is a master of the art of depicting such conflicts as that here outlined, and Brassbound and Cicely are by no means the least of his creations. With all the extravagance of the play, there is something real and human about each, and the same may be said of the lesser characters—Sir Howard; the Rev. Leslie Rankin, missionary and philosopher; Drinkwater, Brassbound’s recruit from the slums of London; the Moorish chiefs; Captain Hamlin Kearney of the U. S. S. Santiago, who comes to Sir Howard’s rescue, and the others.
The chief fault of the play is the fact that the exposition, in the first act, requires an immense amount of talk without action. The whole act, in truth, might be played with all of the characters standing still. Later on, there is plenty of movement, but the play as a whole is decidedly inferior to the majority of the Shaw dramas. The dialogue lacks the surface brilliancy of “You Never Can Tell” and “Candida” and the humor, in places, is too delicate, almost, for the theme. The piece, in fact, is a satirical melodrama disguised as a farce—a melodrama of the true Shaw brand, in which the play of mind upon mind overshadows the play of club upon skull.