THIS is a political satire in Shaw’s most amusing manner and, as its title indicates, deals with the eternal Irish question—a problem that, in England, rivals in perennial interest the dispute between capital and labor in the United States. The author, with characteristic impartiality, gives all sides a fair hearing, and “though in the end,” says A. B. Walkley, “all parties are dismissed with costs, we have a conviction that justice has been done.”
Two London engineers—Broadbent, an Englishman, and Larry Doyle, an anglicized Irishman—are the central characters. Broadbent is a political radical and insatiable reformer of a very familiar sort. Yearning to lend a hand in the uplifting of humanity, he turns to the martyred Irish and proposes to be their champion, without in the least understanding them. Doyle, on the other hand, looks upon all reform as so much moonshine. As far as he is concerned, Ireland may go hang. He is neither a patriot nor an altruist.
Nevertheless, when Broadbent decides to go to Ireland to study the problem of saving the Irish on the ground, Doyle consents to go with him, and together they arrive at a primitive sort of Irish village. There they make acquaintance with the folks who constitute suffering Ireland—an unfrocked priest whose mysticism has given him the local character of a lunatic, a peasant fairly savage in his simple superstitions, the fanatical parish priest and other types more or less familiar. To Doyle they are commonplace bores. To Broadbent they constitute a People yearning for a Moses.
When Doyle refuses to stand for Parliament for the district, Broadbent willingly steps into the breach, and in the ensuing campaign all the multitudinous facets of the Irish question are revealed. The honest electors, misunderstanding Broadbent’s altruistic efforts for their welfare, get a great deal of innocent enjoyment out of his orations and a great deal more out of his honest efforts to deal with them as freeman to freeman. He offers to take a farmer’s pig home in his motor car. The car runs over the pig and, in addition, knocks out the window of the village china shop. “There is a jest in every line,” says the critic of the London Daily Mail. “The play exists for and by the comic spirit alone.”
In the end, after many farcical situations and excellent quips, the canny Irish yeomanry accept Broadbent as a profitable acquaintance, and as the novelty of his misunderstood good intentions dies, come to regard him more or less seriously. As the curtain falls they are looking forward with interest to certain very material boons he promises to confer upon them—a big hotel in the village, a new tower for the village landmark and links for the village golfers. Meanwhile he has fallen in love with an old sweetheart of Doyle’s and, after an uphill wooing, has supplanted the latter in the fair charmer’s affections.
The play is a characteristically Shavian reductio ad absurdum of the vast ocean of hair-raising schemes and startling theories that has so long deluged the Irish question. Shaw himself is an Irishman, and no doubt the troubles of his native land are of some interest to him, despite his vigorous denial that he is a patriot. Probably the play indicates his subscription to the idea of many an Irishman whose emotionalism has been tempered by English common-sense: that Ireland must cease looking for relief without and seek it within. In so far as this is true, the play is dialectic. But first of all it is a farce by the dramatist whom one London critic, at least, calls “the best living writer of comedy.”
“It’s all rot,” says Broadbent, the Englishman in the play, of some speech made by Doyle. “It’s all rot, but it’s so brilliant, you know.”
“Here, no doubt,” observed Mr. Walkley of the Times, “Shaw is slyly taking a side glance at the usual English verdict on his own works. The verdict will need some slight modification in the case of ‘John Bull’s Other Island.’ For, in the first place, the play is not all rot. Further, it has some other qualities than mere brilliancy. It is at once a delight and a disappointment.... Shaw takes up the empty bladders of life, the current commonplaces, the cant phrases, the windbags of rodomontade, the hollow conventions, and the sham sentiments; quietly he inserts his pin; and the thing collapses with a pop.”
The play was given six special matinée performances at the London Court Theater in the latter part of 1904, and Arnold Daly has since presented it in America.