ARMS AND THE MAN
With the play’s cerebral slant and pacifist intention, it’s strange that Arms and the Man (1894) should have inspired Oscar Straus’s 1908 The Chocolate Soldier, a blithely simple-minded operetta that also exploits the plot’s farce. (Of course Shaw repudiated this spin-off, as he would have My Fair Lady if he’d lived to see it.) What G.B.S. aimed to satirize in Arms is exactly what’s lauded in “My Hero,” The Chocolate Soldier’s famous paean.
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Shaw’s target was heroes, and the damage wrought by romantic self-deception, and he reserved his special ire for the rhapsodic lies that sugarcoat war–glittering generalities that, two decades later, would be used to prettify the carnage of World War I. Against his bogus heroes Shaw pits his self-seeking realists: Henry Higgins, Caesar, Mrs. Warren, John Tanner, and here, Bluntschli. They show, as he wrote in his late play The Apple Cart, that “one man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.”
At times Shaw does resort to conventional comic complications. There’s a brouhaha, for example, over the whereabouts of an incriminating photograph Raina gave her “chocolate cream soldier.” But Shaw’s real fun comes in making his ill-matched characters expose each other’s double standards–and sort themselves out as they seek their own levels. The sexual strategists, Sergius and Louka, inevitably find each other–and that they’re right for each other. Sergius knows that Louka has brains enough for both, and he can step down from his martial pedestal. In turn, by the end Raina finds in Bluntschli a paradoxically romantic realist, someone who will do for peace as well as war.
In her dour gray set, Rebecca Hamlin seems to want to depict a backward Bulgarian estate, but the cinder-block walls look more like cheap tract housing. (Against this bleak backdrop, Claudia Boddy’s colorful Victorian costumes erupt, a welcome infusion of good taste.) Last and least, no one used ballpoint pens in 1894.
