Bernard Shaw's Geneva (1938, rev. 1945) is one of the most important and enduring antecedents of British Holocaust drama.  The ideas that Shaw champions in this work, moral relativism and historical reductivism, his use of an agon where a persecuted Jew confronts a Nazi tormentor, his manipulation of Jewish theology to implicate Jews in their own demise, and his assertion of Jewish arrogance are repeated in a series of British dramas about the Holocaust, including Robert Shaw's The Man in the Glass Booth (1968), Peter Barnes' Laughter! (1978), C.P. Taylor's Good (1981), Christopher Hampton's The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1982), Jim Allen's Perdition (1987), and Peter Flannery's Singer (1989).

     Geneva can be technically regarded as an anti-fascist drama because it makes great fun of Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler, but it transcends such categorization because it also takes jabs at the Western democracies, particularly Britain and America, and refuses to assert the moral superiority of the West.  Geneva was one of the most controversial dramas written in English on either side of the Atlantic during the 1930s.  At a time when most other Anglo-American writers were recanting their pacifist positions and urging war against Germany, Shaw remained steadfast in his opposition to military action.  In Geneva the policies of the United States and England are harshly criticized, and the actions of the fascist states are rationalized as being no worse than those of other countries.

     The rhetoric of Geneva may have been controversial, but it was also popular.  The play enjoyed a run of more than 250 performances in London during the 1938-39 season, and the last act was broadcast by the BBC in April 1939.1  The success of Geneva was not an isolated occurrence dependent solely upon the power of Shaw's reputation.  The other major political drama performed in London at this time was Robert Sherwood's Idiot's Delight.  Sherwood's play, a melodramatic farce that argues against the lunacy of war, was enthusiastically received.  Ironically, while Idiot's Delight was playing in Britain, Sherwood was in America writing the anti-fascist drama There Shall Be No Night that repudiated the pacifist stance of his earlier work.  English audiences in late 1938 and early 1939, however, were more sympathetic to the pacifism of Shaw and early Sherwood than to the call to arms of the anti-fascists.  As Terence Rattigan noted a year before the outbreak of hostilities, "the dread of war, of civil strife, of national upheaval is far too real, far too intense in England at the present time to allow audiences to listen with equanimity to gloomy reminders that our civilization is on the brink of destruction."2

     Geneva is a contemporary fantasy that places the leaders of the world on trial.  In Shaw's drama, a young officious Englishwoman working for an obscure department in the League of Nations sets in motion a chain of events that causes European leaders to appear before the International Court at the Hague to answer charges brought by citizens with grievances.  Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, thinly disguised as Bombardone, Battler, and General Flanco, arrive in Geneva to attend their own trial.

     A confrontation occurs between the character of the nameless Jew and the dictator Battler.  The Jew accuses Battler "of murder.  Of an attempt to exterminate the flower of the human race."3  Battler responds in a rational and reasonable manner that the Jew has no right to be in his country: "I exclude you as the British exclude the Chinese in Australia, as the Americans exclude the Japanese in California" (7:134).  Battler's reply avoids the central charge of murder, and the Jew does not pursue it.  Instead, he launches into an arrogant tirade that asserts the superiority of the Jewish people to Europeans: "Why do you exclude the Jew?  Because you cannot compete with his intelligence, his persistence, his foresight, his grasp of finance.  It is our talents, our virtues, that you fear, not our vices" (7:134).  Battler, ignoring that Jews have lived in Germany since Roman times, patiently explains to the emotional Jew that his policies are in keeping with the law of nations: "In every country the foreigner is a trespasser.  On every coast he is confronted by officers who say you shall not land without your passport, your visa.  If you are a certain race or color you shall not land at all. ... Every state chooses its population and selects its blood.  We say that ours shall be Nordic, not Hittite; that is all" (7:134).  The Jew asks whether assault and robbery are also in keeping with the law of nations, to which Battler replies innocently, "I am sorry.  I cannot be everywhere; and all my agents are not angels" (7:134).  Shortly thereafter, the President of the Court tables the charges against Battler for later consideration and the issue is dismissed.

     Shaw presents the Jew in an unflattering light as a clever fellow who reaps a profit from the world's misery.  Just before the end of the play, when it is certain that Europe is going to engage in total warfare, scientists announce that the earth has changed its trajectory around the sun.  They predict that this will cause the earth to undergo another ice age and that mankind will be destroyed.  The Jew, upon hearing the news, immediately leaves the courtroom "to sell gilt-edged in any quantity, at any price, knowing that if this story gets about before settling day he will be able to buy it for the price of wastepaper and be a millionaire until the icecap overtakes him" (7:159).

     In 1938, Shaw sent a privately printed copy of the play to Lawrence Langner, the managing director of the Theatre Guild in New York City.  Langner was dismayed by Shaw's representation of the Jew and was particularly offended by the courtroom confrontation with Battler.  He wrote Shaw a long letter that enumerated the insulting points in the text.  Langner contended that Shaw provided Battler with a misleading rational explanation for his actions and denied the Jew the ability to answer in kind.  Langner's letter, dated 26 August 1938, was an emotional appeal for Shaw to revise the work:
I read the play immediately, and while I enjoyed it very much in the main, I was so deeply hurt by certain parts of it that I feel I should write you immediately about same.  I refer especially to the part The Jew plays in this play, and which seems to me to contradict the attitude you have taken over seventy years of your life.  I do not believe that you will want future generations of Jew-baiters to quote you as part authority for a program of torturing, starving and driving to suicide of Jews all over the world. ... I do most sincerely ask you to reconsider the position you have given the character of The Jew in this play.  Shakespeare, by the character of Shylock, and Dickens, by the character of Fagin, have added greatly to the cross of hatred which future generations of Jews must bear.  You, who have always been so understanding through your entire life, will surely not want to add another figure to a collection which breeds intolerance and racial hatred.4

     Shaw reacted angrily to Langner's suggestion that his work was particularly insulting to Jews.  In a written reply, he asserted that the play was intended to insult everyone.  He noted that no other group had taken offense to the play: "Everyone laughs.  Not a voice in their defense."  Shaw, evidently sensitive about being called an anti-semite, suggested strongly that the Jews, as always, were overreacting:

But I have dared to introduce a Jew without holding him up to the admiring worship of the audience as the inheritor of all the virtues and none of the vices of Abraham and Moses, David, and Isaiah.  And instantly you, Lawrence, raise a wail of lamentation and complaint and accuse me of being a modern Torquemada ... You really are the most thoughtless of Sheenies.  However, to please you, I have written up the part a bit.

Shaw pointed to the end of the play as a place where he had been misinterpreted.  He informed Langner that the earth really does not change its trajectory at all.  The introduction of this information is meant to divert the dictators from their petty self-interests and to stop the impending hostilities.  The Jew, according to Shaw, is not profiting from the world's misfortune, but instead is taking advantage of the those foolish enough to believe such a hoax.  He vehemently rejected Langner's criticism of this action and defended the logic of it: "But you will not allow him to do exactly what an able Jew of his type would do when Gentiles were swallowing a terrifying Press canard: that is, go into the money market as a bear speculator and make his fortune."5

     Shaw's reply to Langner and his preface to the published version of the play (1945) reveal an intellectual prejudice that served as a philosophical model for nonracial, secular, left-wing anti-semitism and anti-Zionism that later appeared in the works of Robert Shaw, Christopher Hampton, and Jim Allen.  Shaw suggests that, in many respects, the Jews have brought their fate upon themselves because they "arrogantly" cling to their own religion, language, and culture and consciously desire to be separated from the Gentile community.  Thus, the Jewish desire for autonomy is inherently a provocative and antisocial attitude that leads to understandable consequences.  In a letter to The Observer dated 21 August 1938, Shaw maintained that Jews who assimilated and adopted prevailing national customs should be considered citizens and not members of an alien group: "The observing circumcised Jew from the Ghetto may still present a problem to Gentile States; but an absorbed Jew presents no problem at all, and must be classed as a citizen of the State under which he was born."6

     Shaw's solution to the Jewish problem in 1939 echoes Nietzsche's biological ideas and anticipates the existential definition of the Jew as the Other that Sartre enunciated immediately following the war.  Shaw's answer is that Jews and Germans should intermarry.  This will genetically strengthen the German people and will dilute the cultural identity of Jews.7  The historian Gordon A. Craig points out, however, that such an approach was inherently doomed to fail, particularly in Germany:

For any sensitive person, the dilemma was a cruel one.  If they remained true to their tradition and their religion, the Jews were regarded as an alien element in the social body; if they accepted Christianity and sought to prove themselves good Germans, they were often criticized for arrogance and presumption, their very achievements being used against them to prove they were un-German.  The causus classicus to illustrate the latter reaction is that of Heinrich Heine.8

     Geneva cannot be dismissed as the ravings of an elderly man reaching senility.  Shaw worked on the play, sporadically, over a nine-year period, and the numerous drafts attest to thoroughness on his part.  The play remains, sixty years after its premiere, a paradigmatic model of Holocaust dramaturgy.  Shaw's doubts about the moral superiority of the British to the Nazis were later echoed in the plays of Martin Richter, John Artrobus, Michael Burrell, Edward Bond, David Hare, and Peter Flannery.  The relativistic position that he championed regarding Nazi Germany served as a model for Robert Shaw and Jim Allen.  The confrontation between The Jew and Battler, between the victim and the accused, was repeated, in altered forms, by Arthur Miller, Michael Cristofer, C.P. Taylor, Christopher Hampton, and Peter Flannery.

     The terrible trauma of the Second World War, the sweeping social leveling that occurred in its aftermath, the dissolution of the British Empire that it engendered, and the relatively tiny size of the English Jewish community contributed to the formulation of a national attitude toward the Holocaust that was, and continues to be, an admixture of apathy and dismissiveness.  In fact, a number of critics have commented upon what can only be termed the British propensity for "genteel English anti-semitism."10  There is little sympathy in British intellectual circles for the singular perspective upon the Holocaust that has been championed in America by Wiesel, Fackenheim, and others.  British artists, and particularly playwrights, tend to view the catastrophe that befell European Jewry as part of an historical continuum and not as a unique occurrence that represents a rupture in the Western tradition.

     Although it is impossible to establish a direct connection between Shaw's Geneva and later British plays about the Holocaust, there is little doubt that many works contain Shavian resonances.  There are both ideological and structural correlations between a number of plays and the paradigms contained in Shaw's work.  Common themes in recent plays about the Holocaust revolve around the ideas of moral relativism and historical reductivism, asserting that the actions of the Nazis were no worse than those of other governments and that the suffering of the Jews was no different—qualitatively or quantitatively—from the fate that befell other groups.  In addition, many British plays seek to denigrate Jewish suffering by asserting that the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel are interconnected historical phenomena and that corollaries exist between Nazis and Israelis in that the historical victims have been transformed into the contemporary tormentors.

     Parallels between Geneva, Christopher Hampton's adaptation of George Steiner's novel The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., Robert Shaw's adaptation of his own novel The Man in the Glass Booth, and C.P. Taylor's Good reveal striking similarities in theme and substance.  In each play, Jews are given the opportunity to confront their tormentors.  In each case, the accused Nazis resort to moral relativism and historical reductivism in an attempt to blame the victims for their own fate.  The accused Germans perform linguistic contortions by denying the existence of absolute moral truths by which they can be judged.  They assert that their actions are capriciously defined as crimes when, in fact, their efforts are wholly rational and logical.  In addition, the Nazis taunt their accusers and assert that the Jews have brought their fate upon themselves by their presumption of claiming to be the chosen people and by their failure to assimilate.

     Robert Shaw's The Man in the Glass Booth (1967) is a melodramatic detective story about the psychological strains of survival.  Originally  published as novel, Harold Pinter assisted Shaw in adapting the work for the stage.11  Like most Holocaust dramas about survivors, the play is more concerned with the issues of guilt, justice, and remembrance than with the details of mass destruction.  The action of the play occurs in New York and in Jerusalem between 1964 and 1965.  There are no flashbacks, no enactments of past events, and no detailed descriptions of the concentration camp universe.

     The premise of The Man in the Glass Booth is that a survivor of a concentration camp would assume the persona of a Nazi war criminal in order "to put a German in the dock—a German who would say what no German has said."12  Goldman, the protagonist, is a wealthy industrialist obsessed by his memories and fearful of the "final assimilation" of the Jewish people.  He assumes the identity of Adolf Dorff, a notorious colonel in the Einsatzgruppen, and waits to be arrested by Israeli agents.

     Goldman, on the witness stand, projects himself as an archetypal unrepentant Nazi.  He spews forth hateful diatribes against Jews and Israelis that borrow heavily from revisionist ideologies and anti-Zionist polemics.  Goldman, as Dorff, offers himself as a pharmakos figure upon whom Jews can vent their anger and through whose immolation they can achieve mass catharsis and expurgation.  He believes that a spectacular show trial will galvanize the Jewish people:  "Yes, I'll tell you a joke, Rosy Rosen, I'll tell you a couple of jokes and I'll bleed you that blood you're talkin' about" (34).

     Goldman's fantasy is brought to an abrupt end when an old woman steps forth at the trial and accuses him of lying.  The woman identifies Goldman as a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp and asserts that Dorff was killed when the camp was liberated.  She proclaims, "I must interrupt now because he is enjoying himself too much" (54).  Goldman's desire to provide an antithetical model to the banality of Eichmann is thwarted by the old woman.  He is crushed by his defeat and ultimately driven mad, but in his final lucid moment he addresses her: "Sweetheart, you did me.  Where's your brains?  You're senile.  You should never have spoke.  Wanted to make some offering for them—something they'd understand.  Wanted to let them take me up and swing me north, south, east, and west" (58).

     Goldman, impersonating Dorff, delivers a terrifying anti-semitic tirade on the witness stand that is not ideologically countered.  The madness of the protagonist at the end of the piece discredits his oratory to a certain extent, but the specific points he raises are never refuted.  Goldman/Dorff asserts that the Jews were arrogant sheep whose presumption of being divinely chosen blinded them to the reality of their material situation.  The weak-willed, selfish Jews were an easy target for extermination, and they eagerly aided and abetted the Nazis.

     Christopher Hampton's dramatic adaptation of George Steiner's novel The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1982) is another British Holocaust drama that uses anti-semitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric to shock, bewilder, and alienate Anglo-American audiences.  Hampton's play presents a Manichean interpretation of survival after the Holocaust.  The goodness in people that prompts remembrance and causes them to seek redress for injustice ultimately leads to the re-articulation and repetition of the evil that spawned the need for vigilance in the first place.

     The play is predicated upon the farfetched premise that Adolf Hitler has been tracked down somewhere in the jungles of South America by a group of Israeli agents.  The commandos, fearing that they will never escape the wilderness alive, decide to put their prisoner on trial.  Compelled by their sense of justice and their respect for law, they allow Hitler to speak in his own defense.  Hitler launches into an extended monologue, taken practically verbatim from Steiner's novel, that manipulates and convolutes Jewish theology and historical reality to create a shocking theatrical tour de force.  Hitler's defense is a clinical and seemingly rational delineation of moral relativism and historical revisionism.  The speech, a judicious mixture of fact and fantasy, is compelling and hypnotic.  Hitler manipulates truth just as he manipulates language; the absurd is made rational and the fallacious believable.  The audience is, or should be, alienated by its own reaction to the theatrical event in an experience of simultaneous fascination and horror.

     C.P. Taylor's Good (1981) is an expressionistic examination of an individual who allows himself to be seduced into the Nazi movement.  Several scenes, temporally located between 1933 and 1942 and spatially distanced as far apart as Frankfurt, Berlin, and Auschwitz, are fluidly bridged by an ever-present musical score that humorously comments upon the unfolding action.  The play occurs within the mind of John Halder, a professor of literature noted for his work on Goethe.  Halder is a bourgeois intellectual who has made his peace with the world by shutting out the realities of the situation.  He justifies and rationalizes his behavior as he moves from a state of relative moral innocence to one of complete degeneracy.

     Halder's best friend, a Jewish psychoanalyst named Maurice Gluckstein, plays a pivotal role in the drama as the embodiment of Halder's conscience and his last link to a rational sense of morality.  Maurice is also something of a loathsome figure in the play.  He is, in many respects, as self-centered as Halder and much more of an anti-semite.  He admits that he "can't stand" Jews, and his greatest regret is not that the Nazis have come to power but that they have rejected him.  Maurice refuses to accept the seriousness of the situation and, in a speech that is reminiscent of the nameless Jew in Geneva, arrogantly asserts that Germany is dependent upon Jews for its national survival:  "Listen, I know how much Germany depends on Jewish brains...Jewish business...Hitler's got all the power he needs now.  They're bound to drop all that racial shit they had to throw around to get their votes."13

     During the course of the play, Halder joins the party and enlists in the SS.  He leads a book-burning rally at Frankfurt University, where he teaches; participates in Kristallnacht,; draws up plans for euthanasia centers; and finally becomes Eichmann's personal representative at Auschwitz.  Along the way he deserts his ailing mother, leaves his wife and children, and refuses to help Maurice escape.  Halder is no mere bystander to the Holocaust, or even an anonymous bureaucrat.  He is an active and important participant who, as a professor of literature, has the intellectual capability to serve up self-justifying rhetoric.

     Good is subtitled "A Tragedy," but in fact it is hardly one.  The often humorous use of music, the representation of Hitler as a Yiddish street musician, and the continual irony of the dialogue purposely undercuts any sense of tragedy that the play might have engendered.  Andrew Kennedy hailed Good because "comic theatricality is used, along with music, as the solvent for a disturbing inquest."14

     C.P. Taylor embraces the notion of moral relativism first set forth by Shaw.   Both writers refuse to accept Nazi barbarism as a discrete historical aberration.  They insist that the movement is indicative of a greater universal moral dilemma.  In the preface of Good, Taylor asserts:

The writing of the play is my response to a deeply felt, and deeply experienced trauma in recent history, the Third Reich's war on the Jews, as well as an intellectual awareness, not at all deeply felt, of my role as a 'Peace Criminal' in the Peace 'Crimes' of the West against the Third World—my part in the Auschwitzes we are all perpetrating today (xi).

     Battler, in Geneva, begins his defense against the accusations of the nameless Jew by stating that his policies are no different from those of the Americans toward the Japanese or the British toward a host of colonial peoples.  Shaw refuses to pass moral judgment upon Hitler's actions and insists upon pointing out the hypocrisy of his detractors.  In a letter to Nancy Astor dated 28 September 1939, Shaw asserts that Hitler "is obsessed by a Jewish complex," which has led to "wholesale persecution and robbery." He adds, however, that it is the British, in their treatment of the Boer population in South Africa, who have provided Hitler with a working model and a historical precedent:  "Nothing should be said about concentration camps, because it was we who invented them."15  The character of Hitler in The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. uses this same argument to deflect charges of atrocities: "What were Rotterdam or Coventry compared to Dresden and Hiroshima?  Did I invent the camps?  Ask the Boers.  But let's be serious ... Stalin slaughtered thirty million.  He perfected Genocide when I was still a nameless scribbler in Munich."16

     Battler, in Geneva, appropriates and convolutes Jewish theology when he declares "I will condescend to tell this fellow from the Ghetto that to every superior race that is faithful to itself a messiah is sent" (7:134).  The character of Hitler, in Hampton's play, extrapolates upon this point and asserts that he is not only the Messiah of the German people but is ultimately the savior of the Jews:

Perhaps I am the Messiah, the true Messiah, the new Sabbatai, whose infamous deeds were allowed by God in order to bring his people home.  'The Holocaust was the necessary mystery before Israel could come into its strength.'  It wasn't I who said that, but your own visionaries, your unravelers of God's meaning on a Friday night in Jerusalem.  Should you not honour me?  Who have made you into men of war, who have made of the long, vacuous daydream of Zion a reality?  Should you not be a comfort to my old age? (74).

     John Halder, the protagonist in C.P. Taylor's Good, also convolutes and misappropriates Jewish theology.  While lecturing his university students he states that the basic tenet of Judaism is arrogant selfishness and cites the Talmudic scholar Hillel to support his claim: "If I am not for myself, then who is for me" (73).  The professor, however, fails to quote Hillel correctly and deletes the line that completes the Jewish philosopher's thought: "and if I am only for myself, then what am I?"  Halder manipulates Hillel's words to justify the Nazi program against the Jews and to put forth the notion that the philosophy of National Socialism is superior to the Judeo-Christian tradition because it puts the community before self.17  Halder, like Battler in Geneva, Hitler in The Portage to Cristobal of A.H., and Goldman/Dorff in The Man in the Glass Booth engages in linguistic contortions to justify the Nazi program.  According to Halder, the Jews are to blame for their own demise because "they are responsible for pushing Germany into this Jewish, moralistic, humanistic, Marxist total fuck up"(83).  Halder rationalizes and intellectualizes genocide by refusing to accept responsibility for either his own actions or those of the Nazis:
I'm talking about objective moral truth, Maurice.  What is an objective Moral Truth?  I'm not being profound, Maurice...I'm just coming to grips with reality...What has happened, is we have confused subjective fantasy concepts like good, bad, right, wrong, human, inhuman...as objective, immutable laws of the universe. (84).

     In the work of Shaw there is always suspicion towards objective moral truths.  In Major Barbara, for example, Shaw celebrates the honesty and achievements of the arms merchant Andrew Undershaft and exposes the hypocrisy of the Salvation Army.  Shaw attempts to do much the same in Geneva by demonstrating that the fascist leader Battler is a totally rational and logical figure who behaves in a manner no different from that of the leaders of the self-congratulatory Western democracies.  The innocent and well-meaning nameless Jew, like Barbara Undershaft, is revealed to be a self-deluded figure who accepts the true nature of his character at the end of the play when he deserts his moral stance and departs the stage to make a profit in the stock market.

     In the preface to Major Barbara, Shaw observes that "the universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization, the one sound spot on our social conscience.  Money is the most important thing in the world.  It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty as consciously and undeniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness."18  Shaw does not criticize or pass moral judgment upon Andrew Undershaft for being an arms merchant and neither does he condemn the nameless Jew for his actions in the stock market.  Undershaft and the Jew are to be commended for their honesty and industriousness.

     Peter Barnes in Laughter! (1978), and Peter Flannery in Singer (1989) present post-war visions that resonate with Shavian overtones.  Both playwrights suggest that moral standards in contemporary Germany and England are dictated by unadulterated capitalism.  In the second act of Laughter!, a black marketeer named Wochner, foresees the future of the German nation: "And I want to see another miracle, when this country's business'll only be business.  Nothing'll stop us then, we'll be the paymasters of Europe.  It'll be easy.  No more uncertainties, we'll be able to judge a man's worth at a glance by his credit rating, know right from wrong, success from failure, by the amount of money in our pockets."19

     The title character in Singer is a Polish Jew who survives the Holocaust and becomes a British citizen.  Like the nameless Jew in Geneva, Singer profits from the misery and stupidity of others.  He turns into a viscous slumlord and makes a fortune by taking advantage of refugees in London.  After confronting the now enfeebled Nazi guard who tormented him in at Auschwitz, Singer undergoes a transformation of spirit and spends "twenty years of sackcloth and ashes" attempting to become the first Jewish Saint in order to redeem his past sins. [83]  In the 1980s, however, at the height of Thatcherism, Singer's name and reputation is resurrected, not for his acts of charity and piety, but for the ruthlessness of his early business success.  The Conservative Minister De Knop, sounding eerily like Andrew Undershaft, describes Singer's slumlord behavior as morally commendable: "I studied your methods, as a youth.  I modeled myself on you.  Your picture was on my wall.  I found out what you found out, but let's not go into that when we're here to talk about the poor homeless people.  Let me see if I can phrase this nicely.  In your day you were free, am I right, Mr. Singer?  May I call you Peter?  Nobody went without a home because you were allowed to find a spot for the poorest man."20  Barnes and Flannery create nightmare portraits of a contemporary world driven by the greed of unrestrained amoral capital.  The Conservative Ministers in "The Great Housekeeper's" England, according to Peter Flannery, are not benevolent Andrew Undershafts, but modern-day Nazis.

     Richard Nickson in an article entitled "The Art of Shavian Political Drama" describes Geneva as an "apocalyptic comedy" that serves as a clarion cry to a society headed towards catastrophe: "By evoking a fantastic, nightmarish atmosphere within the extravaganza medium that he fashioned for this sobering purpose, he was able to record, despite waning powers, the turbulent flux of contemporary life, the social restlessness, the political quandary."  Nickson asserts that Shaw has been unfairly attacked by critics who have misconstrued the author's intentions, and he vigorously denies there is any hint in Geneva that Shaw had become in his dotage either a "Fascist, Bolshevist or Totalitarian," and derides critics who characterize Geneva "as the fulminations of an old man disillusioned with his earlier convictions."21

     While noting Dickson's defense, it must be emphasized that Shaw's decision to publish Geneva in 1945, after the liberation of the concentration camps and the revelations that followed, reveals a stubbornness of character and blindness to reality that is difficult to fathom and justify.  Shaw's dismissal of the evidence about the killing operations and his refusal to express any outrage toward the actions of Hitler demonstrate a moral lapse that casts a pall over his career.  Geneva is one of the lesser known works in the Shavian canon, but it is undoubtedly one of the most troubling plays he ever wrote.

     Throughout his career, Bernard Shaw championed the use of comedy to investigate social issues.  In early works written at the end of the 19th century such as Mrs. Warren's Profession, Arms And the Man, and Candida, Shaw established a dramaturgical model that was emulated by later generations of British playwrights, especially those writing works about the Holocaust.  Peter Barnes, Peter Flannery, C.P. Taylor, and numerous others utilize comedic elements in their treatments of the historical tragedy.  Why comedy?  Part of the reason lies in the inability of any playwright to represent such an ineffable reality.  Another reason, however, is purely strategic.  Playwrights seeking to confront and challenge an audience with the terror and horror of the event must put the material in a palatable, and dare I say, an enjoyable form.  One option is to provide the catharsis of tragedy and to have the audience feel better about itself because they have identified with the heroic and tragic death of the protagonist.  Another option is to create a comedy that will entertain while imparting a didactic lesson.  This approach, perfected by Bernard Shaw and championed by Friedrich Durrenmattt, has wide appeal.  Comedy, however, is intrinsically a dangerous form of representation that can be self-defeating.

      The critic Susan Carlson points out the contradictory nature of the comedic genre.  She asserts that while most comedy attacks the social order, such works ultimately undercut their critical stance by providing reassuring endings that serve to promote the very hierarchies that are being attacked.  Carlson points out articulately the conundrum of the comic writer who serves as a social critic:

But although we may cringe at the graceless, mechanical image of comedy as a social 'safety valve' through which we vent the steam of our disease, most of us do respond to that cleansing function of comedy.  We register comedy's social criticism, while still warming (even against our better intentions) to the happy endings which assure us of a continuing order (paradoxically, the very order that has been criticized).22

     Laughter! concludes with an "epilogue" that serves as a summation for the entire piece.  The "epilogue," staged inside the gas chamber at Auschwitz, is one of the most grotesque moments in the history of world theater.  Two actors dressed in concentration camp uniforms with yellow Stars of David, sporting top hats and canes, appear in the spotlight and proceed to perform a dance and patter routine to the tune of "On the Sunny Side of the Street."  Just as this image sinks into the consciousness of the audience, the two characters, Bieberstein and Bimko, launch into a Catskill comedy shtick.  As the jokes get sicker and sicker—"According to the latest statistics, one man dies in this camp everytime I breathe." ... "Have you tried toothpaste? ... "No, the Dental Officer said my teeth were fine, only the gums have to come out"—a hissing sound is heard and the spotlight throws blue light onto the stage: The scene shifts to the Auschwitz gas chamber.  The two performers proceed to cough, stagger and eventually collapse as they continue telling jokes.  Bimko tells his partner that "this act's dead on its feet" (409).  The spotlight fades out and the two Jews die in darkness.

     The "epilogue," according to Barnes, is not intended to be the least bit funny.  He believes all that proceeds it serves to prepare the audience for the irony of the conclusion.25  For the play to work, however, the audience must catch itself wanting to laugh.  The problem for some critics, and apparently for most audience members was that the play not humorous enough to establish the necessary foundation for the "epilogue."  Robert Cushman, reviewing the piece in The Observer, asserted it was "very feeble," and devoid of humor because "Mr. Barnes can't write jokes."26  Barnes himself became cognizant of the problem when viewing the play in performance.  But he believed that it was a failing not of the script but a product of British sensibilities:
 

 When we did Laughter! at the Royal Court, I used to go into performances, and I felt waves of hate coming out of the audience.  They actively loathed it.  Actively.  It came up like steam.  The actors used to say: 'God we could feel it up on the stage.'  The British want a theater of reassurance, one of affirmation.  They do not want a theater of disturbance.  They do not want to have to reexamine any of the accepted ways of looking at the world of society. 27

Obviously, the epilogue of Laughter! is a product of Peter Barnes' imagination.  Jews did not perform song and dance routines within the confines of the Auschwitz gas chamber.  But Barnes maintains that the underlying idea of the epilogue is 'rooted' in fact and that Jews did indeed laugh at their own plight even inside the concentration camps.  He cites as an example the behavior of Jewish prisoners at Buchenwald:

 
At the height of the mass executions in Buchenwald the camp authorities allowed the prisoners to put on a concert.  The biggest success of the evening was a marvelous Jewish comedian who came on the stage dressed in black and walking behind a coffin.  He then proceeded to lament at great length and with much ironic humour the death of his old father.  The audience of guards and shaven inmates roared with laughter.  Whilst all around them the incinerators were burning hundreds of corpses a day, here was someone actually in mourning for a man who had died of old age.  It was too funny for words.29

NOTES:

1.  Gerard Anthony Pilecki, Shaw's Geneva: A Critical Study of the Evolution of the Text (London: Mouton, 1965), p. 168.

 2.  John Gassner, Master of the Drama (New York: Random House, 1954), p. 628.

 3.  Bernard Shaw, Geneva, Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays,  vol. 7 (London: The Bodley Head, 1974), 7:133.

 4.  Lawrence Langner, The Magic Curtain (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1951), 455-56.

 5.  Langner, The Magic Curtain, 457.

 6.  Shaw, Letter, Observer, 21 August. 1938, cited in "Accompanying Notes," Geneva, 7:168.

 7.  Shaw, accompanying notes to Geneva, 7:168.

 8.  Gordan A. Craig, The Germans (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, Inc., 1982), 132.

 9.  Shaw, prologue to Geneva, 7:31-32.

 10. Calvin Trillin, "Drawing The Line," New Yorker 12 December 1994, 50-62.

 11. John French, Robert Shaw: The Price of Success (London: Nick Hern, 1993), 107.

 12.  Robert Shaw, The Man in the Glass Booth (New York: Samuel French, 1968), 57.

 13.  C.P. Taylor, Good: A Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1982), 10.

 14. Andrew Kennedy, "The Theatre Breeds Comedy," Modern Drama 31, no. 4 (1988): 476.

 15.  Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1926-1950, ed. Dan H. Laurence (New York: Viking, 1988), 540.

 16.  Christopher Hampton, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), 72-73.

 17.  See Bernard Dukore’s "People Like You and Me: The Auschwitz Plays of Peter Barnes and C.P. Taylor," Essays in
        Theater3, no. 2 (1985): 108-124.
 
 18.  Bernard Shaw, preface to Major Barbara, ed. Dan H. Laurence (Middlesex: Penguin, 1985), 21-22.

 19.  Peter Barnes, Laughter! in Collected Plays (London: Heinemann, 1981),  386.

 20.  Peter Flannery, Singer (London: Nick Hern Books, 1989), 86.

 21.  Richard Nickson, "The Art of Shavian Political Drama,"  Modern Drama 14, no. 3 (1971): 324-330.

 22. Susan Carlson, "Comic Collisions: Conventions, Rage, and Order," New Theatre Quarterly 3, no. 12 (1987): 303.

 23. Mark Bly and Doug Wager, "Theater of the Extreme: An Interview with Peter Barnes," Theater 12, no. 2 (1981): 46.

 24. Bly and Wager, "Theater of the Extreme," 46.

 25. Carlson, "Comic Collisions," 309.

 26.  Robert Cushman, "Not So Funny," review of Laughter! by Peter Barnes, Observer 29 January 1978: 26.

 27. Bly and Wager, "Theater of the Extreme," 45.

 28. Irving Wardle, "Laughter!," review of Laughter! by Peter Barnes, Times  25 January 1978, 13.

 29. Stephen Tifft, "Miming the Fuhrer: To Be or Not To Be and the Mechanisms of Outrage," The Yale Journal of Criticism 5,
        no. 1 (1991): 6.