Bernard Shaw's 1907 play about a weapons manufacturer
By Robert Fisk:
And so to Major Barbara at the Abbey. Every
Western arms salesman I have met – usually at arms “fairs” in the Gulf – knows
Andrew Undershaft, the grotesque, brilliant, intellectual weapons manufacturer
in George Bernard Shaw’s 1907 play who abides by the faith of the armourer:
“To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of
persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to nihilist and Tsar, to
Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman,
to black man, white man and yellow man, to… all nationalities, all faiths, all
follies, all causes and all crimes.”
Shaw had an ambiguous relationship with post-independence Ireland
– he did not believe in the Celtic ideal or the neo-Gaelic movement – and
incredibly this is the Dublin Abbey Theatre’s first performance of Shaw’s most
socialist of plays. As director Annabelle Comyn remarked, Major Barbara’s
themes – of poverty, welfare, the labour market advocating for better
conditions – are relevant today in Ireland
as well as Britain .
But it still contains a painful message to the Middle East, and not just
because it is set during the Balkan wars; the character of Adolphus Cusins, a
professor of Greek soon to inherit Undershaft’s magnificent, oh-so-clean,
labour-intensive, pseudo-socialist Middlesex weapons plant, admits that he gave
a revolver to a student to fight for Greece. “The blood of every Turk he shot …
is on my head as well as Undershaft’s.” That’s all the Muslims get in Major
Barbara.
But in the past in the Middle East ,
it was very easy to sympathise with Major Barbara herself, the Salvation Army daughter of Undershaft – and fiancée of
Cusins – who saves souls in the East End of London. “There are neither good men
nor scoundrels,” she pompously informs her father. “There are just children of
one Father … I know them. I’ve had scores of them through my hands: scoundrels,
criminals, infidels, philanthropists, missionaries, county councillors …
They’re all just the same sort of sinner; and there’s the same salvation ready
for them all.”
The play’s contrived but still relevant hinge creaks when
the Salvation Army is forced to accept money from both Undershaft and a whiskey
magnate – the destroyers of people, if not souls – in order to remain active.
But this devilish compromise is now more relevant than ever;
not because Tony Blair abandoned a criminal inquiry into bribery
by a British arms manufacturer in Saudi Arabia to protect “the national
interest”, nor because the late Robin Cook’s mission statement on weapons sales
– only to sell to the good guys – fell to pieces, but because Major Barbara herself,
along with her ruthless father, have today become one. Barbara’s self-denial, her craving after salvation and God,
have been echoed to the letter by George W Bush and Blair and now by Barack
Obama. True, they all believe(d) in good and bad – or “evil” – but they all
held God close to their heart. They all preached, especially Blair and Obama,
with salvationist obsession. Barbara is undoubtedly “faith-based”, like our
Tony. Obama likes making speeches – like Barbara, but also like Undershaft. You
can listen to Barbara admit to a dockland bully that her father was “a
Secularist”, just as Obama told his audience in Cairo that he came from a
family which included “generations of Muslims”. And when Barbara asks her
father to define his faith – and he replies: “Well, my dear, I am a
millionaire. That is my religion” – you can almost hear Blair breathing.
There’s a wonderful moment at the arms foundry when
Undershaft arrives with a telegram to tell his family of “good news from Manchuria ”.
Another Japanese victory, he is asked? “Oh, I don’t know,” he replies. “Which
side wins does not concern us here. No: the good news is that the aerial
battleship is a tremendous success. At the first trial it has wiped out a fort
with three hundred soldiers in it.” These are not dummy soldiers blown to bits,
he assures his family. It’s “the real thing”.
Undershaft’s “aerial battleship” – elsewhere an “aerial
torpedo” – is, of course, our drone. Just as this weekend we were asked
to celebrate the killing of six al-Qa’ida members in Yemen and five insurgents
in the Sinai, northern Egypt – most assuredly “the real thing” by “aerial
battleships” belonging to Messrs Obama and Netanyahu – so Undershaft produces
these wonder-weapons in a squeaky-clean armaments factory whose workers worship
at brand new churches and live in comfortable houses in the safety of
Middlesex. The drone commanders of today, like Undershaft’s men, work
from equally squeaky-clean computer consoles.
Put bluntly, our leaders speak in the language of Major
Barbara – of salvation and human rights – while producing the weapons
to obliterate fellow men. At least Undershaft implies that the innocent also
die under his guns. Barbara speaks of “the power to burn women’s houses down
and … tear their husbands to pieces” – Shaw would have made endless play of
“collateral damage” – but Syria
is providing countless opportunities for Russian and Western arms-makers;
giving to Alawite and Sunni, to “all causes and all crimes”.
At the end of the play, Cusins agrees to inherit Undershaft’s
factory so that he can “make war on war”. How that would appeal to Bush, Blair
and Obama. Finally, Cusins announces that he wants “a power simple enough for
common men to use, yet strong enough to force the intellectual oligarchy to use
its genius for the general good.” No Labour election manifesto should be
without this line... read more:
