by Bernard Shaw.
(See columns 2 and 3)

[Starring] Margaret Lockwood with John Gregson

(Margaret Lockwood appears by permission of Herbert Wilcox; John Gregson by permission of the J. Arthur Rank Organisation Ltd.)

Cast in order of appearance [see below]

at 8.45

Shaw's first, and perhaps more apt, title for this play was The Witch of Atlas. It is set in Morocco - the greater part of it in the Atlas mountains - and the principal character is Lady Cicely Waynflete, a typical Shavian heroine. She has beauty, brains, charm, and a devastatingly simple way of deflating pomp and braggadocio; with her uncommon sense she flattens all around her. She does not so much convert people as utterly demoralise them.

The plot is complicated and is a sly dag at the melodramas still popular when Shaw wrote it (1899). Lady Cicely, an intrepid traveller, arrives on a visit to the Atlas mountains with her brother-in-law, a High Court judge. As escort and body-guard they hire Captain Brassbound, a local pirate and smuggler, and his renegade crew. Then the complications begin. There are sudden and melodramatic revelations which upset the men and leave Lady Cicely as sweetly and maddeningly reasonable as ever.

Shaw wrote this play specially for Ellen Terry. Though he had never met her at the time, he had been carrying on his famous correspondence with her for years. He wrote later: 'When her first grandchild was born Ellen said that nobody would ever write a play for her now she was a grandmother. I said I would; and Brassbound was the result.' But for various reasons, Ellen Terry was not free to do it.

Brassbound was given its first performance in 1900 by the Stage Society for just one Sunday night. Only for one thing was the performance memorable: it was back-stage that night that Shaw and Ellen Terry first met. She thought him 'a good, kind, gentile creature,' not at all what she had expected from his letters to her and his criticisms.

The play did not get its first public performance until it was put on at the Court Theatre in 1906, this time with Ellen Terry in the lead. Shaw wrote to her then: 'I will gravely offer this impossible quintessence of Ellen as a real woman; and everybody will be delighted.' Not everybody was delighted, however, nor was the play a financial success. Brassbound is not a good example of Shaw the dramatist of ideas, but it is a fine example of Shaw the theatrical craftsman. It is Shaw having fun - and highly ingenious fun.
(James Doran)