[These notes were made in 1982:]. Source - U of C. There is an overwhelming temptation here to make the obvious
bon mot: that the play itself is "too true to be good", so full of "statement" that it neglects "art". But in fact, after a lapse of three weeks, my lingering impression of the play is that its "statement" - intentionally or not - is not the best part of it, and that its principal merit might well be that it will come off well on the stage. That remains to be seen, for I am unfortunately not gifted with that kind of visual imagination which transforms the written text onto an imaginary stage. I will therefore be most interested to see what the Shaw Festival makes of it. As to the "statement" itself, which centres around the paradox of a churchman who is a rogue, and his father, an upright atheist - and who is in fact the truer man, given the horror of the Great War; it all may have had some validity when it was written - although it was some thirteen years after the end of WWI - but now it just seems like a rather self-conscious paradox, too simple for the complexity of modern-day despair.
