"Men in the Lump Cannot Govern Themselves"

George Bernard Shaw's The Apple Cart: A Political Extravaganza is an insightful and witty play. Written in 1928, the play is set in the future (this is shown shockingly on stage by the presence of a brain, suspended in bubbling liquid [like a fish tank], that talks). In the first act, the ministers debate with the king, bringing up the debate between monarchy and republicanism. Shaw questions the benefits of democratic rule, maintaining that the people can be manipulated to vote for anyone; this manipulation looks just like rule by elites.

But I'll let Shaw describe it himself, as he does in the preface to the play: "What was all this pother about? I had written a comedy in which a King defeats an attempt by his popularly elected Prime Minister to deprive him of the right to influence public opinion through the press and the platform: in short, to reduce him to a cipher. The King's reply is that rather than be a cipher he will abandon his throne and take his obviously very rosy chance of becoming a popularly elected Prime Minister himself. To those who believe that our system of votes for everybody produces parliaments which represent the people it should seem that this solution of the difficulty is completely democratic, and that the Prime Minister must at once accept it joyfully as such. He knows better. The change would rally the anti-democratic royalist vote against him, and impose on him a rival in the person of the only public man whose ability he has to fear. The comedic paradox of the situation is that the King wins, not by exercising his royal authority, but by threatening to resign it and go to the democratic poll."

In the interlude, we see the King's mistress arguing that she should be his queen. Here we see him putting passion firmly in the private sphere--his current queen better suits the manners and order needed for his job (in the play, the same woman played his mistress and his queen). Great line in an otherwise unremarkable WaPo review: "[The play] even has sex appeal when Peggy Yates, playing Orinthia the Beloved, slithers all over a stuffed eggplant-colored couch as well as Herring’s all-but-defenseless Magnus." I don't know that I'd call it sex appeal, although she does throw herself at him; however, the couch is certainly eggplant (well, actually, or maybe an eggplant/plum blend).

In the second and final act, America decides to nullify the Declaration of Independence and join back up with England. This is a delightful and hilarious idea--America has really already colonized England economically and with her "unique and universal culture." As the American Ambassador tells the Queen, "The United States, ma'am, have absorbed all the great national traditions, and blended them with their own glorious tradition of Freedom into something that is unique and universal." England has, in fact, exported her tradition to America: Ely Cathedral, for instance, has been moved to New Jersey. (This reminded me of something that I dreamed after one of my first trips to Europe and a subsequent drive to Texas with Stearns: there was a touring cathedral on wheels that you had to pay to enter. I was so disappointed in American capitalism, which seems to hit its climax in the ubiquitous Texas strip malls, set a little back from the highway and the only thing with any decoration at all down there.)

The play really was set in the future--two of the cabinet ministers are women--there's Amanda, the Postmistress General, and Lysistrata, the Powermistress General (nothing heavy handed here!). Amanda is flirty and silly, singing songs all the time and giggling. Lizzie, as she's called, is much more serious. It is Lizzie who best articulates one of the biggest themes of the play--its critique of capitalism in the form of Breakages, Limited, the company that actually wields the power in England. Breakages, Limited suppresses inventions in fact, relying on things breaking down for their continued power. As Lizzie says, "Every breakdown, every accident, every smash and crash, is a job for them."

The women in the play are extremes--Amanda is girly, while Lizzie is the hard schoolmistress type: "When will you learn, Nicobar, that it is no use trying to browbeat me. I began life as a schoolmistress; and I can browbeat any man in this Cabinet or out of it if he is fool enough to try to compete with me in that department." Orinthia, the King's mistress is all lust and passion; the King's wife, on the other hand, is all manners and order, with not a drop of passion. The play likens one to a rose and the other to a cabbage. This division between the public and private is never clearer than when the King says to his mistress, "We cannot talk to one another in public: we have nothing to say that could be said before other people. Yet we find enough to say to one another when we are alone together." Their relationship is only one of the private realm, and the private realm is divorced from the public (as can be seen by the way that Shaw squeezes it in in the interlude between two acts).

I think, although I'm not sure, that the beginning of the play is a dig at our own dear TSE:

"PAMPHILIUS. What was your father?

SEMPRONIUS [startled] Eh?

PAMPHILIUS. What was your father?

SEMPRONIUS. My father?

PAMPHILIUS. Yes. What was he?

SEMPRONIUS. A Ritualist.

PAMPHILIUS. I don't mean his religion. I mean his profession. And his politics.

SEMPRONIUS. He was a Ritualist by profession, a Ritualist in politics, a Ritualist in religion: a raging emotional Die Hard Ritualist right down to his boots."

This was published in, I think, the same year that TSE wrote his famous line about being an Anglo-catholic in religion, classicist in literature, and conservative in politics in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes.


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