FESTIVAL THEATRE JUNE 14 TO OCTOBER 11 THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE BERNARD SHAW TADEUSZ BRADECKI, Director

The Devil’s Disciple

Set during the American War of Independence in a New Hampshire town, The Devil’s Disciple is Bernard Shaw’s only full-length play set in America. In it, he takes all of the essential elements of a standard melodrama, and the notion of the ‘romantic hero’ in the form of Dick Dudgeon, and turns them inside out.

Bernard Shaw was approached by the actor-manager William Terris to write something for him to perform on his world tour. His idea was that Shaw could take all of the stock melodrama situations – the evicted widow, the befriended orphan, the swapped identity, the heroine’s swoon, the reprieve from the scaffold – and string them together in a play. Shaw was not interested in that idea but was keen to write a play for Terris, using the elements of melodrama. “A good melodrama,” he wrote to Ellen Terry, “is a more difficult thing to write than all this clever-clever comedy: one must go straight to the core of humanity to get it, and if it is only good enough, why, there you have Lear or Macbeth.” He wrote to Terris that what the world would want of him was not burlesque but something like Hamlet, “on popular lines” and wrote The Devil’s Disciple, subtitled “A Melodrama”.

In his introduction to the play, Shaw sets the political scene: “The year 1777 is the one in which the passions roused by the breaking-off of the American colonies from England, more by their own weight than by their own will, boiled up to shooting point, the shooting being idealized to the English mind as suppression of rebellion and maintenance of British dominion, and to the American as defence of liberty, resistance to tyranny, and self-sacrifice on the altar of the Rights of Man…suffice it to say, without prejudice, that they have convinced both Americans and English that the most high-minded course for them to pursue is to kill as many of one another as possible…”

The play opens on a wintery night as Mrs Dudgeon waits to hear news about her husband. His brother was hung as a rebel and he had fallen ill on the journey to see him. Her son Christy brings news that her husband has died. When the minister, Anthony Anderson, arrives to bring the news of Mr Dudgeon’s will he brings even more distressing news. Her other son, Richard (Dick), had also attended his uncle’s hanging. Then he announces that a new will had been written and all of her husband’s money has been willed to Dick Dudgeon – the black sheep of the family, known as the devil’s disciple.

We move to Minister Anderson’s home where he lives with his wife, Judith. Anderson has sent for Dick Dudgeon to warn him that he is in danger of being hanged as the next rebel but before he can tell him, he is called to Mrs Dudgeon’s house. When the soldiers arrive, Judith and Dick are there alone and the soldiers arrest Dick, mistaking him for the Minister. Dick does not attempt to correct their mistake and tells Judith to tell her husband that he can depend on him, that “I am steadfast in my religion as he is in his, and that he may depend on me to the death.” And he steals a kiss from her before he is taken away to be hanged.

The final act of the play centres on the trial of Dick Dudgeon, where the play’s sense of humour kicks into high gear. We’re introduced to one of Shaw’s funniest characters – General John Burgoyne and he and Dick wage a war of wits where Dick’s motives are questioned. Is he a hero? A martyr? Why did Dudgeon, who seems to revere nothing outside of his own instincts, give himself up? Was it for love, country, duty?

This play was last seen at the Shaw Festival in 1996 and was previously produced in 1984 and 1974. The play was presented for the first time in the Hermanus Bleecker Hall in Albany on Oct. 1, 1897, and was such a success that it transferred three days later to the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York, where it ran for 64 performances. By the end of the year, Shaw told Ellen Terry: ’’I roll in gold”, thanks to the success of this play. The Shaw Festival production will be directed by Tadeusz Bradecki, and features Evan Buliung as Dick Dudgeon, Fiona Byrne as Judith Anderson and Peter Krantz as Minister Anderson.