Update or Adapt a Classic?

Recently I saw a university production of George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 play, Major Barbara. Shaw’s usual themes of capitalism versus socialism and class conflict are front and center in this comedy-drama about a Salvation Army major whose father is a successful arms manufacturer.

One might think that setting this play in the 1960s—the Vietnam War era and a time of major social upheaval—would work well. However, in this updating the play was still set in England, which experienced the Vietnam conflict only peripherally. And Britain’s social upheaval of this period was centered mainly in fashion and popular music.

Leave aside the dreadful British accents and the apparent direction to the actors to speak their lines fast and loud, which rendered half the dialogue in this production incomprehensible, and what remained was a staging that jarred against the play’s central themes. Sure, the Sixties fashions were fun for both actors and audience, but in other respects Shaw’s work was almost wholly obscured, at best reduced to flash and drivel.

Shaw’s play, in hindsight, is piquant not only because of the playwright’s sharp-tongued dialogue but also because the themes in 1905 seem prescient. World War I loomed less than a decade into the future when this script first hit the boards in London. American audiences likely found the play even more pertinent when it opened on Broadway in 1915.

If the play were to be set in the Sixties, a full-out adaptation might have made more sense, moving the action from England to the United States and tweaking the dialogue accordingly. America in that era was feeling the effects of an unpopular war and a cultural revolution, the latter driven not merely by music and fashion but by the civil rights and women’s rights movements—all of which have more resonance to Shaw’s themes than what was happening in Britain at the same time.

Whether to produce a classic such as this one as it was written, to update it mainly by moving the action to a more recent time, or to adapt it more deeply presents many challenges. Will the original seem outdated? Will an updating hold too many anachronisms to be effective? Will a comprehensive adaptation go too far and lose the thrust of the original altogether? These are difficult questions.

The British Sixties setting of Major Barbara in this instance failed to consider these questions sufficiently, and so the update came off as superficial and did little justice to Shaw’s ideas, quite apart from massacring his language.