Джордж Бернард Шоудың «Фаннидің алғашқы пьесасы» тарихы

Play by George Bernard Shaw

Fanny's First Play is a 1911 play by George Bernard Shaw. It was first performed as an anonymous piece, the authorship of which was to be kept secret. However, critics soon recognised it as the work of Shaw. It opened at the Little Theatre in the Adelphi in London on 19 April 1911 and ran for 622 performances. The mystery over the authorship helped to publicise it. It had the longest run of any of Shaw's plays. A second production opened on Broadway on September 16, 1912 for 256 performances. The play toured the provinces in England in the same year. It features a play within a play. The framing play is a satire of theatre critics, whose characters were based upon Shaw's own detractors, in some cases being caricatures of real critics of the day. The main play is a pastiche of the drawing room comedies in vogue at the time.

Shaw introduced the published text of the work with a few words: "Being a potboiler it needs no preface. Its lesson is not, I am sorry to say, unneeded that in an age when custom has been substituted for conscience, and the middle class are as dead as mutton, the young had better get into trouble to have their souls awakened by disgrace."

The play was first produced in April, 1911, having been hurriedly rehearsed because the previous production, of Ibsen's The Master Builder, had ended early. Shaw was convinced that creating a mystery about the authorship of the play would be ideal publicity. Because of the similarity of the character of Juggins to Crichton in J. M. Barrie's play The Admirable Crichton, Shaw hoped the public might be deceived. C. B. Purdom thinks that this might have worked had it not been for the framer play. "Had it not been for this audacity, there might have been a chance of mystifying the public about the authorship, for Shaw had written nothing so 'easy' and nothing so transparently sincere." The critics in the frame play express various opinions of Shaw's works, but make only brief mention of other authors. Even the theatre programme identified the author as "Xxxxxxx Xxxx", a pattern of letters that clearly points to "Bernard Shaw". "Bannal", as his surname suggests, represents the most banal popular taste. Walkley, a friend of Shaw's, was aware of the plan beforehand. He helped to make Claude King, the actor playing Trotter, resemble himself in manner and clothing. In his review he joked that Trotter is a "pure figment of the imagination, wholly unlike any actual person". He praised the play highly saying that Shaw had created "one of the most amusing plays he had ever written, one of the wittiest and most audacious plays of all his attack on 'the mean things which men have to do to keep up their respectability'."

The play was adapted for Australian radio in 1942.