The Apple Cart: A Political Extravaganza is a 1928 play by George Bernard Shaw George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. Nearly all his writings deal sternly with. Though it offers some laughs, the play is primarily a reflection on a number of political philosophies Political philosophy is the study of such as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it should take and why, what the law is, and what duties citizens owe to a and characters who frequently deliver lengthy speeches defending their views. It follows the fictional King A monarch is the person who heads a monarchy, a form of government in which a country or entity is usually ruled or controlled by an individual who normally rules for life or until abdication, and typically inherit the throne by birth. Monarchs may be autocrats or may be ceremonial heads of state who exercise little or no power or only reserve Magnus as he outwits a petulant Prime Minister A prime minister is the most senior minister of cabinet in the executive branch of government in a parliamentary system. In many systems, the prime minister selects and can dismiss other members of the cabinet, and allocates posts to members within the Government. In most systems, the prime minister is the presiding member and chairman of the, Proteus, and his cabinet, who seek to strip the monarchy of its remaining political powers. As Shaw puts it succinctly in the Preface, it is "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."
The play was completed in December 1928 and first performed at Warsaw (in Polish) the following June. Its English première was at the Malvern Festival in August 1928 and a special train had to be laid on for the theatre critics coming from London.
Shaw based King Magnus largely on himself and the enigmatic and pivotal character of Orinthia, the King's Mistress, on Mrs Patrick Campbell, who had created Eliza Dolittle in Pygmalion Pygmalion is a Greek name. Pygmalion—or Pygmaion according to Hesychios of Alexandria—is probably a Cypriot form of Adonis, a Levantine vegetation-god.[1]
Contents |
Characters
- Sempronius The King's Private Secretary
- Pamphilius The King's Private Secretary
- Billy Boanerges President of the Board of Trade
- King Magnus
- Orinthia King's Mistress
- Alice Princess Royal
- Joe Proteus In Greek mythology, Proteus is an early sea-god, one of several deities whom Homer calls the "Old Man of the Sea", whose name suggests the "first" (from Greek "πρῶτος" - protos, "first"), as protogonos (πρωτόγονος) is the "primordial" or the "firstborn". He became the son Prime Minister
- Pliny Chancellor of the Exchequer
- Nicobar Foreign Secretary
- Crassus Marcus Licinius Crassus (ca. 115 BC – 53 BC) was a Roman general and politician who commanded the left wing of Sulla's army at the Battle of the Colline Gate, suppressed the slave revolt led by Spartacus and entered into the political alliance known as the First Triumvirate, with Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and Gaius Julius Caesar. He allegedly owned Colonial Secretary
- Balbus Home Secretary
- Amanda Postelthwaite Postmistress General
- Lysistrata Lysistrata is one of the few surviving plays written by Aristophanes. Originally performed in classical Athens in 411 BC, it is a comic account of one woman's extraordinary mission to end The Peloponnesian War. Lysistrata convinces the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands and lovers as a means of forcing the men to Powermistress General
- Vanhattan American Ambassador
- Queen Jemima
Text
- The entire text of the play, including a lengthy Preface and articles relating to the play can be found at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300431h.html
In performance
The Apple Cart at the Internet Broadway Database The Internet Broadway Database is an online database of Broadway theatre productions and their personnel. It is operated by the Research Department of The Broadway League, a trade association for the North American commercial theatre community
Notes & References
- ^ Peter Hall Company 2009 Programme - Shaw's The Apple Cart by Robert Warren
| This article on a play from the 1920s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
Categories: 1929 plays | Plays by George Bernard Shaw
|