George Bernard Shaw

Like Socrates and Ben Franklin, it’s hard to imagine George Bernard Shaw ever being young — in part because he didn’t become a successful playwright until age 40. When Arms and the Man opened at London’s Avenue Theatre in 1894, the response was so enthusiastic, the audience demanded “author, author.”

Shaw came onstage, brown hair, sculpted brown, rectangular beard, brown tweeds. From the cheap seats, a man shouted a hearty “boo!”

Shaw waved his hands for quiet. “My dear fellow,” he addressed the nay-sayer, “I quite agree with you, but what are we two against so many?”

Shaw’s reply got a great, roaring laugh and became one of his famous impromptu remarks. The poet William Butler Yeats, who was at the opening night, wrote, “From that moment, Shaw became the most formidable man in modern letters.”

But, it turns out, Shaw wasn’t kidding.

The audience didn’t get it. Expecting a comedy, they reacted to one, even though Shaw marbles the text with social commentary and bombards idealistic illusions. He even wanted Sergius, the braggart Bulgarian soldier, to be a “comedic Hamlet.” The audience stuck to the surface Shaw was trying to expose.

A few days later, he wrote in a letter: “In Arms and the Man, I had the curious experience of witnessing an apparently insane success, with the actors and actresses almost losing their heads with the intoxication of laugh after laugh, and of going before the curtain to tremendous applause, the only person in the theater who knew that the whole affair was a ghastly failure.”

That’s because the man who boo’d, Reginald Golding Bright, actually enjoyed the play. He objected to a switch the actor playing Sergius made. Rather than declare that the “Bulgarian” army was ludicrous, the actor said the “British” army.

Reginald Golding Bright may also “boo’d” to stand out. He wanted to become a journalist and theater critic and, assuming a bond with the now famous playwright, wrote Shaw for advice.

In his reply, Shaw pinned Bright’s ears back: “Even if the play did contain any such interpolation, I should not admit your right to make a disturbance on the head of it.”

As for becoming a pundit, Shaw corresponded with Bright for the next 34 years. In 1956, this correspondence became one of the few useful books on the subject: Advice to a Young Critic.

One of its observations: “A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.”