Theater: Silky Redcoat

THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE by George Bernard Shaw

The theater does not survive on its masterpieces but between them. Much the same is true of Shaw. His finest works, Major Barbara, Heartbreak House and Pygmalion, are rarely performed. Conversely, scarcely a season passes when the overestimated Saint Joan and Candida do not show up on some theater's docket. One could hardly underestimate The Devil's Disciple. Shaw himself thought that this 1897 play would eventually be considered a "threadbare popular melodrama."

Popular it was, and may again be in the Brooklyn Academy of Music's revival. The locale of the play is a small New Hampshire town in 1777. The colonies are at war with England. The British plan to hang a Yankee rebel. That man is the Rev. Anderson (Barnard Hughes). But he is away from home when the redcoats break in, and they mistake Dick Dudgeon (Chris Sarandon) for the pastor, since he is having tea with the pastor's wife. Dudgeon is the village scapegrace, a man so revolted by narrow-spirited Puritan cant that he has proclaimed himself "the devil's disciple."

Rather like the play, Dudgeon barely escapes the noose. The second act brings on a wittily cynical charmer in the person of General Burgoyne, who is portrayed with silky urbanity by the multi-faceted George Rose. In addition to elongating a happy ending, Shaw has provided Burgoyne with a line worthy of the playwright's fellow Irishman, Oscar Wilde: "Martyrdom, sir, is the only way in which a man can become famous with out ability. " T.E. Kalem