



Produced by Ron Burkey









FANNY'S FIRST PLAY

BY BERNARD SHAW

1911



This text was taken from a printed volume containing the plays
"Misalliance", "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets", "Fanny's First Play", and
the essay "A Treatise on Parents and Children".

Notes on the editing: Italicized text is delimited with underlines
("_ _"). Punctuation and spelling retained as in the printed text. Shaw
intentionally spelled many words according to a non-standard system. For
example, "don't" is given as "dont" (without apostrophe), "Dr." is given
as "Dr" (without a period at the end), and "Shakespeare" is given as
"Shakespear" (no "e" at the end). Where several characters in the play
are speaking at once, I have indicated it with vertical bars ("|"). The
pound (currency) symbol has been replaced by the word "pounds".





PREFACE TO FANNY'S FIRST PLAY

Fanny's First Play, being but a potboiler, needs no preface. But its
lesson is not, I am sorry to say, unneeded. Mere morality, or the
substitution of custom for conscience was once accounted a shameful and
cynical thing: people talked of right and wrong, of honor and dishonor,
of sin and grace, of salvation and damnation, not of morality and
immorality. The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise
us as much as the word telephone or motor car. Nowadays we do not seem
to know that there is any other test of conduct except morality; and
the result is that the young had better have their souls awakened by
disgrace, capture by the police, and a month's hard labor, than drift
along from their cradles to their graves doing what other people do for
no other reason than that other people do it, and knowing nothing of
good and evil, of courage and cowardice, or indeed anything but how to
keep hunger and concupiscence and fashionable dressing within the bounds
of good taste except when their excesses can be concealed. Is it any
wonder that I am driven to offer to young people in our suburbs the
desperate advice: Do something that will get you into trouble? But
please do not suppose that I defend a state of things which makes such
advice the best that can be given under the circumstances, or that I do
not know how difficult it is to find out a way of getting into trouble
that will combine loss of respectability with integrity of self-respect
and reasonable consideration for other peoples' feelings and interests
on every point except their dread of losing their own respectability.
But when there's a will there's a way. I hate to see dead people walking
about: it is unnatural. And our respectable middle class people are all
as dead as mutton. Out of the mouth of Mrs Knox I have delivered on them
the judgment of her God.

The critics whom I have lampooned in the induction to this play under
the names of Trotter, Vaughan, and Gunn will forgive me: in fact Mr
Trotter forgave me beforehand, and assisted the make-up by which Mr
Claude King so successfully simulated his personal appearance. The
critics whom I did not introduce were somewhat hurt, as I should have
been myself under the same circumstances; but I had not room for them
all; so I can only apologize and assure them that I meant no disrespect.

The concealment of the authorship, if a _secret de Polichinelle_ can be
said to involve concealment, was a necessary part of the play. In so far
as it was effectual, it operated as a measure of relief to those critics
and playgoers who are so obsessed by my strained legendary reputation
that they approach my plays in a condition which is really one of
derangement, and are quite unable to conceive a play of mine as anything
but a trap baited with paradoxes, and designed to compass their ethical
perversion and intellectual confusion. If it were possible, I should put
forward all my plays anonymously, or hire some less disturbing person,
as Bacon is said to have hired Shakespear, to father my plays for me.

Fanny's First Play was performed for the first time at the Little
Theatre in the Adelphi, London, on the afternoon of Wednesday, April
19th 1911.




FANNY'S FIRST PLAY




INDUCTION


_The end of a saloon in an old-fashioned country house (Florence Towers,
the property of Count O'Dowda) has been curtained off to form a stage
for a private theatrical performance. A footman in grandiose Spanish
livery enters before the curtain, on its O.P. side._


FOOTMAN. [announcing] Mr Cecil Savoyard. [Cecil Savoyard comes in:
a middle-aged man in evening dress and a fur-lined overcoat. He is
surprised to find nobody to receive him.