ABSTRACT
The achievement of the Stage Society and Court Theatre productions after the turn of the century, to the huge success of Saint Joan in 1924 and the Malvern Festival productions of the next decade, is George Bernard Shaw. More defiantly still the most recurrent indictment, quoted at the head of this chapter, that Shaw's work is all head and no heart, is presented for scrutiny in the Epilogue. It is not that the play creates revolutionaries of its audience but that its pattern of laughter and disruption of expectations insists that mind plays its part in the audience's response, and plays it in Shaw's way. The demands made on the audience here are more complex than in the 1890s plays. Higgins' experiment is to demonstrate that language is the 'gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul'; that flower girl and duchess are remarkably similar were it not for their language usage.
