Arms and the Man is a comedy by Bernard Shaw. Its title comes from the opening words of Virgil's Aeneid, (Of arms and the man I sing).

The play was first produced on 21 April 1894 at the Avenue Theatre in London and published in 1898 as part of Shaw's Plays Pleasant volume, which also included Candida, You Never Can Tell, and The Man of Destiny. Arms and the Man was one of Shaw's first commercial successes. He humorously exposes the futility of war and the hypocrisies of human nature.

Characters and original cast

  • Major Paul Petkoff – James Welch
  • Major Sergius Saranoff – Bernard Gould
  • Captain Bluntschli – Yorke Stephens
  • Major Plechanoff – A. E. W. Mason
  • Nicola – Orlando Barnett
  • Catherine Petkoff – Mrs Charles Calvert
  • Raïna Petkoff – Alma Murray
  • Louka – Florence Farr

::Source: The Stage.

Plot summary

The play takes place during the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War. Its heroine, Raina Petkoff, is a young Bulgarian woman engaged to Sergius Saranoff, a battlefield hero whom she idolizes. On the night after the Battle of Slivnitza, Captain Bluntschli, a Swiss mercenary in the defeated Serbian army, climbs in through her bedroom balcony and threatens her not to give the alarm. When Russian and Bulgarian troops burst in to search for him, Raina hides him. He tells her that "nine soldiers out of ten are born fools". Bluntschli's businesslike attitude to war shocks the idealistic Raina, especially after he admits that he uses his ammunition pouches to carry chocolates rather than pistol cartridges. When the search dies down, Raina and her mother Catherine sneak him out of the house, disguised in one of Raina's father's old coats.

[[James Welch (actor)|James Welch as Major Petkoff, 1894|thumb|alt=White man with white hair and large white moustache, in military uniform]]

The war ends and Raina's father, Major Paul Petkoff, returns home with Sergius. Raina begins to find Sergius bombastic and tiresome, but she hides it. Sergius also finds Raina's romantic ideals tiresome, and flirts with Raina's insolent servant girl Louka (a soubrette role), who is engaged to the Petkoffs' manservant Nicola. Bluntschli unexpectedly returns to give back the old coat, but also to see Raina. Raina and her mother are shocked when Major Petkoff and Sergius reveal that they have met Bluntschli before and invite him to lunch (and to help them figure out how to send the troops home).

Left alone with Bluntschli, Raina realizes that though he sees through her romanticism, he respects her, as Sergius does not. She reveals that she left a photograph of herself in a pocket of the coat, inscribed "To my chocolate-cream soldier", but Bluntschli says he did not find it, and it must still be in the coat. Bluntschli gets a telegram informing him of his father's death: he must now take over the family's luxury hotels in Switzerland.

Louka gossips to Sergius that Raina had protected Bluntschli and is in love with him. Sergius challenges Bluntschli to a duel, but Bluntschli evades it. Sergius and Raina break off their engagement, with some relief on both sides. Major Petkoff discovers the photograph in the pocket of his old coat; Raina and Bluntschli try to dispose of it, but Petkoff is determined to learn the truth and claims that the "chocolate-cream soldier" is Sergius. After Bluntschli confesses the whole story to Major Petkoff, Sergius proposes marriage to Louka (to Major Petkoff and Catherine's horror); the manservant Nicola quietly and gallantly lets Sergius have her; and Bluntschli, recognising Nicola's merits, offers him a job as hotel manager.

While Raina is now unattached, Bluntschli protests that—being 34 and believing she is 17—he is too old for her. On learning that she is actually 23, he immediately proposes and shows her the telegram announcing his inheritance. Raina, realizing the hollowness of her romantic ideals, protests that she would prefer him as a poor "chocolate-cream soldier" than as a wealthy businessman. Bluntschli protests that he is still the same person, and she proclaims her love for him. The play ends as Bluntschli, with Swiss precision, arranges the major's troop movements and informs them he will return to marry Raina in exactly two weeks.

Reception

Shaw was called onstage after the curtain, where he received enthusiastic applause. Amid the cheers, one audience member booed. Shaw riposted, "My dear fellow, I quite agree with you, but what are we against so many?" George Orwell said that Arms and the Man was written when Shaw was at the height of his powers as a dramatist. "It is probably the wittiest play he ever wrote, the most flawless technically, and in spite of being a very light comedy, the most telling." His other plays of the period, equally well written, were about issues that, according to Orwell, were no longer controversial at the time Orwell was writing. For example, the theme of Mrs. Warren's Profession, which so shocked audiences at the time, was that the causes of prostitution are mainly economic, which was already a common opinion in Orwell's time, and the play Widowers' Houses was an attack on slum landlords, who had since become stock villains.

In 2024, an attempt to stage John Malkovich's production of the play at Ivan Vazov National Theatre of Bulgaria was targeted by nationalist protesters that considered it a calumny of Bulgaria. The mob surrounded the theatre, threw smoke bombs, prevented the visitors that had bought tickets from entering the theatre hall, accusing them of being traitors and threatening them, and physically assaulted the director of the play and the director of the theatre.

Revivals

West End

{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="text-align: left; margin-right: 0;"

! scope="col" |Theatre

! scope="col" |Date

! scope="col" |Bluntschli

! scope="col" |Sergius

! scope="col" |Raina

! scope="col" |Petkoff

! scope="col" |Louka

!scope="col"|Ref

|-

| Savoy

| 30 Dec 1907

| Robert Loraine

| Harley Granville-Barker

| Lillah McCarthy

| Michael Sherbrooke

| Auriol Lee

|

|-

| Criterion

| 18 May 1911

| Arnold Daly

| Dawson Millard

| Margaret Halstan

| J. Fisher White

| Jean Mackinlay Stirling

|

|-

| Duke of York's

| 11 Dec 1919

| Robert Loraine

| Gerald Lawrence

| Stella Mervyn-Campbell

| M. R. Morand

| Dorothy Holmes-Gore

|

|-

| Everyman

| 6 Mar 1922

| Milton Rosmer

| Gordon Bailey

| Isabel Jeans

| Michael Sherbrooke

| Dorothy Holmes-Gore

|

|-

| Everyman

| 16 Sep 1926

| Robert Loraine

| Frank Vosper

| Jeanne de Casalis

| Michael Sherbrooke

| Joyce Kennedy

|

|-

| Court

| 23 Dec 1929

| Esmé Percy

| George E. Bancroft

| Rosalind Fuller

| Wilfrid Lawson

| Dora Macdona

|

|-

| Old Vic

| 16 Feb 1931

| Ralph Richardson

| John Gielgud

| Marie Ney

| George Howe

| Dorothy Green

|

|-

| Embassy

| 15 Jul 1935

| James Dale

| Alan Webb

| Joan Marion

| Alan Wheatley

| Catherine Cordell

|

|-

| New

| 5 Sep 1944

| Ralph Richardson

| Laurence Olivier

| Margaret Leighton

| Nicholas Hannen

| Joyce Redman

|

|-

| Arts

| 25 Jun 1953

| Alec Clunes

| Robin Bailey

| Diane Cilento

| Cyril Luckham

| Gwen Cherril

|

|-

| Mermaid

| 20 Mar 1962

| Joss Ackland

| David Knight

| Jane Merrow

| Richard Wordsworth

| Sally Smith

|

|-

|Lyric

|14 Oct 1981

|Richard Briers

|Peter Egan

|Alice Krige

|Richard Pearson

||Anna Nygh

|

|}

North America

New York

The Internet Broadway Database lists seven productions of the play:

  • September 1894, presented by Richard Mansfield and his company.
  • November 1899, at the Garden Theatre.

US elsewhere

  • Marlon Brando's final stage appearance was in Arms and the Man in 1953. He gathered friends who were fellow actors into a company for a summer stock production. He chose to play Sergius while William Redfield starred as Bluntschli.
  • The Studio Arena Theater in Buffalo, New York, put on a production of Arms and the Man in 1983 with Kelsey Grammer as Sergius.

Canada

  • The play was produced in 1982 at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, with Brian Bedford as Bluntschli and Len Cariou as Sergius.
  • The Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, has presented the play in 1967, 1976, 1986, 1994, 2006 and 2014, the last directed by Morris Panych.
  • In the summer of 2013 Odyssey Theatre in Ottawa performed a masked performance of this play.

Adaptations

Radio

The BBC has broadcast six radio adaptions of the play:

  • in 1939, with Barry Jones as Bluntschli, John Wyse as Sergius and Peggy Ashcroft as Raina.
  • in 1948, with Richard Willliams, John Wyse and Beryl Calder.
  • ITV, 1971, with John Standing, Laurence Harvey and Anna Calder-Marshall.
  • Channel 4, 1983: a film of the 1981 West End revival with Briers, Egan and Krige; it was first broadcast on 15 January 1983.
  • BBC, 1989, with Pip Torrens, Patrick Ryecart and Helena Bonham-Carter. Shaw despised the result, calling it "a putrid opéra bouffe in the worst taste of 1860", but grew to regret not accepting payment when, despite his opinion, it became a lucrative international success. Israeli soldiers use the term "chocolate soldier" (hayal shel shokolad, חייל של שוקולד) to disparage a soldier not tough enough to fight. The Australian Citizens Military Force were derided by the regular army as "chokos" or chocolate soldiers, implying they were not real soldiers.

References

Informational notes

Citations

Bibliography

  • The script of Arms and the Man at Project Gutenberg
  • Internet Movie Database entry for Arms and the Man