SOURCE: Leary, Daniel J. “Shaw's Use of Stylized Characters and Speech in Man and Superman.” Modern Drama 5, no. 4 (February 1963): 477-90.

In the following essay, Leary explores the vitality of the characters and speeches in Man and Superman.

In discussing the dramatic effectiveness of puppets, Shaw wrote:

I always hold up the wooden actors as instructive object-lessons to our flesh-and-blood players. … The puppet is the actor in his primitive form. Its symbolic costume, from which all realistic and historically correct impertinences are banished, its unchanging stare, petrified (or rather lignified) in a grimace …, the mimicry by which it suggests human gesture in unearthly caricature—these give to its performance an intensity to which few actors can pretend, an intensity which imposes on our imaginative life those images in immovable hieratic attitudes on the stained glass of Chartres Cathedral, in which the gaping tourists seem like little dolls moving jerkily...