["Bury the Dead"] presents the finest image that has appeared in our theatre this year. A great theatre image is when there is discovered something seen and done in which the central idea is completely expressed, and is revealed without effort, as if creation had fully taken place already and were all exhibited. Not often in drama anywhere do we find so powerful an image as dominates the whole of "Bury the Dead." A myth is created, a veritable fable is established. When these six dead men arise from their graves and refuse to be buried, the imagination is shocked and caught by the sheer sight of them and the light upon them: Possibilities in fear and living variety, nostalgia, and pity, immediately swarm to the full powers of the stage. As theatre image this motif ranks with the entrance of Oedipus with his blinded eyes, in Sophocles' play, with the sleep-walking scene in "Macbeth," with Lear in the storm, with, that is, such consummations of action, the visual and the idea as are rare even in first-rank drama. The idea and the tone, inseparable, are first and last the chief necessity in a drama; the final need for its vitality is the discovery of a strong, full image for their conveyance….
"Bury the Dead" is obviously an anti-war play. By those interested for or against, it may be called a propaganda play. There can be no objection basically to art that is propaganda, but ultimately there is every objection to propaganda that is not art. It can be said to Mr. Shaw's credit … that he never in the outline or structure of his piece relies on propaganda to hold him up. But the weaknesses of the play do at times proceed from the fact that the statement in itself seems left to do the work without much creation on the author's part.
Stark Young, "The Great Doom's Image" (reprinted by permission of the Literary Estate of Stark Young), in The New Republic, Vol. LXXVII, No. 1119, May 13, 1936, p. 21.
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