GEORGE Bernard Shaw could be high minded to the point of priggishness about the tender emotions. The playwright regarded marriage as a snare and opined that human society resembled a farmyard in its social arrangements – except that "children are more troublesome... than chickens and calves".
Yet Shaw – Irish playwright, novelist, political activist and Nobel laureate – was also extremely fond of women. He suffered one of the great crushes of the age on the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, who became his first Eliza Doolittle. And it's this side of the man that veteran Dublin actor Des Keogh is bringing to the Lyric Theatre in a one-man show he has put together entitled My Fair Ladies.
"The idea of playing George Bernard Shaw came a number of years ago when my friend Donal Donnelly put on a one-man show about him called My Astonishing Self. I saw it in New York and asked if I could see the script which he generously showed me. Donal said I could have carte blanche with it but in the end I found the script didn't suit me," Keogh, an actor and broadcaster whose film credits include Ryan's Daughter, says.
Then he had a much better idea. "Having read a bit about the man, I discovered he had quite a number of ladies in his life and thought I'd go down that route." It proved to be a very productive route and Keogh gives an insightful account of the women on Shaw's romantic CV.
"The big love of his life was Mrs Patrick Campbell whom he met after he'd reviewed her performances. Shaw wrote glowingly about her." Interestingly, this was a passion that was unfulfilled as the two prodigious letter-writers never actually had an affair. Keogh thinks Shaw would have liked to but she demurred.
"He is a man of contradictions and his marriage to the Irishwoman Charlotte Payne-Townshend was unconsummated. They were happy, shared many intimacies and Shaw wrote about a middle-aged, childless marriage being different from a young marriage with procreation in mind. But I think he would have liked to have gone to bed with Mrs Pat Campbell. They had an arrangement in somewhere like Torquay but at the last minute, she decided against it."
Keogh believes that Mrs Patrick Campbell, who described herself and Shaw as "lustless lions at play", may have finally decided to observe the proprieties.
The two-act 80-minute show has been constructed around a nice fiction. "I have set the piece in Ireland and we see Shaw visiting a women's meeting in a hall at the end of the Second World War," Keogh explains.
"He's around 80 and starts by telling them that he's been asked to speak about his favourite topic, adding: 'And one of my favourite topics is myself'. He goes on to explain that his wife has died and that although he misses her greatly, he can now talk more freely about the other ladies he's known."
Keogh has one unbeatable advantage in playing the great man – "I do look quite like him." He uses his own light, humorous Irish voice and says Shaw, who moved to London from his native Dublin when he was 20, kept his Irish accent. "But I'm not doing an impersonation."
Although Shaw deplored romantic love, calling it "the most violent, most insane, most delusive and most transient of passions", he seems to have enjoyed capitulating. He always appreciated actresses and Dame Ellen Terry was one of his ladies. But his first grown-up love affair at the age of 29 was with a woman called Jenny Patterson. She was 44, one of his mother's singing pupils and Shaw described her as the "tempestuous widow".
Then he had a relationship with Florence Farr who had also had an affair with WBYeats. Another of Shaw's ladies was the famous American dancer Isadora Duncan – so the list of conquests is pretty stellar.
"Shaw was a gallant lover but describes himself as 'a philanderer' and had a lot of affairs between the age of 29 and 40. During his married life there were also other women. He had a twinkle in his eye and was quite a lad," Keogh says.
Keogh, who is married himself and has a grown-up daughter, laughs when asked how much he himself relates to the material he presents in My Fair Ladies. "Not at all," is his reply. But he says that he thinks Shaw understood women. "He certainly had a good understanding of his wife. And he wrote women well in plays like Candida."
The role of GBS is one Keogh is enjoying, partly because he has acted in his plays. At the end of the night, when Shaw's passions are spent, the actor, who defines the word sprightly, likes to relax over a Guinness. It brings back memories. "After training as a barrister, I worked in Belfast for a year in the firm of Arthur Guinness. That was before I started my nomadic career."
:: My Fair Ladies, written and performed by Des Keogh and directed by Patrick Talbot is at Belfast's Lyric Theatre, June 15 – 20. Tickets lyrictheatre.co.uk or 028 9038 1081.
