Does Rada seriously believe George Bernard Shaw was an Irish Mengele?

What has happened to Rada? The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art is the latest arts establishment to have gone mad. In the summer, it issued a self-flagellating public statement that it was institutionally racist and would ‘decolonise the curriculum and end racism’. The ‘actor-vists’ are clearly unhappy with the place. They should all be busy learning how to be heard at the back of the stalls. But these days, the enunciation course has a ‘d’ in front of it.

The student body — or a noisy part of it — is now calling for a purge of the school’s illustrious benefactor, George Bernard Shaw, after whom one of the school’s theatres and a special fund are named. Why? He is accused of being a racist and a eugenicist. We are actually meant to believe that Shaw, the great socialist emancipator and lover of equality, is now an Irish version of Josef Mengele.

Shaw is an indelible part of Rada’s history (of which it is officially no longer proud). The place was established in 1904 by the actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as a London school ‘founded by the industry for the industry’. Shaw was elected to Rada’s council in 1911 to replace W.S. Gilbert who died that year. He was a great catch. Shaw urged the school to stay open during both world wars, stumping up £1,000 when it was reduced to rubble during the Blitz — a loan he made clear he didn’t expect to be repaid. He bequeathed a third of his royalties to Rada, a steady river of cash since his death in 1950.

How perverse that the place should ever want to disown him. You’d think Shaw would be well within the radius of trust of even today’s wokest students.