Shaw thing

T.E. Lawrence is like the gap-year student from hell. He visits a country full of exotic barbarians and after a busy few months rescuing them from their spiritual frailties, and helping them emulate their Western superiors, he returns home and never stops boring on about it. ‘How much I learned from them,’ he gushes, when what he means is, ‘How much they learned from me.’

That’s always been the view of Lawrence’s critics, among them fellow British army officers, who saw him as a reckless, attention-seeking fantasist. Howard Brenton’s new play offers a more charitable portrait of Lawrence as a brilliant, sensitive, rootless genius. The action opens with him newly enlisted as a flunkey in the RAF under the surname ‘Ross’. He visits his pal Bernard Shaw, who is in the process of writing Saint Joan. Shaw grafts elements of Lawrence’s character on to his version of the Maid of Orléans. Cameos shuffle on and off. General Allenby stomps about briefly. Lowell Thomas, an American impresario, pops in for a whinge. Shaw’s neglected wife, Charlotte, conceives a sexless crush on their house guest and Lawrence imagines himself back in the desert wearing billowing robes amid gun-toting fanatics beneath the burning skies.

The play has a linear, explanatory style, more like an illustrated sermon than a drama, because the author belongs to the post-war generation that regarded the theatre as an extension of the state bureaucracy and a useful instrument for teaching proles about difficult stuff like politics, war and foreigners. All the certainties of the hippie decade are on display. It goes like this: men are important; women less important; Americans bad; field marshals very bad; journalists evil; artists good; playwrights marvellous; secretaries nice but thick; posh socialists excellent; Arabs fickle but glamorous; working-class people irrelevant.