Robert Gore-Langton

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

You'd think Shaw – vegetarian, pro-women's rights, pro-homosexual, anti-war – would be well within the radius of trust of the wokest student

George Bernard Shaw with Chinese communist playwright Hong Shen, during a visit to Shanghai in 1933. Photo: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis / Getty Images 
issue 26 September 2020

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.

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