James Bridie

• Born: January 3, 1888
• Birthplace: Glasgow, Scotland
• Died: January 29, 1951
• Place of death: Edinburgh, Scotland

Other Literary Forms

Two autobiographical volumes constitute the major nondramatic writings of James Bridie. Some Talk of Alexander, derived from his experiences in the field ambulance unit of the British army during World War I in India, Mesopotamia, Persia, Transcaucasia, and Constantinople, was published in 1926. A second autobiography, One Way of Living, published in 1939, is a creative memoir written when Bridie had turned fifty. It is divided into ten chapters, each covering a five-year period of his life. There is an overlay of italicized portions in each chapter, in which an interior monologue of the author ranges freely over some imaginative, associative reflection, evoking the style of James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In addition to his two autobiographical works, Bridie wrote a collection of essays entitled Mr. Bridie’s Alphabet for Little Glasgow Highbrows (1934); a collection of short plays, fragments, essays, poetry, and film and radio scripts entitled Tedious and Brief (1944); criticism in The British Drama (1945); and still another collection of essays entitled A Small Stir: Letters on the English (1949; with Moray McLaren). Finally, Bridie was a prolific writer of articles, described by Winifred Bannister, his biographer, as “witty, teasing admonitions usually aimed at drawing people into the theatre, and even that part of the Scottish public not interested in the theatre could hardly avoid being aware of Bridie as a personality, for almost everything he said and did in public was news.”

Achievements

James Bridie, like John Keats and Anton Chekhov, belongs to a long tradition of writers who were educated for a medical career but who eventually became major literary figures. The author of more than forty plays, he complemented that impressive achievement with a lifelong, active participation in the development of the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow’s equivalent of London’s National Theatre. His civic work on the Scottish Arts Council, the Edinburgh International Festival of music and drama, the film section of UNESCO, and the Scottish Community Drama Association was unflagging. He also developed into a more than proficient artist, for a time illustrating the Scots Pictorial as “O.H.” His drawings and paintings have been exhibited at Glasgow art galleries.

Bridie’s position in modern British drama is firmly established, and certainly he is a major dramatist in Scottish theater history. Gerald Weales in Religion in Modern English Drama (1961) links Bridie and George Bernard Shaw as modern religious dramatists who, at their deaths in 1951 (Bridie) and 1950 (Shaw), left religious drama “almost completely in the hands of the more orthodox practitioners,” few of whom “approach Shaw and Bridie as playwrights.” J. B. Priestley, a consummate crafter of the well-made play, while calling attention to some of Bridie’s weaknesses, calls his best scenes “blazing triumphs.” He also asserts that Bridie’s “characters appear to exist more in their own right than Shaw’s.”

Indeed, for Priestley, Bridie is Scotland’s major dramatist. In the preface to the posthumous publication of Meeting at Night, Priestley offers a measured evaluation of Bridie’s work. He concludes his personal tribute to Bridie with the comment that since his death, “the Theatre has seemed only half the size, half the fun, it used to be.”

Biography

James Bridie was born Osborne Henry Mavor on January 3, 1888, in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of Henry A. and Janet (Osborne) Mavor. Bridie said that in 1931, he started calling himself “James Bridie,” after his grandfather James Mavor and his great-grandfather John Bridie, a sea captain. Gradually, the name Bridie—the dramatist half of Osborne Henry Mavor, the doctor—took over, so that by the time of his death, friends such as Priestley had thought of him strictly as Bridie, never as O. H. Mavor.

Near the beginning of his autobiography, One Way of Living, Bridie writes that on January 3, 1938, he takes pleasure, at the age of fifty, in having lived ten different lives in cycles of five years. He describes himself as a Lowland Scot who has no English or Highland blood, no Unconscious Mind, and who therefore is ill-qualified to write an autobiography. Yet he must write one, even though he makes of it a matter of mathematics rather than art, since a Lowland Scot is so ordered in his life, dividing it into three planes—intellectual, moral, and physical—that anyone out of step with it is considered disordered and abnormal. Indeed, Bridie’s life was ordered, at first by a father whom he admired and who, unable to enter medicine because of financial difficulties, wished his son to become a doctor. Later, the order was of his own making.

At twenty-five, Bridie was still an undergraduate, having failed some of his medical courses, particularly anatomy. Eventually, however, he became a resident at the staff of the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow as house physician to W. R. Jack; he then moved to the eye, ear, and nose department. He served in the army field ambulance unit during World War I, returning from Soviet Russia in 1919. Joining the staff of the Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow, he led a pleasant life, and began writing, he contends, to subsidize his consulting practice. In 1923, he married Rona Locke Bremner, bought himself a car, and settled into what he describes as a happy bourgeois life. Indeed, he remarks in his autobiography that a childhood admiration for a doctor who owned a car was his reason for wanting to become a doctor. His medical career was rewarded with a doctorate of law from Glasgow University in 1939, and a C.B.E. in 1946. Of the honors conferred on him, he enjoyed most the governorship of Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow, where he had earlier served as assistant physician and honorary consulting physician.

Amid the events of a physician’s life, however, Bridie’s writing and theatrical interests persisted. Undergraduate productions of his plays with titles such as The Son Who Was Considerate of His Father’s Prejudices, No Wedding Cake for Her, The Duke Who Could Sometimes Hardly Keep from Smiling, Ethics Among Thieves, and The Baron Who Would Not Be Convinced that His Way of Living Was Anything Out of the Ordinary were received with loud applause at school functions. He also wrote for the Glasgow University magazine under “unfamiliar names.”

Because of his concern that playwriting, considered by some disreputable, could hurt his consulting practice, Bridie at first wrote under the pseudonym “Mary Henderson,” who appears as a character in his first professionally produced play, The Sunlight Sonata. In addition, he feared that the hobby might become too absorbing. Another name, “Archibald Kellock” (a character in Colonel Wotherspoon), became the pseudonym under which he wrote other plays. In 1938, at the age of fifty, Dr. Osborne Henry Mavor and playwright James Bridie parted, and the latter devoted full time to his chosen career, one that included the development of the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre in particular and the Scottish theater in general. Bridie died in 1951 of a vascular condition at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, one year after the death of George Bernard Shaw, whom Bridie knew and who attended some of Bridie’s plays.

Analysis

At the heart of much of James Bridie’s drama lies the conflict between science and religion. He explored this conflict in a variety of dramatic genres, including comedies, mystery plays and morality plays that have interesting resemblances to those of the medieval period, and problem dramas that suggest the influence of Henrik Ibsen. In all three general groupings, one can detect a stylistic hallmark: the use of medical language, characters who are members of the medical profession or who have something to do with a member of that profession, or situations in which science is involved in either a major or minor way. In Bridie’s plays, however, as in his life, science takes second place to the moral problems of his characters, even when its virtues or vices are the basis for those problems. In a general sense, then, all his dramas, including the most entertaining Shavian comedies, are morality plays.

Although Bridie’s religious views were “so liberal minded, so humanitarian as to be unfixed,” according to Bannister, they were, nevertheless, the driving force in his own life and in the characters of his plays. A moral fervor and rational humanism characterize his earliest performed play, The Sunlight Sonata, a comedy about seven characters affected by the traditional Seven Deadly Sins. Similarly, The Baikie Charivari is a Faustian confrontation between man and the Devil, containing seven potential evils in the form of visitors who would teach Bridie’s “Faust.” Indeed, Bridie’s thesis resembles Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s: the necessity of never saying to the moment, “Stay, thou art fair.”

Bridie’s mystery plays, dramatizations of Bible stories, constitute an important part of his œuvre. In the tradition of the medieval mystery play, in which Bible stories were dramatized for “plain people,” Bridie modernizes the dilemmas in which biblical characters find themselves. In fact, he wrote three versions of the Jonah story: Jonah and the Whale, The Sign of the Prophet Jonah (1942), and Jonah 3. Bridie’s stories were drawn not only from the Bible but also from the Apocrypha and from contemporary religious events and figures.

Some of Bridie’s plays have evoked comparisons with Shaw and Ibsen. Clever turns of phrase, witty dialogue, puns, and outrageous situations involving societal “outlaws” (such as the father and daughter in Meeting at Night who conduct a mail-order confidence racket) have earned for Bridie the label the “Scottish Shaw.” Bannister records a comment that Shaw is supposed to have made to Bridie: “If there had been no me there would have been no you.” The two dramatists are dissimilar, however, in a major way, for with the exception of Daphne Laureola, Bridie’s characterizations of women lack the strength and conviction of Shaw’s. Among influences on Bridie, perhaps that of Ibsen is the strongest. It can be seen in his adaptations of Ibsen’s plays but more subtly in the satiric thrusts at status-quo science and religion in plays such as A Sleeping Clergyman, The Switchback, and The Anatomist.

A Sleeping Clergyman

In his autobiography, Bridie claimed that A Sleeping Clergyman “was the nearest thing to a masterpiece I shall probably ever write.” Completed at the end of 1932, before he had decided to give up medicine in order to devote himself to the theater, the play was produced in London in 1933. He had worked on the play off and on for two years, with earlier productions in Birmingham and Malvern. He stated that the play was an attempt to combine two themes with which he had dealt earlier: the scientist as dictator in The Anatomist and as lost sheep in the wilderness in The Switchback, and the relation of human beings to God in Tobias and the Angel and Jonah and the Whale.

The play is in two acts, the first preceded by a prologue and the second by a “chorus.” In these two introductory portions, the framework for the story is established. At a respectable men’s club in Glasgow, Dr. Cooper, a specialist in diseases of women, and Dr. Coutts, a neurologist, are relaxing with a drink. Nearby, a “huge, whitebearded” clergyman sleeps. Coutts has just returned from the funeral service of ninety-seven-year-old Dr. William Marshall, a former visiting physician at the Royal Infirmary of Glasgow. Coutts, whose father had been a friend of Marshall, represented the faculty at the funeral. The conversation then turns to another funeral attendee, Sir Charles Cameron, a noted bacteriologist. Interest in Cameron, a relative of the deceased, is aroused as the matter of his illegitimate birth is mentioned by Coutts. With a brief reference to Cameron’s grandfather, a dissipated medical student, the prologue ends, and the narration shifts to a dramatization of events in the lives of three generations of Camerons. In flashback style, the drama consists of two acts, with four scenes in each act. The action moves swiftly through more than sixty years, from 1867 to 1872, 1885, 1886, 1907, 1916, and finally to the 1930’s, in a fascinating tale in which genius eventually conquers the predilection to dissipation that the latest Cameron had inherited from his grandfather.

In act 1, the first Cameron is a young medical researcher, dying of tuberculosis but, above everything else, bent on finishing the medical research project in which he is currently engaged. The efforts of Dr. Will Marshall and his sister, Harriet, to convince Cameron to spend some time with them at their shore residence are futile. After visiting Cameron in his untidy room, Will leaves, having loaned Cameron three pounds. Later, Harriet arrives to inform Cameron that she is pregnant. He agrees to her proposal of marriage, but it is later revealed, in a conversation between two relatives on the day of a birthday party for little Wilhelmina (daughter of Harriet and Cameron), that the marriage had never taken place.

The story of the second generation of Camerons is dramatized in scene 3 of act 1. Wilhelmina, now a young woman, shows the effects of heredity as she asks her Uncle Will for a cigar she wishes to try. The incident evokes the scene in Ibsen’s Gengangere (pb. 1881; Ghosts, 1885) in which Oswald, an artist returning from Paris to his hometown in Norway, smokes a pipe and then recalls being sick as a child after his father had given him a pipe to smoke. Ibsen’s play is about an inherited syphilitic condition; Bridie’s is about inherited genius and its accompanying Bohemian lifestyle.

Wilhelmina, reared by her Uncle Will, follows in the footsteps of her mother and father in her disregard of stifling, conventional conduct. During a lovers’ quarrel over her decision to marry another man, a man of her own class—even though she is pregnant by her lover, a lower-class employee of her uncle—she poisons the latter. In covering up her act, her uncle asks Dr. Coutts (father of Coutts of the prologue) to carry out the investigation of the death. In the ensuing trial, Wilhelmina is found innocent, and then, in a reversal of her earlier intentions, refuses to marry Sutherland even though he proposed. Act 1 ends on this note. Without regard for the puritanical mores of Scottish respectability, the Camerons continue to exercise their individualism.

A “chorus” introducing the second act parallels the prologue to act 1. The clergyman still sleeps as Dr. Cooper listens to Dr. Coutts’s tale of the Cameron generations. The audience learns of the trial of Wilhelmina and of the birth of her twins, Charles and Hope. The birth is followed by Wilhelmina’s suicide one month later.

Act 2 continues with the third generation of Camerons, as Will Marshall once more assumes the duties of child rearing. Charles Cameron follows in his grandfather’s footsteps in the sowing of his wild oats and in his genius for medical research. Like the ghosts of the past in Ibsen’s plays, the present repeats the past. When Cameron cites the pressure of exams as the reason for his disorderly conduct and consequent arrest, Uncle Will provides the three pounds for his release, an amount similar to that which he had loaned Cameron’s grandfather long ago.

After service in World War I, this third-generation Cameron, through both hard work and genius, eventually becomes a noted bacteriologist. At the age of fifty, he heads a medical research organization, the Walker Institute, financed by a wealthy relative, Sir Douglas Todd Walker. In his consistently blunt manner, he proposes marriage to Lady Katharine, saying that, if he wants descendants, he will have to hurry. Katharine, a worker who supplies the Institute with flowers, accepts, returning his bluntness in her acceptance.

Cameron’s sister, Hope, appears on the scene from Geneva with a message from the League of Nations asking Cameron to expedite research on his cure for influenza. Both sister and brother have experienced the triumph of virtue over evil, even though it required three generations to do so. Old Will Marshall, now in his nineties, lives to see the rewards of his efforts. Vindicated, he comments to Hope at the play’s end that “Charlie Cameron the First had the spark in his poor diseased body. Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. I did my best to keep the spark alive, and now it’s a great flame in Charlie and in you. Humanity will warm its hands at you.”

Bridie’s view of genius as the divine force working through humankind is reflected in Katharine’s comment that perhaps Cameron is a law of biology himself. God, like the sleeping clergyman in the two prologues, is removed from the immediate goings-on. Old Dr. Will Marshall, having lived ninety-seven years and having encouraged the spark of genius through three generations of Camerons, is a variation of the God principle. Like the sleeping clergyman, who is oblivious to his surroundings, Dr. Will has devoted nearly a lifetime to practicing status-quo medicine. Unlike the clergyman, however, he has nourished the genius in which he never loses faith.

In addition to the Ibsenite concern with heredity already mentioned, there is in Bridie’s play the Shavian concern with a life force that works through genius, emerging in the medical breakthroughs by the Camerons in their contributions to civilization. Religious, not in the conventional doctrinaire sense but in his contribution to humankind, Cameron is the very essence of God. Bridie’s God is a deistic entity that has provided human beings with laws and that has retired, like the sleeping clergyman, to a preprandial nap, to allow people to work out those laws. This working out of virtue is the personal and social morality of Bridie’s plays. Weales claims that Bridie is one of the last two modern playwrights (Shaw is the other) to write religious plays based on a personal and unorthodox view of human beings’ relationship to God.

The style of the play is as direct, unsentimental, and naturalistic as are the Camerons, whose disregard for the civilities of language and behavior provokes the censure of their conventional friends and relatives. Bridie’s epic sweep of three generations has invited the criticism that the characters, particularly the supporting ones, are not fully developed.

The Queen’s Comedy

Two of Bridie’s last plays are companion pieces that deal yet again with human beings’ relationship to their God or gods. The first of the two, The Queen’s Comedy, is a reworking of books 14 and 15 of Homer’s Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614). Produced in 1950, a year before Bridie’s death, the play is dedicated to its director, Tyrone Guthrie, famous in both England and the United States. On the title page appears Gloucester’s famous line from William Shakespeare’s King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606). “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport.” The title of the play derives from the various goddesses’ attitudes toward Jupiter, particularly toward his entanglement in the affairs of humankind. In a conversation with Minerva, Juno reflects on the absurdity of Jupiter changing himself into “swans and things,” a reference to his love affair with Leda and, consequently, his peopling the whole world “with his little lapses—all demanding special consideration because of their remarkable parentage.”

Reflecting the ravages of World War II, in which Bridie lost a son, the play modernizes Homer’s view of the gods. Jupiter comments that it was “easier to make a Universe than to control it. It was full of mad, meaningless forces. I got most of them bound and fixed and working to rules and all a sudden I felt lonely. I felt that I would rather my mother had given me a puppydog or a kitten.” An extension of the sleeping clergyman as a symbol for God, Jupiter feels helpless and, more to the point, is saddened by his inability to provide answers to the overriding questions of humankind’s existence. It is this fact that humans discover when, slain on the battlefield of Troy, they reach Olympus. The gods in their personal habits and relationships are no better than humans. Bridie wrote this fiercely antiwar play at a time when his own deteriorating health intensified his awareness of the bleakness that pervaded postwar Great Britain.

The Baikie Charivari

If The Queen’s Comedy is about the relationship between God and humankind, its companion piece, The Baikie Charivari, is an allegory about the relationship between human beings and the devils that besiege them during their lives. The play can be seen as Bridie’s final comment on his lifelong concern with good and evil forces at work in people’s lives. Produced the year after his death, the drama bears an interesting resemblance to his first professionally produced play, The Sunlight Sonata. Like the Seven Deadly Sins of that earlier play, seven devils confront Sir James MacArthur Pounce-Pellott, the leading character, whose name is derived from that of Pontius Pilate and the comic character, Punch, of magazine fame. His wife’s name is Judy, and they have a daughter whom they still call Baby, even though she is of marriageable age. Pounce-Pellott has returned to the town of Baikie on the Clyde Estuary in Scotland to retire at the age of fifty. He has spent his life in the British Civil Service in Junglipore, India.

In the surrealistic prologue, the Devil appears as a mask in the moon and speaks to a beadle, the Reverend Marcus Beadle, and to a local police officer, Robert Copper. The names of the Baikie residents, like those of the characters in a medieval morality play, symbolize their professions or qualities. In the style of the Book of Job in the Old Testament, the Devil inquires of Beadle and Copper, “Have ye considered my servant Pounce-Pellott?” When the cock crows and the Devil vanishes, Pounce-Pellott appears, a good-looking man in his fifties, announcing himself as “Knight Commander of the Indian Empire, King of Ghosts and Shadows, sometimes District Commander of Junglipore and other places.”

Like Faust in his quest for wisdom, Pounce-Pellott wishes to be educated in the knowledge of the West. To this end, various neighbors (and a woman from America) appear as his teachers: the Reverend James Beadle (religion), Robert Copper (law), Councillor John Ketch (sociology, labor, and left-wing thinking), Joe Mascara (art), Dr. Jean Pothecary (psychiatry), Lady Maggie Revenant (the old aristocratic order, actually a ghost from the past), and Mrs. Jemima Lee Crowe (an American publisher who offers Pounce-Pellott money for his memoirs). These figures represent the current wisdom of the West.

In the end, Pounce-Pellott, like his predecessor Pilate, washes his hands of them all and, asking for his stick, kills them all, except Lady Maggie, whom he cannot kill because she is a ghost. The Devil reappears, announcing that only time will tell whether he has been defeated. He vanishes, and Pounce-Pellott reflects on his inability to answer the riddle of life. He does know, however, that he killed those who pretended to know. Like Cameron of A Sleeping Clergyman, he knows that he cannot know and also that he cannot stop seeking to know.

The tone of the play shifts between the surrealism of scenes such as that in which the Devil appears to Pounce-Pellott and the ironic comedy of a Punch-and-Judy world, in which the realistic antics of his wife, daughter, and the seven representatives of Western wisdom are observed by Pounce-Pellott. As the play progresses to its conclusion in the form of arguments presented by the seven teachers, the prosaic style subtly gives way to poetic and lyric passages.

As a final, highly poetic statement, The Baikie Charivari is a sophisticated extension of Bridie’s lifelong moral earnestness and a paean to the necessary effort of the human spirit to extend virtue, not in any narrow dogmatic sense or through high-flown idealism, but in the dogged persistence with which a rational humanism can create some order out of chaos, even out of the remnants of civilization left in the wake of a Trojan War or a World War II.

No Third Act

Responding to the long-standing criticism that he had difficulty in concluding a play, Bridie, at the close of One Way of Living, writes: “Only God can write a third act, and He seldom does.” Bridie expresses his anger at “doctrinaire duds” and insists that audiences should leave the theater with their heads “whirling with speculation” and “selecting infinite possibilities for the characters . . . seen onstage.” These possibilities find focus from time to time in men of genius such as Charles Cameron of A Sleeping Clergyman and Pounce-Pellott of The Baikie Charivari, who can stand alone if necessary. The miracle, mystery, and morality plays of medieval times are given contemporary significance in Bridie’s theater, in that it is the miracle of individuated person that gives meaning to the existence of a Maker. As reflected in the very structure of Bridie’s plays, there is no concluding “third act” to humanity’s Faustian effort to work miracles on earth.

Biliography

Low, John Thomas. Doctors, Devils, Saints, and Sinners: A Critical Study of the Major Plays of James Bridie. Edinburgh, Scotland: Ramsay Head Press, 1980. An examination of the dramatic works of Bridie. Bibliography and index.

Mavor, Ronald. Dr. Mavor and Mr. Bridie: Memories of James Bridie. Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate, 1988. A biography of Bridie from a personal viewpoint. Analysis of dramatic works is included.

Tobin, Terence. James Bridie. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A chronological analysis of the complete multifaceted works of Bridie as a Renaissance man of the first half of the twentieth century. Includes a photograph, a chronology, a bibliography, and an index.