Bernard Shaw's verdict on corporate predators are as true as when he wrote Heartbreak House
I have twice played the role of The Burglar in Bernard Shaw’s play ‘Heartbreak House’. The first time was at Pentameters Theatre, Hampstead, in 2009, and the second was in the grounds of the great man’s house in Hertfordshire, Shaw’s Corner, in 2014.
It is a remarkable play in many respects, but in this brief essay I refer in particular to one speech, by a character called Alfred ‘Boss’ Mangan. This archetypal ‘bloated capitalist’ (Shaw’s own description) is as relevant today as when the play was first performed nearly a century ago.
Mangan confesses to his intended bride (young enough to be his granddaughter) that he ruthlessly destroyed her father’s small business so that his own huge company could acquire it for little or nothing and subsequently stitch it back together and reap the profits.
His methods sound very similar to those still used today in our globalised world by multinational corporations to first asphyxiate, then gobble up, small and medium enterprises, regardless of the cost in jobs and livelihoods. Mangan says:
“Your father’s business was a new business; and I don’t start new businesses: I let other fellows start them. They put all their money and their friends’ money into starting them. They wear out their souls and bodies trying to make a success of them. They’re what you call enthusiasts.
“But the first dead lift of the thing is too much for them; and they haven’t enough financial experience. In a year or so they have either to let the whole show go bust, or sell out to a new lot of fellows for a few deferred ordinary shares: that is, if they’re lucky enough to get anything at all.
“I saw that he had a sound idea, and that he would work himself silly for it if he got the chance. I saw that he was a child in business, and was dead certain to outrun his expenses and be in too great a hurry to wait for his market. Your father and the friends that ventured their money with him were no more to me than a heap of squeezed lemons.”
Squeezed lemons, indeed. How many people a century later, having given the best years of their lives, working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for years and years, to build their dreams into a reality, suffer that same fate at the hands of global conglomerates? As usual, Shaw hit the nail squarely on the head.
It is a remarkable play in many respects, but in this brief essay I refer in particular to one speech, by a character called Alfred ‘Boss’ Mangan. This archetypal ‘bloated capitalist’ (Shaw’s own description) is as relevant today as when the play was first performed nearly a century ago.
Mangan confesses to his intended bride (young enough to be his granddaughter) that he ruthlessly destroyed her father’s small business so that his own huge company could acquire it for little or nothing and subsequently stitch it back together and reap the profits.
His methods sound very similar to those still used today in our globalised world by multinational corporations to first asphyxiate, then gobble up, small and medium enterprises, regardless of the cost in jobs and livelihoods. Mangan says:
“Your father’s business was a new business; and I don’t start new businesses: I let other fellows start them. They put all their money and their friends’ money into starting them. They wear out their souls and bodies trying to make a success of them. They’re what you call enthusiasts.
“But the first dead lift of the thing is too much for them; and they haven’t enough financial experience. In a year or so they have either to let the whole show go bust, or sell out to a new lot of fellows for a few deferred ordinary shares: that is, if they’re lucky enough to get anything at all.
“I saw that he had a sound idea, and that he would work himself silly for it if he got the chance. I saw that he was a child in business, and was dead certain to outrun his expenses and be in too great a hurry to wait for his market. Your father and the friends that ventured their money with him were no more to me than a heap of squeezed lemons.”
Squeezed lemons, indeed. How many people a century later, having given the best years of their lives, working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for years and years, to build their dreams into a reality, suffer that same fate at the hands of global conglomerates? As usual, Shaw hit the nail squarely on the head.
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