This early play of Shaw's, written in 1897, demonstrated that he could write light and witty comedy as well as the more serious "message" plays with which he began. It is also a dramatic revision of the troubled family in which he grew up, a revision in which (unlike the real family) all ends happily.
Shaw's mother made an early and unwise marriage to an alcoholic husband, whom she eventually left, taking her three children: Lucy, the oldest, and the younger Elinor "Yuppy" and Bernard himself--the latter two only a year apart in age. Mrs. Shaw was a singer, and reared Lucy as her protégée, just as Mrs. Clandon prepares Gloria to continue her work. No special plans were made for the two younger children, who like Dolly and Philip in the play simply amused themselves with their own wit. (Shaw tells that he and Elinor used to laugh at the naiveté and sentimentality of their nurse's bedtime stories.)
After her husband had left the scene, Mrs. Shaw took in as a boarder her voice teacher, John Vandeleur Lee, whom everyone but Bernard Shaw himself suspected of a romantic involvement. This seems to echo the play's Finch M'Comas, a former but unsuccessful suitor of Mrs. Clandon's. Finally, there is the estranged husband himself, the plays' Mr. Crampton, ultimately reconciled with his wife. We can feel the poignance of the happy ending on stage that never took place in Shaw's own life.
But whatever the source of the play's family situation, Shaw did not write it simply to explain his upbringing, but to dramatize many of his characteristic themes. As an Irishman, Shaw regularly pointed out the follies of the English, which the Clandon children, reared in Spain, also are happy to do: when Mrs. Clandon apologetically says "They think every Englishman they meet is a joke," Dolly replies "Well, so he is: it's not our fault." England's class system also comes in for ridicule: we see that the Waiter, everyone's servant, is really their superior in wit, wisdom, and diplomacy. And who can resist the irony of his apology ("only the accident of birth") for being the father of a Q.C. (Queen's Counsel, the highest distinction for an English barrister)?
As in other plays, Shaw cheerfully acknowledges the importance of money in human happiness: when M'Comas tells Valentine that Gloria's father may regard him "as a fortune hunter," Valentine replies: "So I am. Do you expect my wife to live on what I earn?" And perhaps most central, there is the "Life Force." This is Shaw's term for human vitality as the basis of all actions and achievements, and is regularly shown in his plays as the irresistible force that brings men and women together. Shaw's romantic pairs are not conventionally romantic, but are seen, like Valentine and Gloria, as coming together almost in spite of themselves, unable to resist the power that Shaw saw as guiding human evolution.
Finally, there is the theme of the "new woman," as 1890s feminism called her. Though Shaw himself was an early and ardent champion of feminism, he also sees its limits. Gloria, educated as a "new woman," can not resist Valentine's verbal virtuosity as, in the grip of the Life Force, he turns all her arguments against her. Altogether, You Never Can Tell is truly a "Pleasant Play," as Shaw called it, and at the same time one that energetically showcases the iconoclasm that made Bernard Shaw world-famous.
--Dean Bevan