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One of George Bernard Shaw's most performed and studied plays, "Arms and the Man" is a classic example of Shaw's comedic wit. First produced in 1894, the play is set during the Serbo-Bulgarian war and tells the story of Raina Petkoff, a young Bulgarian woman, who is engaged to Sergius, a soldier away at war whom she idolizes. While both her father and fiancé are away fighting, Raina, at home with her mother, has a very innocent and romantic idea...
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The play is set in a seaside town and tells the story of Mrs. Clandon and her three children, Dolly, Phillip and Gloria, who have just returned to England after an eighteen-year stay in Madeira. The children have no idea who their father is and, through a comedy of errors, end up inviting him to a family lunch. At the same time a dentist named Valentine has fallen in love with the eldest daughter, Gloria. However, Gloria considers herself a modern...
3) Misalliance
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Misalliance is a play written in 1909–1910 by George Bernard Shaw. The play takes place entirely on a single Saturday afternoon in the conservatory of a large country house in Hindhead, Surrey in Edwardian era England. It is a continuation of some of the ideas on marriage that he expressed in 1908 in his play, Getting Married. It was also a continuation of some of his other ideas on Socialism, physical fitness, the Life Force, and "The New Woman":...
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The Philanderer is a play by George Bernard Shaw. It was written in 1893 but the strict British censorship laws at the time meant that it was not produced on stage until 1902. It is one of the three plays Shaw published as Plays Unpleasant in 1898, alongside Widowers' Houses and Mrs Warren's Profession. The volume was written to raise awareness of social problems and criticise capitalist behaviour. The influence of Naturalist playwrights is evident...
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Androcles and the Lion is a 1912 play written by George Bernard Shaw. The play is Shaw's retelling of the tale of Androcles, a slave who is saved by the requiting mercy of a lion. In the play, Shaw portrays Androcles to be one of the many Christians being led to the Colosseum for torture. Characters in the play exemplify several themes and takes on both modern and supposed early Christianity, including the cultural clash between Jesus' teachings and...
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Don Juan in Hell is an excerpt (Act 3, Scene 2) from George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. It is often performed as a stand-alone play. In it, three characters from Mozart's Don Giovanni (Don Juan, Dona Ana, and the statue of the Commendatore, Dona Ana's father) meet in Hell and, joined by the Devil, have a philosophical debate on a variety of subjects, including Heaven and Hell, men, women and marriage. In the end, they all decide where they will...
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Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological character. It was first presented on stage to the public in 1912. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp...
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John Bull's Other Island is a comedy about Ireland, written by George Bernard Shaw in 1904. Shaw himself was born in Dublin, yet this is one of only two plays of his where he thematically returned to his homeland, the other being O'Flaherty V. C. The play was highly successful in its day, but is rarely revived, probably because so much of the dialogue is specific to the politics of the day. (Excerpt from Wikipedia)
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Getting Married is a play by George Bernard Shaw. First performed in 1908, it features a cast of family members who gather together for a marriage. The play analyses and satirizes the status of marriage in Shaw's day, with a particular focus on the necessity of liberalizing divorce laws.
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Caesar and Cleopatra is a play written in 1898 by George Bernard Shaw that depicts a fictionalised account of the relationship between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. It was first published with Captain Brassbound's Conversion and The Devil's Disciple in Shaw's 1901 collection Three Plays for Puritans. It was first performed in a single staged reading at Newcastle upon Tyne on 15 March 1899, to secure the copyright. The play was produced in New York...
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A Treatise on Parents and Children is a classic family studies/parenting guide by the great Irish writer George Bernard Shaw that examines the parent/child relationship and contains the following excerpt: Childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture of the Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated. The Life Force either will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very low organisms: indeed it is by no means ascertained...
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The three-character play is set in the drawing room of a flat located on Cromwell Road in London. Shaw describes Henry Apjohn as a very beautiful youth, moving as in a dream, walking as on air, while Aurora Bompas has an air of being a young and beautiful woman but as a matter of hard fact, she is, dress and pretensions apart, a very ordinary South Kensington female of about 37, hopelessly inferior in physical and spiritual distinction to the beautiful...
15) Overruled
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Gregory Lunn and Mrs. Juno are in love, having met during a sea voyage. On a sofa in a hotel where both are staying, they discuss their feelings. They are both already married, so they decide they must part, but are unable to do so. They then recognize the voices of their respective spouses, apparently staying together at the same hotel. They leave in confusion. Mrs. Lunn and Mr. Sibthorpe Juno enter and sit together on the same sofa that the other...
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In the preface, Shaw speaks of the pervasive discouragement and poverty in Europe after World War I, and relates these issues to inept government. Simple primitive societies, he says, were easily governable while the civilised societies of the twentieth century are so complex that learning to govern them properly can't be accomplished within the human lifespan: People with experience enough to serve the purpose fall into senility and die. Shaw's solution...
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Captain Charles Edstaston is assigned to the Imperial Russian court in Saint Petersburg, during the 34-year rule of Empress Catherine the Great, and brings his fiancée, Claire, with him. In the midst of court intrigue and palace politics, primarily instigated by Catherine's favored statesman and military leader, the drunken, ill-mannered, but crafty Prince Patiomkin.
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It is midsummer night on the terrace of the Palace at Whitehall, overlooking the Thames. The Palace clock chimes four quarters and strikes eleven. The Man arrives at Whitehall where he meets a Beefeater guard. He persuades the Beefeater to allow him to stay to meet his girlfriend, a lady of the court, who will be arriving soon for a secret tryst. The Man notes down various interesting phrases used by the Beefeater. The Lady arrives, cloaked, but it...
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This pamphlet was written as a philosophical commentary on Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. Shaw believed that most people could not understand the drama, and wanted to bring them the knowledge of the adepts who see in the operas the "whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today."
20) Candida
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"Candida" is the story of its title character, a woman who is married to the Reverend Morell. Candida is a woman of many talents and her husband has his wife to thank for much of his success. When a young man by the name of Marchbanks professes his love for Candida, Morell must reexamine his relationship with his wife and ultimately discovers a side to her that he never knew existed. "Candida" is a play written during a time of great empowerment of...
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