Author: Bernard ShawPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Book Description
John Bull's Other Island, and Major Barbara
Author: Bernard ShawJohn Bull's Other Island and Major Barbara
Author: Bernard ShawJohn Bull's Other Island and Major Barbara: also How He Lied to Her Husband
Author: Bernard ShawMan and Superman, John Bull's Other Island, and Major Barbara
Author: George Bernard ShawPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198828853
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 721
Book Description
Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw remains one of the world's most important and popular writers. His plays are regularly performed around the world, from the boards of Broadway and the West End to regional, community, and college stages.The three plays selected here are widely considered to be three of the most important in the canon of modern British theatre:Man and Superman: a four-act comedy for serious people, staged in part at Royal court in 1905, it is one of the early works of Modernism to take an ancient myth and restage it in contemporary mode (and its influence extends across world literature, palpable in writings from Mann to Joyce). Its storyof how a sensitive woman compels a superman-figure to adjust to her needs and those of the real world provides an updated commentary on Nietzsche's still-fashionable notions of ubermensch; and its famous third act introduces a persistent Shavian theme, which goes back as far as earliest religiousliterature-that the truly damned are those who are happy in hell.John Bull's Other Island takes up that idea: to the visionary, hell may be the ultimate modern dream of efficiency and rational administration, as manifested in a colonial Ireland run by liberal exploiters. Commissioned by WB Yeats to mark the opening of Ireland's National Theatre, the Abbey, theplay was promptly refused by its Directors (who disliked its mechanical mockeries of mechanism but may have missed its visionary qualities). It was performed to huge acclaim in London in November 1904 and it made Shaw famous, the supreme example of the Playwright as Thinker and, ever afterwards,one of the most valued commentators on Anglo-Irish relations.Major Barbara: a three-act drama which in classic Shavian style unmasks the motivation of puritan idealists and dedicated industrialists, this work (like the previous two) pits a strong woman against a sardonic, practical man. Having exposed the mendacity of apostles of efficiency, Shaw seems thento submit to their doctrine, arguing that a pure private charity towards the destitute is no adequate substitute. Like the previous two works, this is a problem play, in the course of which the audience sympathy is aroused and then repelled in all directions. The suggestion that it may be acceptableto take money from tainted sources, such as arms manufacturers, caused much debate in 1905 - and even more after the carnage wrought by mechanized guns in World War One.
John Bull's Other Island
Author: Bernard ShawJohn Bull's Other Island and Major Barbara
Author: Bernard ShawPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Adultery
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Book Description
Major Barbara is a three-act English play by George Bernard Shaw, written and premiered in 1905 and first published in 1907. The story concerns an idealistic young woman, Barbara Undershaft, who is engaged in helping the poor as a Major in the Salvation Army in London.
John Bull's Other Island
Author: Bernard ShawJohn Bull's Other Island
Author: Bernard ShawJohn Bull's Other Island
Author: George Bernard ShawPublisher:
ISBN: 9781774412381
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 130
Book Description
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. The play deals with Larry Doyle, originally from Ireland, but who has turned his back on his heritage to fit in with the English and Tom Broadbent, his English (and very Machiavellian) business partner. They are civil engineers who run a firm in London. They go to Roscullen, where Doyle was born, to develop some land.Doyle has no illusions about Ireland while Broadbent is taken with the romance of the place. Broadbent, a lively man who is seemingly not always aware of the impression he makes, becomes a favourite of the people. Before the play is over, it is clear he will marry Nora Reilly, the woman waiting for Doyle (who is more than happy to let her go) and become the area's candidate for Parliament after Doyle refuses to stand, but has also 'called in' all his loans given "so easily" to the locals against their homes and intends (as he had planned all along) to make the village into an amusement park.Another major character is the defrocked priest Peter (Father) Keegan, the political and temperamental opposite of Broadbent, who sees through him from the beginning and warns the locals against him.The play was commissioned by W.B. Yeats for the opening of Dublin's Abbey Theatre, but Yeats rejected it as too long and too difficult to produce. He claimed that no actors were available who could do justice to the part of Broadbent. Peter Kavanagh suggests that Yeats' real reason was dislike of Shaw's style of playwrighting: "at this time Yeats and Synge did not feel that Shaw belonged to the real Irish tradition. His plays would thus have no place in the Irish theatre movement
Author: Geoffrey West