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Man and Superman, John Bull's Other Island, and Major Barbara (Paperback)
Loot Price: R253
Discovery Miles 2 530
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Man and Superman, John Bull's Other Island, and Major Barbara (Paperback)
Series: Oxford World's Classics
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List price R303
Loot Price R253
Discovery Miles 2 530
You Save R50 (17%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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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 story of 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 religious literature-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, the play 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 then to 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
acceptable to 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.
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