Man and Superman, John Bull's Other Island, and Major Barbara

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 ar