A drama about an armaments king, his daughter in the Salvation army and a foundling Professor of Greek. The society that makes Barbara necessary is repellent, but should we admire or condemn do-gooders like her?
'The greatest of our evils and the worst of our crimes is poverty ... our first duty, to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor'
Andrew Undershaft, a millionaire armaments dealer, loves money and despises poverty. His energetic daughter Barbara, on the other hand, shows her love for the poor by working as a Major in the Salvation Army. She sees her father as just another soul to be saved. But when the Salvation Army needs funds to keep going, it is Undershaft who saves the day. Is the Army right to accept money that has been obtained by 'Death and Destruction'? Barbara is forced to question her philanthropic motives, and what she discovers tells her something new about the world and its ways.
Full of lively comedy and sparkling debate, Major Barbara is also one of Shaw's most powerful and forward-looking plays. As Margery Morgan says, while Shaw was responding to 'a material and cultural situation that is now part of history', his work still has relevance 'in a period when new technologies drive the globalization of trade and the migration of populations ... and ancient forms of brutality and carnage have re-appeared.'
The definitive text, under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence
By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
“[Shaw] did his best in redressing the fateful unbalance between truth and reality, in lifting mankind to a higher rung of social maturity. He often pointed a scornful finger at human frailty, but his jests were never at the expense of humanity.”
—Thomas Mann “Shaw will not allow complacency; he hates second-hand opinions; he attacks fashion; he continually challenges and unsettles, questioning and provoking us even when he is making us laugh. And he is still at it. No cliché or truism of contemporary life is safe from him.”
—Michael Holroyd “In his works Shaw left us his mind. . . . Today we have no Shavian wizard to awaken us with clarity and paradox, and the loss to our national intelligence is immense.”
—The Sunday Times “He was a Tolstoy with jokes, a modern Dr. Johnson, a universal genius who on his own modest reckoning put even Shakespeare in the shade.”
—The Independent “His plays were superb exercises in high-level argument on every issue under the sun, from feminism and God, to war and eternity, but they were also hits—and still are.”
—The Daily Mail
