Man and Superman

Shaw’s longest, most argumentative and most exhilarating play — a romantic comedy about a man running from a woman, wrapped around a philosophical debate between Don Juan and the Devil that has nothing to do with the plot and everything to do with why we are alive.

Why it matters right now

Shaw wrote Man and Superman in 1903 and believed he was writing about the eternal war between the sexes. What he actually wrote about, perhaps without knowing it, was the gap between what people say they believe and how they actually behave. John “Jack” Tanner delivers brilliant speeches about the tyranny of marriage, the freedom of the individual, the stupidity of convention. Then he gets married. The play is about a man who is entirely right in theory and entirely helpless in practice, which is a condition that has not dated by a single day. In an era of people who hold strong opinions on everything and act on almost none of them, Tanner is uncomfortably familiar.

The story in three sentences

Jack Tanner, a wealthy radical and amateur philosopher, discovers he has been made guardian to Ann Whitefield, a young woman he finds dangerous and predatory. Ann has decided she wants to marry him. Despite his every effort to escape, including fleeing to Spain, he cannot.

The moment you will remember

Halfway through the play, Tanner falls asleep in the mountains and dreams. The dream is Act Three, a sequence set in Hell in which Tanner becomes Don Juan and Shaw essentially stops writing a play and starts writing a philosophical dialogue that lasts, uncut, for over an hour. Don Juan argues with the Devil about the purpose of human existence. The Devil is charming, reasonable and entirely wrong. Don Juan is difficult, relentless and right. It is spoken theatre at its most operatic (Shaw himself called it a dramatic poem) and it was so long and so separate from the surrounding play that the first production in 1905 cut it entirely. Productions still cut it today. The irony is that the Hell scene is the best thing in the play, possibly the best thing Shaw ever wrote. Seeing it performed complete is one of the genuine experiences theatre can offer.

Who it is for

Read or see this if: you like argument for its own sake and find long speeches pleasurable rather than exhausting. If you want to understand where twentieth century ideas about gender, evolution and the purpose of civilisation came from. If you enjoy watching a writer be outrageously clever at the expense of his own characters.

Approach with caution if: you need plot momentum. Acts One, Two and Four are a witty romantic comedy; Act Three is something else entirely. The full play runs close to four hours and requires a production that knows what it is doing.

The debate

Shaw built the play around a simple inversion: Ann is the pursuer and Tanner is the prey. Shaw meant this as a serious point about biology; that women select mates to advance the species and men merely think they are in charge. The debate the play has never resolved is whether this reading is radical or reactionary. Is Shaw exposing male self-delusion, or is he reducing women to a biological function? Ann wins by the end, but she wins by manipulation rather than argument. Tanner loses despite being right about almost everything. Who, in Shaw’s view, is the Superman of the title — the man with the ideas or the woman who gets what she came for?