Man and Superman

by George Bernard Shaw

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NancyAf: Both plays are hilarious comedies of manners with the interplay between the sexes at the forefront.

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Showing 5 of 5

Look, there are three awesome acts in this and then there's that whole thing in the middle where Don Juan argues with the devil. Is the rest of the play just an excuse for Act III? Is it, like, the bread around a Don Juan / Satan sandwich? I preferred the bread.

I didn't hate the Don Juan / Satan part. I underlined a whole bunch of stuff that was really smart and / or funny. I just...it obviously goes on too long. The characters acknowledge it themselves!

Pygmalion was better.

Soundtrack:
- The Suffering, Fishbone
- Masters of Reality (

)

AlCracka | Apr 2, 2013 |

מחזה פילוזופי של שו שכולל את דון ג'ואן בגיהינם הידוע שפעם לא הפסיקו לתת אותו ב"מסך עולה" בקול ישראל (

)

amoskovacs | May 5, 2012 |

Man and Superman combines a dramatization of Neitsche's "ubermensch" or superman, that was believed to be the goal of creative evolution, with a romantic comedy. For that alone the play deserves five stars. That it does all of this and does it well is a remarkable achievement. The third act, Don Juan in Hell, is often played by itself. A surreal episode in the play, it is in this act that we see the realization of the play's philosophy, with the other three acts framing it with romance. Characteristic of Shaw, we see in the other three acts the Shavian inversion, where he flips commonly held notions on their head: in this case, the tradition that it is the man who is the pursuer in love. Shaw shows that in sex, it is the man who is the hunted and it is the woman who is in control. (

)

Mromano | Jan 22, 2011 |

pretty stinky. act 1 in england, act 2 in spain, act 3 in hell, act 4 in spain. all over the place in every way. (

)

mahallett | Mar 28, 2008 |

very good George Bernard Shaw

emrahcan1986 | Mar 26, 2008 |

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▾Other authors

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Author name	Role	Type of author	Work?	Status
George Bernard Shaw	—	primary author	all editions	confirmed
Teitel, N. R.	Introduction	secondary author	some editions	confirmed

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Is contained in

The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw by Bernard Shaw

Plays by George Bernard Shaw by George Bernard Shaw

MAJOR BRITISH WRITERS VOLUME II 2 ENLARGED EDITION by No Author

Contemporary Drama: 15 Plays by E. Bradlee Watson

Four Plays : Franklin Library by Bernard Shaw

Four Plays : Washington Square edition by Bernard Shaw

(show 1 more)

Three Plays : Franklin Library by George Bernard Shaw

Contains

Don Juan in Hell by George Bernard Shaw

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Series (with order)

Canonical title

Man and Superman

Original title

Alternative titles

Original publication date

1903 (printed)

1905 (performed)

People/Characters

Important places

Important events

Related movies

Man and Superman (1982 ∙ IMDb)

Hallmark Hall of Fame: Man and Superman (1956 ∙ IMDb)

Awards and honors

Western World's Greatest Books - Project Gutenberg

Philip Ward's Lifetime Reading Plan (Year 35)

Epigraph

Dedication

First words

Roebuck Ramsden is in his study, opening the morning letters.

Quotations

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

(show all 18 items)

Last words

(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)

Disambiguation notice

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▾References

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (2)

Arnold Allen

George Bernard Shaw

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▾Book descriptions

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0140437886, Paperback)

How tantalizing to hear Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient, Schindler's List) but not be able to see him! And hear him one does in his role as Jack Tanner, the antihero of Shaw's 1905 classic drama Man and Superman. Fiennes is a veritable mouthpiece--and a frequently sarcastic one at that--for the burning issues on Shaw's philosophical and social laundry list: the state of the English working class, the arms race, women's rights, unwed mothers, the evils of industry and capitalism, and English morality in general. The seriousness of the discussions is tempered by delightful Shavian wit ("There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it."), which prevents the dialogue from collapsing under its own weight, although it does teeter at times. The four-act play, directed by the esteemed Peter Hall for BBC Radio, begins in the English countryside and ends in the mountains of Spain after a curious detour to Hell, where, in act 3, the famous dream sequence unfolds and the main characters take on such roles as Don Juan and the Devil to further hash out the meaning of existence, the definition of life force, and the power of the female sex. This is a spirited production of Shaw's imperfect but intellectually challenging work. (Running time: 225 min; four cassettes)

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:44:25 -0500)

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▾Library descriptions

"John Tanner is horrified to discover that he is the object of Ann Whitefield's ambitions in her search for a satisfactory husband. For Tanner, political pamphleteer and independent mind, escape is the only option. But Ann is grimly resigned to society's expectations and ready for the chase." "In this caustic satire on romantic conventions, Shaw casts his net wide across European culture to draw on works by Mozart, Nietzsche and Conan Doyle for his re-telling of the Don Juan myth. As Stanley Weintraub comments, it was Shaw's ability to combine popular comedy with intellectual seriousness that made Man and Superman 'the first great twentieth-century English play', and one that remains a classic expose of the eternal struggle between the sexes."--BOOK JACKET.… (more)