Man and Superman - Shaw, George Bernard

. .

Résumé :
'Man and Superman' is one of the finest and most devilish four-act dramas, written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903. Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist. The series was written in response to calls for Shaw to write a play based on the Don Juan theme. It opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 23 May 1905, but it omitted the third act. It portrays Don Juan as the quarry instead of the huntsman. John Tanner, upon discovering that his beautiful ward plans to marry him, flees to the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where he is captured by a group of rebels. Tanner falls asleep and dreams of the famous 'Don Juan in Hell' sequence, which features a sparkling Shavian debate among Don Juan, the Devil, and a talkative statue. With its fairy-tale ending and a cast literally from hell, it is a hilarious cocktail of farce, Nietzschean philosophy, and Mozart's Don Giovanni.

Biographie:
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856-2 November 1950) was an Irish comic dramatist, literary critic and socialist propagandist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s and continues till now. Incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.

Sommaire:
Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological figure. It was first presented on stage to the public in 1913. In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The general idea of that myth was a popular subject for Victorian era English playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story called Pygmalion and Galatea that was first presented in 1871. Shaw would also have been familiar with the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed. Shaw's play has been adapted numerous times, most notably as the musical My Fair Lady and its film version. Shaw mentioned that the character of Professor Henry Higgins was inspired by several British professors of phonetics: Alexander Melville Bell, Alexander J. Ellis, Tito Pagliardini, but above all, the cantankerous Henry Sweet....