Between socialism and controversy: The political theatre of George Bernard Shaw

By Harsh Thakor* 

This year, on November 2, we commemorated the 75th death anniversary of George Bernard Shaw. It also marked one hundred years since he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. Shaw was among the most prolific, gifted and creative playwrights of his time—a socialist, a humanist, and a great artist who placed politics at the centre of his work.

In 1891, Shaw introduced the work of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen to the English-speaking world, an intervention that helped engineer twentieth-century realism on the English stage. His plays are often characterised as satirical and incisive, exploring the evils of capitalism with an intensity and depth rarely surpassed.

Shaw was drawn towards socialism after reading Karl Marx’s Capital. He wrote that “Marx opened my eyes to the facts of history and civilisation… [and] provided me with a purpose and a mission in life.”

George Bernard Shaw—who disliked the name “George” and never used it either personally or professionally—was born in 1856 in Dublin into a lower-middle-class family of Scottish Protestant ancestry. His father was a failed corn merchant with a drinking problem, while his mother was a professional singer and the sole disciple of Vandeleur Lee, a voice teacher who claimed to have a unique and original method of singing.

Shortly before Shaw’s sixteenth birthday, his mother left her husband and son and moved with Vandeleur Lee to London, where they set up a household along with Shaw’s elder sister Lucy, who later became a successful music hall singer. Shaw remained in Dublin with his father, completed a schooling he intensely disliked, and worked as a clerk in an estate office, which he hated just as much. It was therefore no coincidence that many of Shaw’s plays, including “Misalliance,” depict troubled parent–child relationships, featuring children raised in isolation, foundlings, orphans, adopted heirs, and parents who wrongly assume obedience and affection from their children.

In 1876, Shaw left Dublin and moved to London, joining his mother’s household. There he lived off his mother and sister while pursuing a career in journalism and writing. He began as a prose writer, completing five novels—beginning with the aptly titled “Immaturity”—before any were published. He read voraciously in public libraries and in the British Museum Reading Room, immersed himself in progressive politics, and spoke energetically at socialist rallies and at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, where his animated and aggressive style captivated audiences.

Alongside Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Shaw helped found the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation that sought to transform Britain into a socialist state not through revolution but through systematic and progressive legislation achieved by persuasion and mass education. Shaw lectured widely for the Fabian Society and wrote influential pamphlets, including “The Perfect Wagnerite,” an interpretation of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, and “The Quintessence of Ibsenism,” based on lectures on Henrik Ibsen. As a journalist, he worked successively as an art critic, a music critic under the pseudonym “Corno di Bassetto,” and, from 1895 to 1898, as theatre critic for the Saturday Review, where his reviews appeared under the initials “GBS.”

In 1891, at the invitation of J. T. Grein, Shaw wrote his first play, “Widowers’ Houses,” for the Independent Theatre. Over the next twelve years, Shaw wrote nearly a dozen plays, though he often failed to persuade London theatre managers to stage them. Some were produced abroad, one—“Arms and the Man”—under experimental management, while “Mrs Warren’s Profession” was censored by the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays. Several others were staged only in single performances by private societies.

In 1898, following a serious illness, Shaw resigned as theatre critic and married Charlotte Payne-Townsend. Their marriage lasted until Charlotte’s death in 1943.

In 1904, Harley Granville Barker took over the Court Theatre in Chelsea and turned it into an experimental venue specialising in progressive drama. Over the next three seasons, Barker produced ten of Shaw’s plays, often with Shaw himself directing. For the following decade, almost all of Shaw’s plays—except “Pygmalion” in 1914—were produced either by Barker or by his associates.

The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 marked a decisive turning point in Shaw’s life. He viewed the war as a symbol of the bankruptcy of capitalism and articulated this view in a series of articles titled “Common Sense About the War.” During the war years, he wrote only one major play, “Heartbreak House,” expressing his deep disillusionment with British politics and society.

After the war, Shaw revived his dramatic voice with “Back to Methuselah” and later, in 1923, with “Saint Joan.” In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and donated the prize money to support an English edition of August Strindberg’s works.

Shaw remained an international celebrity for the rest of his life, travelling widely and remaining politically active. He visited the Soviet Union at Joseph Stalin’s invitation and briefly toured the United States at the invitation of William Randolph Hearst. He continued to write prolifically, producing thousands of letters and more than a dozen additional plays.

In 1950, Shaw fell from a ladder while trimming a tree at his home in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, and died a few days later at the age of ninety-four. He was working on “Why She Would Not” at the time of his death. In his will, he left much of his estate to a project aimed at reforming the English alphabet. Royalties from his plays, including those from “My Fair Lady,” based on “Pygmalion,” continue to benefit cultural institutions.

Shaw was a socialist, activist, intellectual, playwright, author and critic whose character was marked by controversy and contradiction. He oscillated between Marxism and anti-Marxism, revolution and reform, and at various times expressed admiration for Mussolini, Stalin and even Adolf Hitler. In the preface to “Major Barbara,” Shaw affirmed that he would never abandon his role as “a revolutionary writer.”

Plays such as “Widowers’ Houses” and “Mrs Warren’s Profession” remain among the sharpest dramatic critiques of capitalism, portraying exploiters not as caricatures but as morally complex figures enmeshed in social contradiction. Shaw rejected melodrama in favour of realism, transforming political theory into the language of everyday life.

Among his most celebrated works are “Pygmalion,” “Heartbreak House,” “Major Barbara,” “Saint Joan,” and “Man and Superman,” the last of which contains one of the most intellectually compelling debates in theatrical history between Don Juan and the Devil.

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*Freelance journalist